Steve,
Sorry for the delayed response but this is a difficult question to answer.
Everything depends on your goal. If you want to know the program well, there's
no shortcut to reading the reference Guide. Yes, I know, it's like fifteen
hundred pages but it contains essentially everything you need. Naturally, skip
the video chapters. You probably don't need to worry about sync and surround
material as well. An enormous amount of material is repetitive but it helps
emphasize key points. As blind users, there's a disadvantage we face in that
on-screen changes are not easily detected and those very changes speak volumes
about functionality. For example, trimming the right edge of a clip boundary
with a keyboard shortcut goes completely undetected unless you specifically
read the length counter to verify the behavior. Naturally, you don't need to
verify the behavior once you know how it works and what's going on but nowhere
in the manual will there be an instruction to check the length counter. A
sighted user immediately sees that the clip has clearly become shortened. What
a blind user needs to understand is that the shortcut trims the right boundary
of the clip and the user has to logically deduce that, if the clip has been
shortened and it's still selected, well then, the selection must itself be
shorter. Hey, let's check the length of the selected clip. Guess what?
I simply use this example to illustrate how, when reading the manual, blind
users need to use deductive reasoning to experiment and verify results. This,
in the end, makes for a deeper understanding of the environment. I've never,
ever said that learning Pro Tools is easy. In fact, it's quite difficult in a
way, especially for a blind user, but it's absolutely worth it. There are
people who only need to edit audio files and they struggle with other
applications and platforms. Meanwhile, Pro Tools is, hands down, the best audio
editor out there and it's ninety nine percent accessible. And the one percent
that isn't accessible is stuff that's so esoteric that you'll never need that
functionality. Mind you, I'm talking about audio editing and not the entire
scope of what Pro Tools can do. So, with virtually complete accessibility
through keyboard shortcuts alone, some users will simply not read the chapter
on audio editing and look at the keyboard shortcuts list and experiment.
All that said, a proper tutorial on audio editing would probably go a long way
but it has to be done well. There's nothing as bad as a disorganized and poorly
executed tutorial. Perhaps that's something that I might tackle at some point.
We've gotten a bunch of new users and I'm afraid many of them are not inclined
to put in the daunting amount of work to learn how to do basic editing. Some
get it instantly and others struggle. If I can carve out some time, I'll put
something together.
Best,
slau
On Mar 17, 2018, at 10:56 AM, Steve Matzura <number6...@gmail.com> wrote:
While I consider myself a reasonably efficient stumbler (LOL), what's a better
method of self-learning Pro Tools? So far, the concepts are clear enough, but
moving within the environment sometimes bogs me down because I don't yet know
where to find things in specific windows or dialogs, not to mention which
windows to keep open in order for shortcut keys to work properly, so I do spend
a lot of time fumfering around, opening things to see what's inside, and
eventually finding what I'm looking for. So far, I've hacked my way through
laying down a few audio tracks, and from listening to a demo Slau posted in the
PT WhatsApp group, have been successful at some very basic editing. The next
thing I want to tackle is adding an effect to some recorded audio, and then
jumping into MIDI-land, particularly via Komplete Kontrol and other VST
instruments I have installed. I'd also love to have a short-list of what I
should stay away from--things that don't work, that we can't use--so I won't be
tempted by them.
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