Old School Rock, Indie, Americana & Blues
Music Production, Engineering & Development in Los Angeles

Making the most of the color palette

One of the features of Pro Tools that I find engineers use the least is the color palette. For me, it’s once of the features I love the best. I am all about keeping sessions organized and easy to use and I can’t imagine doing that without the use of color coding.

The Basics

There are three basic places that you can really dig in with custom colors: The track color, the region color and the marker color. The important thing here is to not use my colors, but to have colors that you know and can easily remember. The color scheme I stick to was one I learned from the great Mark Wessel:
Drums — Black
Percussion — Brown
Bass — Purple
Guitars — Green
Keyboards — Blue
Vocals — Orange
Effects/Auxes — Red

I keep my preferences set to the following:

Track Colors:

Thanks to this color scheme, I can open up any of my sessions, and know what I’m working with, without ever even looking at a track label. For example, here I can see that I haven’t overdubbed any keyboards yet. Pro Tools can let you customize a few things about track color via the color palette, mainly through Brightness and Saturation. Saturation controls how much of the color is shown throughout the track, and brightness controls.…well…the brightness of the color.

Region Colors:
This same color scheme can easily be applied to regions as well.

This offers the same advantages as in the mix window. It comes especially in handy when you’re dealing with high track counts, and your sessions gets a little chaotic.

Marker Colors:
You can also make the most of colors with your section markers as well. I have to admit, I don’t fully customize these, and usually leave them at random, but I always keep markers colors enabled. It basically allows you to easily see what section is coming up. If you wanted to though, you could develop colors for specific sections of songs, like blue for verses, purple choruses etc. To customize these, just click on the dropdown menu in the color palette and choose “Markers”:

Then, click on a section marker and customize to your heart’s content.

Conclusion:
These may seem like tiny, trvial things, but trust me, they can really speed up work flow. Play around with your own color combinations and try to develop your own standards. You can even translate these colors into the analog console world by using sharpies/highlighters across your console tape: