Pro Tools Pointers #9

Selecting Across Tracks/
Shuffle Mode

by Dave Whittaker

Selecting Across Your Tracks

A colleague recently showed me several shortcuts he'd discovered for selecting across all your tracks. While neither is new, I just hadn't discovered them yet for this use, and now I find myself using them almost daily.

To get an insertion point across all your tracks, hold SHIFT-OPTION while clicking with the Selector; wherever you clicked within the timeline, that's where your across-the-board insertion point will be blinking. Now if you do this on a region (such as a head pop that you've got on multiple tracks) and double click, all those pops will be selected. Switch to the Grabber and Spot mode and click on one of them while holding down OPTION and you can place pops at the end of the session in a flash. Or if you're already using the Grabber just click on a region while holding down SHIFT-OPTION and the selection will extend across all tracks.

You may have noticed that clicking on the Edit window outside of a region with the Grabber places the insertion point across all tracks to the top of the session. If you do this and then hit SHIFT-TAB to select the first region(s) in the session, you've got yet another way to quickly select the head pop(s) for copying to the tail of the reel.

Shuffle Mode:
Extremely Useful, But Handle with Caution!

The first time a new Pro Tools user tries Shuffle mode the experience is often a bit disconcerting because it's the only mode where the user doesn't directly create a new region and move it to a new location; instead, the software is inferring a new region in the selected area, then discarding it and pulling everything up in the timeline behind it in one fell swoop. It's actually the pure equivalent of taking out a piece of mag or fill leader in a film track and splicing together the two ends left in your hands. But like film, when you add to a moment in a film track with more mag or additional fill leader, Shuffle will do the same. If you extend a region with the Trimmer out to the right, everything down the timeline on that track will move downstream by the same amount.

Because Shuffle affects the entire downstream timeline, I recommend using it only in dedicated "cutting tracks"as a working habit.