Create an aux track of the same type as the vocal track you are trying to delay (mono, stereo)

On one of the sends on the vocal track, choose an available bus.

On the input of the aux track, select the same bus.

Insert either medium, long or extra long delay in the aux track.
The tempo should sync to your session tempo. (if your audio was not played to a click along with the session tempo, you will have to determine the tempo of the recorded audio; but I will not get into that here, as that would be a tutorial all in itself)
Select the note duration that you want the delay to follow (whole, half, quarter, eighth, sixteenth) with triplet and/or dot modifier if necessary.
That’s it for setting up the delay to tempo sync

And to catch just that one phrase, you would automate the send so that it is only active for the particular phrase that you want to repeat. You can do this by automating the send volume, or by muting the send, depending on the sound you are looking for. Automating by mute might not be as smooth as automating the volume of the send. (I prefer automating the volume).

NOTE: This tip is obsolete with the release of Pro Tools 8, which makes the “hidden” control an actual control on the color palette window.

Here’s a new feature of Pro Tools 7.3 that isn’t documented, but I think is very cool and helpful for session organization:

1. Open the color pallete by double-clicking any track’s color label
2. Hold down the three primary modifier keys at once (OSX: Command+control+option; XP: Control+start+alt)
3. Mouse click in the color pallete window and drag up/down (this is typical “click/drag” functionality, but there seems to be some confusion with some users; click the color pallete->hold the click->drag while over the color pallete)

You should see the color of the track change in opacity to match the track’s color label. You can set the opacity how you like it, and be able to locate groups of tracks much faster. Your tracks will end up looking something like this:

Mix Window Snapshot

Edit Window Snapshot

Please note: This feature was changed slightly with the release of Pro Tools 7.4. With the standard release of 7.4, you can no longer adjust the opacity of the colors; they are either “on” or “off”. So step 3 above becomes just “Mouse click in the color pallete window”.

This behavior has been corrected in the 7.4cs2 update (which is highly recommended for many other bugfixes), and the procedure above returns to normal.

The basics

This question goes a little deeper than can be explained here, as there are several different ways and/or reasons to side chain. I’m just going to cover the basics of how to make it happen; it’s up to you to decide what you want to do with it (gate trigger, ducking, de-ess, etc)

For this tutorial, you will need a few “givens”: a track to process and a track/source to be the trigger. Set the output of the trigger track to be an available bus. On the process track, insert the plugin that you are using that you want to side chain (compressor, gate, etc). Set the key input to be the bus you selected for the trigger track output, and activate the key. Make settings on the plugin accordingly.

An example of a use for a side chain gate trigger can be found in my other tutorial; How to fatten a kick drum in ProTools?

More information can be found starting on page 20 of the DigiRack Plug-ins Guide

There are a few different ways to do this. I’ll cover a few:

Use a Signal Generator

Create a mono aux track
create a send from the kick track across a bus (say bus1). I’ve renamed that bus in my example to make it more recognizable: KikPhatt
insert the signal generator on the aux track. Set the Frequency low (like 65Hz), bring the level up, and set the signal to sine.
Insert the Expander/Gate Dyn3 plugin inline after the generator. Set it’s key input to be the send bus from the kick (bus1/KikPhatt), and turn on the side chain button (looks like a key). Play with the attack, hold and decay until you have something that is pleasing (try Attack 10.0us, hold 23ms, ratio 5.0:1, range -80.0db and release 5.0ms to start) Set the threshold as necessary.

Click here for a Photo Reference

Of course tweak all settings/levels to taste…

More to come…

So you want to get that other-worldly, just arriving from the 5th dimension sound on a vocal track? Try a Reversed Reverb:

• Duplicate the track in question.
• Slice one of the vocal phrases on the new track into a separate region.
• Isolate it (remove all other region data from before and after)
• Note where the start and end points are. (this will be important later)
• Select it.
• Use the audiosuite reverse tool to reverse it.
• Now select the region and an amount about the same size after the region.Click here for a photo of the selection
• Use an audiosuite reverb (for this example, I’m using D-Verb’s Room2 on medium setting) on the selection. (you may have to do this a couple of times to get it to sound the way you want it to).
• Now reverse it again.
• Move the region back so that it’s end time is the same as it’s original end time from above (you noted it, didn’t you?) Shift+drag will snap the end time to the grid.Click here for a photo of the alignment
• Mix with the original.
• Listen.

Of course, you will need to tweak the settings to taste, but those are the basics.

This procedure has become somewhat unnecessary since the introduction of the Music Production Toolkit, which increases the track count of LE or MPowered to 48 tracks, mono or stereo. I definitely recommend adding the toolkit to your Pro Tools aresenal. If you still need more tracks, or can’t add the MPT for some reason, here is the procedure:Use Ableton Live rewired into Pro Tools AUX tracks.

Always record and edit audio in PT. Then after all edits are done, consolidate the wav to the beginning of the session making them one big waveform. Name the region to make it easy to find, like “Live.Kick”, “Live.Snare”, etc. It makes them easy to find in the next step. Then make the track inactive in PT. and create an aux track for each audio track. Keeping them together like this helps you remember what’s what. Insert a separate Ableton Live channel for each AUX created.

Then you create tracks in Live linking to those audio regions directly in the session’s audio folder (“Live.Kick”, “Live.Snare”, etc.) The audio tracks in Live get routed to the corresponding separate channels on your rewire returns on each aux track in PT.

From there, you can add processing on the PT AUX track, and mix/bounce just like you would if it were an audio track.