Avid Pro Tools 2023.9

Pro Tools users can now join the clip‑launching party without leaving the comfort of their favourite DAW.

Autumn: season of mist, mellow fruitfulness and DAW upgrades. In the last month alone, Cubase 13, Studio One 6.5, Reaper 7 and Bitwig Studio 5 have all sprung up like mushrooms on a dewy pasture. And while version 2023.9.0 might not sound like a milestone for Pro Tools, in practice it’s the most significant development for music‑creation purposes since the adoption of Core Audio and ASIO support.

Although they’ve been fearless in pioneering high‑end features such as Atmos, Avid have typically been more conservative when it comes to music‑production tools. Folder tracks, ARA support, plug‑in freezing and so on have all come later to Pro Tools than to other DAWs. But the flip side of this is that when such features do arrive, the implementation is usually second to none.

The headline addition in Pro Tools 2023.9 follows in this tradition. Clip‑ or loop‑based composition has a long history, dating right back to the trackers of the 1990s, but most contemporary implementations follow the template established by Ableton Live more than 20 years ago. Live itself has evolved into a hugely sophisticated and very popular package that is widely used for live playback, theatre sound and so on as well as music composition, while the basic idea of a scene‑based ‘clip launcher’ environment has recently found its way into other, more mainstream DAWs, as for instance in Logic’s Live Loops. Now version 2023.9 brings clip launching to Pro Tools, courtesy of the Sketch window. Sketch is included in all versions of Pro Tools, including the free Pro Tools Intro, and is also available as a free iPad app.

Edit, Mix & Sketch

One of the core strengths of the Pro Tools user interface is that it’s always been possible to do everything from within the main Edit window; the Mix window provides a useful but largely inessential complement to this. Sketch, however, is almost completely independent of both.

Sketches have their own file format and are loaded and saved independently of Sessions and Projects. Only one Sketch can be open at once, but you can have either a Session or Project open at the same time as a Sketch. These Sketches can also be pinned to one or more Sessions, so that they open automatically alongside those Sessions. The Sketch window has its own tempo and time signature, but can be sync’ed to those of a Session if you like.

A Sketch comprises an arrangement of audio or MIDI clips within a grid of cells.

A Sketch comprises an arrangement of audio or MIDI clips within a grid of cells. Each clip has its own play button, while playback of an entire row of clips — a scene — is triggered using play buttons to the left of the row. Plackback is quantised to bars in the grid, so after you hit play on a clip or scene, playback will actually start on the next downbeat. Scenes themselves can be sequenced in a linear Arrangement along the timeline above the grid. Each column of clips, meanwhile, is routed to a channel within Sketch’s simple mixer, and MIDI clips within a column all trigger the same instrument. Scenes and columns/channels can be named and coloured, but for some reason this requires you to right‑click and choose Properties from the pop‑up menu — you can’t simply double‑click.

Sketch includes a simple mixer with insert slots.

Reflecting the need for Sketches to be interchangeable between desktop and tablet versions, the Sketch window is very self‑contained. It has its own, intentionally limited, collection of instruments and effects, and doesn’t support either third‑party plug‑ins or those bundled with Pro Tools. It also has its own sound library, which is accessed through a browser on the left‑hand side of the Sketch window. This browser can also access audio files stored elsewhere on your device, and on top of this, cells can be populated by dragging and dropping from the Finder, Windows Explorer, or the Pro Tools Edit window. Anything you drag in is automatically time‑stretched to make it...