Pro Tools 11 - #18 - Strip Silence and Batch Fades Video Lecture | Pro tools Tutorial: Basics to Expert - Video & Sound Editing

hello this is music tech help guy and
welcome to episode 18 of my Pro Tools 11
video tutorial series in this episode
I'm gonna talk about a pretty simple
editing function called stripped silence
what strip silence does is it allows you
to take out material on a track that is
below a certain threshold so lets you
automatically trim that material or crop
that material out so in my example it's
gonna be particularly useful for our
kick track here where we have some bleed
from the Tom's from the snare from the
hi-hat and other instruments if I just
want to sort of isolate each kick hit
into its own little clip now if we were
to do this manually you could do it sort
of with with tab to transient or you
could drag over each one of these
individually hit B to cut it out that's
just way too much work so strip silenced
sort of does it for you
automatically a batch processes all of
those edits so let's listen what we've
got here all the drums together it's
this is the same drum kit that we comped
in the previous episode in episode 17
I've just done a little bit of mixing on
it so let's listen to this
all right this is what the kick drum
sounds by itself there you go
so what we're gonna do is we are going
to isolate each kick hit from any of the
extraneous background noise now
generally when I use strip silenced I
like to test it out on just a small area
first and then I'll batch process
everything all together all at once so
the test it's gonna go to this area here
and just drag over this section and hit
B to separate it from everything else
and the reason why I do a test a test
section is because you can zoom in on it
a little bit better and see what you're
doing if you're really zoomed out and
there's hundreds of kick hits that
you're looking at it's kind of difficult
to see what you're doing so let's just
click on that clip now go up to edit and
go down to strip silence you can also
use the key command command U or control
U on a PC alright so there's four
different controls for strip silenced or
strip threshold minimum strip duration
clip start pad and clip end pad what I
like to do is I like to start with the
bottom three faders all the way down and
the top fader all the way up and what
I'm gonna do first is I'm going to pull
the strip threshold down this determines
what the threshold for stripping is so
is it negative 22 DB or is it way down
here so the further you go down the
longer each strip is gonna be because
it's gonna pick up more material in the
background so it's gonna be more
sensitive material in the background you
have a lower setting it's gonna be less
sensitive to material in the background
at a higher setting so I want to put
this at a real high setting because I
just want each kick to come through I
don't want these snare hits to come
through like here so I'm going to put
this real high up so just see kick kick
kick kick kick and
thing else I think there's some Tom's or
something here to the minimum strip
duration is the actual length of each
strip of each clip I should say really
I'm gonna try to generally what I like
to do is I like well the the minimum
strip duration is what the minimum
length each strip can be so if you start
pulling this up you're gonna find that
some of these merged together I'm gonna
keep it all the way down the clips start
pad will put sort of like a buffer
before each strip so you can do that or
that if you want to sort of have like a
little bit of like a little bit of AK
elite' in so you don't cut off the the
transit you can do that I'm gonna keep
this all the way down though and the one
I'm gonna use that's really useful here
is the clip end pad now I don't want to
just have this tiny little strip I want
it to be a little bit longer because I
don't want it to sound like it's too cut
off or too gated sounding by the way you
can do the same thing with a gate
plug-in it's just I like using strip
silence and processing the waveform
rather than using a gate anyway so after
we're done
it looks like I've just got one little
clip for each kick hit I'm gonna hit
strip and it gets rid of everything else
so I'm gonna take this same setting and
I apply it to the first half of the song
and the second half and there we go
so now what I'm left with is a bunch of
little and it's not always perfect
either I mean sometimes it picks up a
little things like up here it left these
in that's fine I'll just go in and
manually trim that up
right here let a snare drum through me
to delete that up here it let some of
this this Tom fill through let some of
the snare drum hear through so I
probably could have used a higher
threshold and so sometimes you'll find
yourself going in here and manually
deleting some of these extra extra notes
but it beats doing the whole thing
manually all right now the problem with
this is always it sounds really choppy
and nasty sounding you know we've got
our kick drum isolated it just sounds
really choppy so there's there is a way
around this one of the things I love
about logic I mean one of the things I
showed in the logic video series was
that you can drag over multiple clips
and you can sort of batch fade them all
at the same time you can do the same
thing in Pro Tools it's just not quite
as intuitive as it is in logic there
isn't just like a little option you say
let's apply a 30 millisecond or 50
millisecond fade to every single clip
what you have to do is drag over all the
clips that you want to apply a fade to
hit command F and what she have to do
normally what you get is eel is you'll
get like a crossfade like this we don't
want to crossfade these clips that's not
gonna do us any good at all it's kind of
faded and fade out so let's what we're
gonna do is on our in shape we are going
to apply a square fade so basically no
fade a square fade you're gonna want to
make sure that the link option is off so
you say none create a square fade and on
the out shape we're gonna create really
any shape you want but I'm gonna just
use like the linear fade and then you
can set a link for your fade I'm gonna
say a hundred milliseconds as you say
okay
I'm gonna say it just to fit what it
does is it essentially puts a square
fade on the front end of the clip it's
just a square fate doesn't really do
anything but then it adds a 100
millisecond fade to each of the other
clips um so let's try that doing this to
all of our clips now so now every single
one of these clips has a short little
fade on it it's gonna sound less gated
sounding as long as it turns out for you
can just drag over everything and hit
shift option 3 you can consolidate all
these kick hits into a new file so now
there's no background noise now you have
to be careful with what you use strip
silence on a lot of people like to use
it on snare and toms I'm a big I'm a big
fan of using it on kik but I'm not a big
fan of using it on the snare drum
because sometimes it tends to cut off
the tail end of the snare and the snare
is pretty much the one you know one of
the drums in the drum kit that's used
the most so I'm very hesitant to use it
on snare drum sometimes I'll use it like
on the upper Tom's the bottom Tom tends
to ring a bit too much for it to really
work out but sometimes you can use it on
the upper Tom track to just isolate toms
by themselves like you know if I wanted
to use my Tom one here by itself there's
only really two or three spots in the
song where the Tom's actually used it
here here here and here so if I wanted
to I could click on that do command you
set a quite a high strip threshold so I
just get those four sections there let's
zoom in on this one
make the clip end pad kind of longer
something like that and then strip and
now I just have just these four Tom hits
but again we're gonna have to go back in
here because there's a lot of crash
cymbal in those tracks too and add fades
to these Tom hits so and it sort of
depends on what the genre of music is if
this was like heavy metal or rock or you
want a lot of isolation a lot of sort of
intricate it's almost surgical sounding
drum patterns you may consider doing
something like this just to to cut down
on the bleed for a song like this it's
like a blues tune I sort of want the
drums the sound as organic and natural
as possible so I probably wouldn't do
something like this for the Tom but
let's just see what it sounds like with
everything together now see if we get a
little more isolation and clarity yeah
it's not too bad I mean it actually
cleans it up a little bit we were
getting a lot of crash cymbal ring and
hi-hat ring in the first Tom I would be
hesitant to use strip silence much on
floor toms just because they ring so
much and also because the the usually
the ride cymbal is right next to the
floor tom so that can cause some issues
as well all right so I hope you enjoyed
the video and thanks for watching