[MUSIC] Now that we know how to make both software instrument and audio tracks, now we can use Pro Tools to our advantage. To be prepared every time we have a new session by setting up what is called the template. As you probably noticed, Pro Tools is really customizable and sometimes it's easier to work from something that we've already created, planning out exactly what we need, than to recreate this every single time. So let's start making a template that you'll be able to use throughout the rest of this course. Now if you're a Pro Tools first user, you're not going to be able to create and save your own templates beyond the ones that come with Pro Tools first. But, if you're using the demo version, or you own the full version of Pro Tools, you'll be able to follow this step. It's nothing to worry about, if you're in Pro Tools first, but it just means that you can't create a template to work from every single time you make a new session. But if you follow the steps about making new tracks and creating click tracks every time, you'll be completely fine for the rest of this course. It's always good to start off a template with a click track, which we've already made. Remember the creating a click track is the only one that you don't get in your new tracks window. And you can find it under Track > Create Click Track. If you still have the same project from the last lesson, your click track will already be made for you. But it's always good to have one on every session, so you can always keep your tempo, and play things in time. It's also really useful to have a software instrument track ready to go, so you can record right away. A lot of times, if you're creative, and you have some creative energy flowing, and you really want to get an idea down right away, it can be really detrimental to have to go through all sorts of shortcuts to get there. So what I usually like to do is pick out a software instrument sound that is going to be easy to write with. So I can get ideas down really fast. So for me I like to have a piano sound, but if you like to program beats or you like a drum kit or something similar, then you can choose that sound for yourself. So in my software instrument track I created, I loaded expand and I actually chose a natural grand piano sound for this. [SOUND] And this is going to be great if I need to get an idea down quickly. And like we talked about with the software instrument tracks, you can always change the sound later if you want to. [MUSIC] I also made sure that I labeled the track as piano, so I know when I open it up and in case I have different templates with different setups, I know I'm going to get exactly what it says, a piano sound. Another really useful track to have in our template is an audio track. And this one is going to be a little bit more customizable because your audio track can be for whatever instrument you play, or for someone that you happen to record a lot. So for me, because I have my microphone set up, I'm going to have a voice track for my audio track. And I've set it up exactly the same way as we did previously by setting the input in my IO setup. Input standing for I and output for O. I have set my interface input to number one because I know that's where my microphone is plugged in. I also made sure to label as voice, again, just because we want to be clear with what we're getting with our template. One of the other tracks that we haven't really explored yet is what's called a Master Fader. And the Master Fader is going to give us a reading of all of our tracks combined to make sure that we're not peaking on the output. And we talked about peaking with audio tracks already, but you want to make sure that your whole mix isn't getting any sort of distortion and is staying at the right level. You're going to use the same new track key command as we did before. Shift+Cmd+N on a Mac, or Shift+Ctrl+N on a PC to create a new track. In the type of track, you want to change that to master fader like we talked about. For a master fader, you always want it to be stereo. Because you have two speakers and we want to monitor out both of them equally. If we make a mono track we're not going to have accurate monitoring about how loud or soft our mix is. So, choose a stereo master fader and click Create. You can move all of these tracks around in any way that you want by clicking on the track name and dragging them up and down. I like to have my Master Fader last and my Click at the top. And if we hit Cmd or Ctrl+= to bring up our Mix window, you're going to see that the Master Fader is all the way to the right. This is a really good way to keep organized and a good habit to get into. To start out, this is a great template to have. When we start exploring different types of tracks later in this course, you're going to want to make some different templates depending on the style of music you're going to make or to get more advanced with your productions. In order to save this as a template you want to go to the File menu and choose Save as Template. This prompt is going to come up and it's going to ask you to save your template into your computer. You can choose to make your own category or you can put it in one of the existing template categories that comes with Pro Tools. So where it says Category, I'm going to click there and add my own. I'm going to call it Chrissy's Templates. [MUSIC] You can call it whatever you want. And for the template name, you can choose something that you're going to remember. So I'm going to call this Chrissy Production Template. And you can choose to include any media if you have any audio files in there, but we haven't really gone over that yet. So most likely you're not going to have to check any of these other boxes. So install it into your computer under your own category, or one that exists, and give it a creative name. Now that this is done, we can actually close Pro Tools and create a new session that's going to look exactly like the one that we see now. So go ahead and go to File > Save or Cmd+S or Ctrl+S to save what you have so far and then File > New Session. And you're going to remember this new session prompt that we have up here, this new session menu. And instead of creating a blank session like we did last time, we're going to create a session from the template we just made. And up here you have the same dropdown menu. And you can see my Chrissy's Template folder has been created. In there is going to be my production template, and all I have to say is OK. Any time you create a new session in Pro Tools, it's going to ask if you want to save the project you already have open, before you close it. Always say yes, so you don't lose anything. And because we're creating a new session from our template, it's going to ask you to save it. So just to show you how it works, I'm going to call this Chrissy Production Template Session. And it's going to load up the template we have exactly like we saved it and you can use this every time, and everything's going to be ready for you to work right away. [MUSIC]
