Now that you have some software instruments, let's check and make sure our audio is working. If you're using an interface, make sure that it's plugged in and you have your microphone plugged into the XLR Input. If you're using a USB mic, make sure that your USB mic is plugged into a USB port on ProTools. If you need to make sure that your interface is set up properly, go to your Setup menu, and choose Playback Engine. And remember, whatever your interface is for your microphone, you want to make sure that its name is shown in the Playback Engine. When we test out audio, you want to make sure you have headphones on for this. You don't want to playback through your speakers, otherwise you will get extreme feedback and you definitely don't want that for your ears. So, put some headphones on when we test our audio. To make a new track is going to be the same shortcut as we used last time. Shift+Command+N on Mac or Shift+Control+N on PC. This time instead of an instrument tracks we're going to use an audio track. And instead of using a stereo audio track, we want to use a mono audio track. And a good way to remember whether you need mono or stereo. Is how many microphones you actually have. So for example, I'm using one microphone for this. Which means I want on mono audio track. For different recording situations, you might want to use two microphones to record one instrument. In that case you'd use a stereo audio track. Click Create after you've chosen one mono audio track. Audio tracks in ProTools come up blue as a natural color, and it's an easy way to differentiate between them and software instrument tracks. To test your microphone and make sure that it's working, make sure that you check out your interface. For example if you have a condenser microphone like this one here, you want to make sure that Phantom Power is on. Sometimes Phantom Power is labeled as 48v, or 48 volts on your interface. You will only need to Phantom Power for condenser microphones because it's used to actually power the microphone to help it pick up sound. If you have just a regular dynamic microphone, or one that doesn't need Phantom Power, you're going to want to turn up the gain on your interface. Here's what it look's like on the inbox. On your audio track when you're testing mute it first. [MUSIC] And in our input and output setting, which we haven't really covered a lot yet. You want to choose whatever input you plugged your microphone into on your interface. So for example, if you plugged it into input one, you want to choose one in this area of ProTools. [MUSIC] My interface in this studio has 16 possible inputs, but I know that I plugged my microphone into input 1. In order to test this, let's record enable our audio track the same way that we record enable the software instrument track. And that's by clicking the red record button. [MUSIC] If we've done everything right, you should see some signal coming through. If you don't hear anything, gradually turn up your gain and see if you start to see some signal. Hit Command+= or Control+= to bring up your mix window. And you're going to see this signal coming in nice and strong. Try to keep the signal in the green area, which is basically going to be around -15 or -20 db. This is going to be the best way to do it, because it gives you a little bit of headroom if your signal suddenly gets louder. For example, if you get a really loud sound, or if you start to bring up too much gain, you can see that it starts the microphone peaking. You know something is peaking when you see a little red dot above the meter on the track that you're recording. Turn down the gain to get this at a better level. To make that little red dot go away, just click on it. If your gain is too low, you won't be able to record in, and I'm still talking with the microphone on, but without enough gain, so when you start to record something on ProTools using the same command as we use with the software instrument track, you're actually not going to get anything into the program. So make sure that your gain is high enough to get some input and ProTools but not too high to have peaking happen. The best way to do that is keep it in that range of 15 to minus 20 db. If your audio track is on, everything's plugged in, and your gain is turned up, and everything looks bright. Sometimes problems can still happen. If you're still having trouble go to the manufacturer's website of whatever equipment that seems to be giving you problems. Because most of these websites will have a troubleshooting section or a helpline that you can contact. [MUSIC] Once you have level you can unmute this track and you'll be able to hear yourself or whatever your instrument is coming through your headphones. Use the same Command+ pacebar or Control+Spacebar to record some sound. [MUSIC] One, two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight. Obviously you can be more creative, but just make sure that it's working, and record something from your instrument or your voice. As you can see, audio recordings and software instrument recordings look quite different. But you always want to make sure you follow the same steps with your audio tracks as you did with your instrument tracks. For example, if you record multiple pieces of audio you want to be able to tell which track is which. And audio one is not exactly a really great label. So, for this one, I'm going to double click on the track name, and I'm going to call it speaking because it's what I just did. [MUSIC] Once, you have it labeled and you've got some sound recorded, you're ready to move on to the next stage. [MUSIC]
