FEATURE:
Music Technology Breakthroughs
Part Three: Pro Tools
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FOR the third part of this feature…
I am moving away from hardware technology and moving to a technological breakthrough and discovery regarding music software. We hear the words ‘Pro Tools’ now, and it is practically synonymous! So many artists use it and, when it comes to recording, I think music would be very different if Pro Tools did not exist. I am going to quote from other sources for this feature when it comes to explaining what Pro Tools is and its history. I am surprised how early Pro Tools was developed and solidified, as I have always assumed that it is a relatively modern innovation – maybe the past decade or so! When it comes to recording and mastering, Pro Tools offers a world of convenience and choice to artists. This Wikipedia article provides details as to what Pro Tools is:
“Pro Tools is a digital audio workstation (DAW) developed and released by Avid Technology (formerly Digidesign) for Microsoft Windows and macOS used for music creation and production, sound for picture (sound design, audio post-production and mixing) and, more generally, sound recording, editing, and mastering processes.
Pro Tools operates both as standalone software and in conjunction with a range of external analog-to-digital converters and PCIe cards with on-board digital signal processors (DSP). The DSP is used to provide additional processing power to the host computer for processing real-time effects, such as reverb, equalization, and compressionand to obtain lower latency audio performance. Like all digital audio workstation software, Pro Tools can perform the functions of a multitrack tape recorder and a mixing console along with additional features that can only be performed in the digital domain, such as non-linear and non-destructive editing (most of audio handling is done without overwriting the source files), track compositing with multiple playlists, time compression and expansion, pitch shifting, and faster-than-real-time mixdown.
PHOTO CREDIT: @gnolatinbird/Unsplash
Audio, MIDI, and video tracks are graphically represented on a timeline. Audio effects, virtual instruments, and hardware emulators—such as microphone preamps or guitar amplifiers—can be added, adjusted, and processed in real-time in a virtual mixer. 16-bit, 24-bit, and 32-bit float audio bit depths at sample rates up to 192 kHz are supported. Pro Tools supports mixed bit depths and audio formats in a session: BWF/WAV (including WAVE Extensible, RF64 and BW64) and AIFF. It imports and exports MOV video files and ADM BWF files (audio files with Dolby Atmos metadata);[9] it also imports MXF, ACID and REX files and the lossy formats MP3, AAC, M4A, and audio from video files (MOV, MP4, M4V). The legacy SDII format was dropped with Pro Tools 10, although SDII conversion is still possible on macOS.
Pro Tools is revolutionary when it comes to getting your music recorded and heard. Not only does it greatly reduce the time needed to record and edit music (by using analog recording, one has to spend hours cutting and splicing recording tape to edit tracks; Pro Tools can do it in a click). Artists do not need to gig and showcase their work and get signed to a label. They can, instead, record their music to Pro Tools and edit it there - and, with the Internet and music-sharing platforms get it out there! Giving artists this studio-like quality and professionalism has changed the game. It is worth giving some history regarding Pro Tools in terms of how it started life and when the industry standard came into place.
I would encourage people to read the full article from Music Radar, as it is really fascinating and informative. The Pro Tools story begins, interestingly, the year that I was born:
“The story starts in 1983 with the release of E-MU's Drumulator drum machine. A companion to the Emulator sampling keyboard and antecedent to the equally legendary SP-12 and SP-1200 samplers, the Drumulator was a relatively simple digital unit with EPROM- based memory for its non-editable 12-bit samples.
The Drumulator was a hit despite the fact users were limited to its built-in sounds. Enter Evan Brooks and Peter Gotcher, high school buddies and University of California graduates with a shared interest in music, recording, electronic engineering and computer programming.
After consulting E-MU for details of the Drumulator's memory system, the duo set about creating new sound libraries and formed a company, Digidrums, to offer a series of upgrade EPROM microchips just a year after the release of the drum machine itself.
Identifying the audio potential of the newly released Macintosh computer, they set about creating basic digital audio recording and editing software for their own use. Despite their primary interest in making their own lives easier, it soon became apparent that the software should be developed for general release.
Working in conjunction with E-MU, Digidrums changed its name to Digidesign and began work developing a groundbreaking Mac-based sample editing system for the Emulator II keyboard.
Released in 1985 at a price of $995, Sound Designer brought the visual editing features of exotic instruments like the Synclavier and Fairlight to a much larger market”.
The solution came in 1987 with the release of the Macintosh II, complete with six NuBus expansion slots. Brooks built an expansion card equipped with a 16-bit DA converter and a prototype Motorola DSP chip, allowing Sound Designer to use the DSP chip rather than the computer's CPU for its audio editing”.
“The Sound Tools system's stereo audio features were groundbreaking, but the move to multitrack recording with the release of the Pro Tools system was a logical progression for Digidesign.
Released in 1991, the first version of Pro Tools was based around a similar hardware-software hybrid setup to Sound Tools, this time with a four-channel interface. Priced at nearly $6,000, the software side of the system was handled by Digidesign's ProEDIT program and ProDeck, a newly designed version of OSC's Deck application.
However, the Digidesign team soon admitted that relying on a third party to develop part of the Pro Tools software was a mistake. Version 2, released early in 1993, brought the software back in-house and introduced the now-familiar Pro Tools application”.
The 1990s was an exciting and busy time for music software. Again, I would not have imagined that there was much in the way of quite advanced music software that early. Listening to music from the time and I never really think about the software technology used and how the performances are captured and edited. Now, we sort of take for granted this wonderful breakthrough for musicians everywhere; the finalisation and consecration of something close to what we know today came in the first decade of this century.
“2002 saw Apple buy out Emagic, acquiring the rights to Logic, and Steinberg announce Cubase SX, rewritten from the ground up and based on the Nuendo audio engine.
Digidesign hit back with Pro Tools HD, an update focusing mainly on new hardware choices rather than dramatic overhauls of the software front end.
With the introduction of the 192 I/O interface and new HD Core and Process cards (soon followed by the even more powerful HD Accel cards) Pro Tools offered substantially more recording flexibility and DSP power than ever before.
Over the past decade, Pro Tools has come to define the workflow of most modern studios. Consistently staying at the front of the pack with regular software updates, Pro Tools offers audio editing options which exploit its DSP power to the maximum. Beat Detective (introduced in PT5, 2001), Elastic Audio (PT7.4, 2007) and Elastic Pitch (PT8, 2008) have become essential tools for recording and mix engineers”.
Pro Tools has come a long way since its beginnings! Countless studios use it and, for recording film scores with large orchestras, Pro Tools provides low-latency performance when recording many tracks via HDX hardware. There are many great aspects and uses for Pro Tools; there are other options on the market today which are favoured. I think that Pro Tools has kickstarted a lot of competition and development in terms of what the market can provide people but, despite that, so many still rely and cherish the original. I will be using it myself next year in some form, so I wanted to learn a little bit about where Pro Tools began and why it is so important. I have always known about Pro Tools, but I never really knew much about its life and influence. In future parts, I will move back to hardware but, for this outing, I wanted to salute an invaluable piece of software that has helped transform music…
IN so many ways.