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GMC Forum _ Marcus Lavendell _ Pro Tools Tracks

Posted by: Jeff Aug 28 2008, 05:00 PM

Hey Marcus,

I'm curious if you use Pro Tools LE or HD? I'm asking because I remember you saying that you used 90 tracks on one of your KMC Metal songs, although I forget which one. Anyway, I've got LE 7.4 and I only have 48 tracks. I got an extra 24 because I bought the expansion toolkit. I believe Pro Tools limits the tracks in LE unless you are using HD? ($$)

So I was curious if you meant that you were using 90 separate tracks with one track each dedicated to one instrument/vocal or if you meant there was some sort of combination of MIDI + audio that may be mixed together to comprise of the 90 tracks.

thanks!

Posted by: Marcus Lavendell Aug 28 2008, 06:13 PM

Hi Jeff,

First - yes I use Pro tools LE (with a DIGI002r).
Yeah I think it was "Soul to the world" that had about 90 tracks totally. But maybe I should have said 90 faders (or something like that) instead, because there were lots of Aux- and MIDI tracks in there. So not 90 audio tracks if I remember correctly.

However, I did use Pro Tools LE's maximum amount of audio tracks but I still needed more. So what I did was to create a completely new session where I edited and mixed all of Kris's choirs (about 16 tracks). Then I bounced them to one stereo track and imported it into my "main session". Now, this worked great until I had to edit the choirs to fit the main mix... so then I had to re-open the Choir-session, make the edits, bounce it down to a new stereo file, and import it to the main session.....

It's not an optimal way to work, but it's the only way since Pro Tools LE has this track-limitation (but then, my computer probably wouldn't been able to handle 90 tracks anyways)

Posted by: Jeff Aug 28 2008, 06:42 PM

Thanks, Marcus.

Sounds like a lot of work remixing the choirs this way. But, you really have not many options. This reminds me of the old days when I had a 4 track analog Tascam porta studio. I went through a lot of cassette tapes. Bouncing tracks on that thing was fun. I get a kick out of thinking about that now!

I hope they relax the track limits on LE someday soon and make it unlimited. I see no reason why not, technically speaking - not financially for Digidesign though. Even though I haven't used that many tracks, I certainly paid a lot more for pro tools than some of the other applications that I could have gotten. I don't regret getting it though. I especially like the new elastic time features in 7.4.

Posted by: Marcus Lavendell Aug 29 2008, 08:18 AM

I had a 4 track porta studio as well (actually I still have it... somewhere ). Brings back old memories when you mentioned it ... only 4 tracks!! Can't believe we could record whole songs with only 4 tracks back then These days I need 6 tracks or more - just for the guitar tracks

I can't answer for Digidesign, but I doubt they'll ever give Pro Tools LE unlimited tracks. Maybe people would stop buying Pro Tools HD if they did, and they can't risk that of course