Pro Tools: Gift or Curse?
Austin Convention Center, Friday 16
How pervasive is Pro Tools? It’s become a verb. There is almost nothing you hear on radio, TV, or film that hasn’t been touched by it. For the uninitiated, Pro Tools is simply a software application that allows you to record and manipulate audio. It also happens to be enormously powerful. With Pro Tools you can track, edit, mix, master, whatever; and you can do it right on your desktop computer. Even within the music community, however, the understanding of Pro Tools varies wildly. To wit, a couple of journalists simply wanted to know from the panelists what they were listening to when they sat down to review records. In other words, how much of what made it onto the final recording was an actual performance, and how much was sound that had been manipulated digitally? Was that drum track played by a drummer? Were those near-perfect harmonies sung or created with a few mouse clicks? On the other hand, the serious Pro Tools users quickly jumped into discussions that required fairly extensive knowledge of the equipment just to be able to understand the questions. On the panelist side, there was more or less a consensus, one that basically went: Pro Tools is here and it’s not going anywhere, but a top-notch analog recording is still superior to what you can do on a computer. From there it was largely a discussion about the uses of the technology. For example, musician and producer Chris Stamey (Golden Palominos, Flat Duo Jets) claimed to use Pro Tools like a tape recorder that he leaves running. As a result, when he did the recent Hazeldine album, 80% of it ended up being from early rough takes that the band had no idea would even be used. The odd man out, and God bless him for his comments, was Steve Berlin of Los Lobos. In fact, after the initial demonstration and product hyping from Digidesign’s Jake Schaefer, Berlin introduced himself by saying, “I feel like the president of the Flat Earth Society up here.” Berlin admitted to being in situations — one as early as two nights previous — where he would have been dead without Pro Tools, but despite that, had a lot of resentment for what the application has done to music and musicians. Basically his argument was as follows: If you’re a musician or any kind of artist, you’re in a very privileged place, and your greatest responsibility is to make great art. But with Pro Tools, musicians have gotten lazy. You can lay down a track that might not be any kind of exceptional performance and just Pro Tool it later (there’s the verb use) to get the performance you want to put on record. It’s an ethic Berlin called “bullshit.” Even the more devout users on the panel had a hard time finding fault with that reasoning. Of course when Berlin had to duck out early so that he could do a radio gig with Los Lobos, the discussion tended back toward something more user-issue oriented. For all the resignation to the pervasiveness of Pro Tools, local musician Barbara K had maybe the most poignant comment of the morning: “It doesn’t matter what format you put it on. The goal is capturing the original intention the artist had to lay it all down in the first place.”This article appears in March 16 • 2001.