Markers in Pro Tools
This blog is part of our new series of tutorials based on Avid’s flagship Digital Audio Workstation, Pro Tools.
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Getting started with Markers in Pro Tools
Pro Tools is a software that lets you produce, record, edit and mix audio as well as MIDI performances.
If you are producing music in Pro Tools, often you will yourself in situations in which you write music in “blocks” such as verses, choruses, bridges, etc.
Once you have written these parts, you can benefit from having a graphical timeline in which these parts are labeled with their respective names such as “Verse 1” or “Chorus 3” for example.
Having these parts displayed not only lets you order the song logically, but also navigate through these parts faster, especially when mixing.
On this tutorial, we will explore an overview of the Markers in Pro Tools:
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Create or open an existing Pro Tools session:
Before we start adding markers, we need to make sure the colors are enabled for the markers.
2. Click on Pro Tools – >Preferences:
The Preferences Window will open as:
Make sure you are on the “Display” tab and check the “Always Display Marker Colors” box:
Now we can start adding markers to our Session.
Suppose we want to add a marker at the start of the Song, right at bar #1.
3. Locate your cursor and playback at bar #1:
4. Click on the “+” sign next to “Markers”:
The New Memory Location window will open as:
This window has some parameters that we can define as:
- Number: This field lets you type the number associated to the marker’s order.
- Name: This field lets you type the name of the marker
- Time Properties: These options let you select between “Marker”, “Selection” and “None”
- Reference: This drop-down list lets you select the location reference of the marker.
- General properties: This list shows miscellaneous options you can assign to your markers.
For the purpose of this tutorial we will create a Marker called “START” on bar #1. The parameters will be set as:
- Number: 1.
- Name: START
- Time Properties: Marker
- Reference: Bar|Beat.
- General properties: All unchecked.
5. Apply the previous configurations to the New Memory Location window:
6. Press “OK” and the marker will be created as:
7. Repeat these steps to create other markers within the song:
And that is it!
We have successfully created our Markers in Pro Tools.
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