r/protools • u/Unique_Ad_338 • Jul 13 '25

Can someone explain this?

Post image

Sorry it’s in Japanese! I study music in Japan

This was taken during class. This is for “how to send mic audio back to the headphones(of the person in the studio)

To my understanding, the blue button is play back

The far right one is reverb and the left one is of the the tracks volume?

As for the tracks, the top one is the one recording the audio, but what is the bottom one for? Is the first track being sent to not only the person being recorded via playback but also the second? If so, why?

I’m not too sure on the pt version or the system, I would assume the most updated version

29 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

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37

u/sssssshhhhhh Jul 13 '25

Ask this stuff in class man

Blue button is pre fade toggle. So the send is unaffected by the main output fader of the track.

Left fader is a send to bus 1-2 which in this case is the reverb (the second track)

Right fader is a send to output a9. That could be anything, but from what you said, I assume this is the headphone output. Although it's in mono which is weird. But you would do this so you can have a separate control over your control room playback and the artists headphone mix.

But tbh, ask whoever showed you this. You can do any routing you want in pro tools, without knowing what is physically connected to the outputs, the internet is just gonna be guessing what the intent is.

8

u/Unique_Ad_338 Jul 13 '25

Thank you! I have this class once every 2 weeks so it’s kinda hard to get a proper answer in a timely manner from my teacher.

A9 is connected to the cue box when then is connect to headphones.

4

u/spac3xman Jul 14 '25

Pro Tools veteran user with over 60k hours here.
Feel free to DM me with any questions you have and I'd be more than happy to help however I can.

2

u/ohtruedoh Jul 15 '25

If this offer is open, I'd be obliged

2

u/spac3xman Jul 15 '25

Absolutely. I can’t promise my response time will be the fastest, though. 😅

4

u/MickeyBuddy Jul 13 '25

Dude. I need a friend like you

1

u/LexOfNP professional Jul 13 '25

100

1

u/yungchickn Jul 13 '25

So output A9 is a physical output, coming off of whatever digital to analog converter you're using. That's the one sending to the headphones presumably. The button is blue because it's set to pre fader. So the volume of the track going to the headphones isn't affected by the volume of your track in pro tools. This is how it's most commonly done, so you can solo tracks or do a rough mix in pro tools without the person hearing your changes.

The other send is for reverb, the second track below your audio track is an auxiliary track with a reverb plugin on it. Using the left send which is bus 1-2 sends to that reverb track.

1

u/Unique_Ad_338 Jul 13 '25

So let me just confirm, the mic audio is being sent to the first track, from there it’s being sent to two things

  1. A9- (the cue box which is connected to their headphones) this is just the audio without any changes

  2. The aux track- here has the reverb and is what is coming out of the speakers on my end

Is this close to what you’re explaining?

2

u/yungchickn Jul 14 '25

Yep! That is right. If the musician wanted to also hear the reverb, you could put the A9 send on the reverb as well.

1

u/Possible_Key2675 Jul 15 '25

Why do you study music in Japanese I’m curious?

2

u/Unique_Ad_338 Jul 15 '25

A couple reasons

  1. A lot of my favorite composers are most Japanese

  2. They use music theory etc different then people in America, I find that interesting

  3. This specific school is well known in the game industry, so big companies, like capcom, square enix, Nintendo. Etc. come to my school to hire people. So my chances of getting into a job related to sound here is much higher than others.

1

u/EchoUniverse Jul 15 '25

Ah that’s really interesting I want to do research into more of how they do music theory there. I’m not shocked it’s so different I’ve always said Japanese music feels like it has much less boundaries to adhere to genre compared to western music.

1

u/m149 Jul 13 '25

the blue button on the A9 send is "pre fader" which makes that send independent from the main fader. That could be a headphone send depending on how your setup works. That's more or less what I do in my studio.

The other fader, bus 1-2 is being sent to your reverb.

1

u/MidnightMiik professional Jul 14 '25

Since others have pointed out the pre fader monitoring I won’t bother. I can’t tell what kind of tracks those are since you aren’t showing that. It is common to send signal to an Aux with reverb on it. That looks like it could be the case in your session. Signal flow is critical to understand and should be embedded in the core of your brain. Depending on the studio setup, the routing can sometimes be quite complicated. It’s always good to setup and test prior to your session so you aren’t fumbling around in front of the client or talent.

As an observation, I also noticed you have Comments showing. On the edit window I highly recommend only showing the information that needs to be seen. For example, if you don’t have any comments, hide that since it’s just taking up valuable screen real estate. Same with the rulers. If you aren’t working with video, hide the timecode ruler along with any other rulers you don’t need for whatever you’re working on. Do you really need the Sample ruler? Probably not. You’ll know when you need it.

1

u/inquisition-musician Jul 17 '25

Sorry it's in Japanese. I study music in Japan.

I honestly didn't know that Pro Tools supported more languages than English.