Multi-Platinum Pro Tools
Advanced Editing, Pocketing and Autotuning Techniques. With Brady Barnett. Focal Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0-240-52023-0.
What it is about
Two techniques, mostly. Pocketing is the business of moving recorded performances against each other until a band that played slightly apart sounds like a band that played together. Autotuning — pitch correction — is the same operation applied to intonation rather than time.
Both were, in 2006, things that every serious Nashville session was doing and almost nobody was writing down. The techniques were passed between engineers verbally, in rooms, and the published literature covered the software’s features rather than what working people actually did with them. This book wrote down the practice.
The DVD
It shipped with a DVD containing a real Pro Tools session, so a reader could open the same material the book was describing and do the edits themselves rather than read about somebody else doing them. That was the whole design: a technique you have only read about is not a technique you have.
Why anyone cared
Because the argument about it was already public. MSNBC put me in front of a camera to answer whether any of this counted as cheating, which is the version of the question the general audience had. The book is the version for the people doing it, and it takes the same position: these are tools for making a record sound like the performance everyone in the room believed they gave.
Related
The second book is Pro Tools 9: The Mixer’s Toolkit. The company of the same name is Multi-Platinum.com.