Sometimes when working on an album or series of songs you tend to mix with some similar plugin settings. For instance, your kick drum may have been recorded the exact same for each song. Therefor any tweaks you needed to do on it for one song may very well be needed for all the songs. Instead of having to remember what EQ curve you tweaked for the kick in one session wouldn’t it be nice if you had saved a custom preset in your EQ plugin that you could recall in a separate session? Heck yes it would! And you can. Here’s how:
Save Your Current Setting
What ever settings you have your plugin set to, this is what you are going to capture as a preset. Click on the drop down menu in the Presets section of the plugin window and choose Save Setting.
Give your “new setting” a name. Try to name it something practical that you’ll recognize when you see it later. Try to be as specific as you can also. Click Save and you’re done. Pro Tools has automatically placed your new setting in the correct folder for that plugin.
Recall Your New Custom Preset
Now when you want to apply that custom preset to a new track (even in a new session) you can simply open the plugin, click on the factory default button, and BOOM! there’s your brand spankin’ new preset ready and waiting for you to open it up. Select it and watch your plugin settings change to your custom preset.
Imagine The Possibilities
With custom plugin presets in Pro Tools, your possibilities are limitless. You can save custom delay settings for vocals, EQ effects for guitars, even mix bus compressor settings ready to be recalled at a moments notice. Remember, the more time you save in Pro Tools mumbo jumbo, the more time you get for making music. And isn’t that what this is all about anyways?
Comments
Great post Graham, very helpful!
Thanks!
On a similar note, is there way to save mix settings in Pro Tools to use them across different PT sessions? For example, say I am working on 8 songs for an album. The drums for all songs were tracked with the same mic setup, same drummer, etc. I have mixed the drums for the first song and now want the exact same mix settings for the rest of the songs. What is the best way to do this?
What you could do is Import Session Data from a previous Pro Tools session. Open your new session, then choose File – Import – Session Data. Select the session you want to copy the settings from, then choose all the tracks whose data you want to import. This will import things like plugins, sends and returns, etc. That might help out.
hello, i have just upgraded to a new computer and pro tools le 002 box & pt 9 software, i still have all my plugin presets i have made on my old computer, is there a way i can save them and put onto my new computer?
any help greatly appreciated
Jimmy Disco
Jimmy… if you are on a Mac. Go to your system HD – Library – Application Support – Digidesign – Plugin Settings – Then to the plugin(s) of your choice and physically copy the settings file (You’ll recognize your custom names) to a flash drive or hard drive and transfer them to your new computer.
[...] Custom Plugin Presets [...]
I’m an audiobook narrator and I record each chapter as a separate session in Pro Tools. Then I import all the sessions into one combined session so that I can balance the levels (tails to heads) so there are no awkward volume jumps from chapter to chapter. I have saved EQ and Compressor plugins with the settings I like. Is there a way I can apply those settings to multiple tracks (chapters) at one time. I’m finding it tedious to do it one by one. Thanks. jz