Digidesign Pro Tools 7.4.2 The DAW With The Best GUI At UofL
As an instructor of music composition and computer-based recording at -- some call it electro-acoustic composition -- John Ritz has a unique perspective on Digidesign Pro Tools.
Its benefits in the professional and semi-pro recording world are obvious, but from a teaching perspective, the DAW's gentle learning-curve makes the technical part of a teacher's job easier, meaning he or she can focus on the hard part: getting the kids to understand what the jazz is all about.
JOHN RITZ: My name is John Ritz and this is the University of Louisville School of Music.
This lab I consider to be more of an experimental music studio or computer music studio that being our main purpose is training composers of contemporary classical music to incorporate technology into their music compositions, so we're taking more of an experimental composition approach to the technology than say a traditional recording arts approach.
I would say that most if not all the students that we have coming into the program have very little to know previous experience in Pro Tools. Perhaps very few of them have some experience with digital audio workstations but very few.
PATRICK OGLE: How do you find Pro Tools? I mean what version of Pro Tools do you use?
JOHN RITZ: Well, we just actually upgraded to 7.4.2 which has Mac OS 10.5 compatibility. Honestly, the learning curve isn't that steep for Pro Tools. I think that Digidesign has done a great job making Pro Tools a very intuitive, easy to use program. For the most part, a lot of the functions that we use on a regular basis, recording, editing, adding effects, automation, so on, it's all contained within the main edit window. A lot of sequencing software requires you to navigate menus and various window sets to do some of the more basic things you can do right in the edit window in Pro Tools so in that way I think it's a very easy program to teach from and a very easy program for students to learn.
I think that the most difficult aspect for students to overcome is digital audio theory in general, acoustics, you know, "What is sound? How does it work in the natural environment? How do we best use technology like microphones and the computer to capture sound?" and to understand some of those basic recording techniques and processing techniques that we use. I think that those aspects are much more difficult and complicated for them to understand than sort of navigating the software. I think so many students today are used to navigating software and working within a GUI and working on a computer that those kinds of basic edit, cut, type of things are easy for them to grasp, but it's the more kind of technical side of sound itself that becomes complicated.
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