Grouping tracks can also make it easier to perform an edit-like cutting or moving a section of music-on a number of tracks as a unit, though, as I said, I’ll focus more on mixing applications. Grouping tracks also allows overall processing to be applied to all the tracks in a group, like compressing multi-miked drums or adding an effect to a large number of background vocals. If these tracks have different levels dialed up, grouping allows them to be adjusted all together, changing the overall level while preserving the inter-channel balances of the different fader levels-with larger mixes, it’s much easier to adjust related tracks all at once than to have to make lots of individual track tweaks. Maybe the most common application would be to adjust the level of a number of (usually-related) tracks at the same time. There are a lot of reasons for grouping tracks together in a mix. VCA Faders work in conjunction with Mix Groups, offering additional convenience. The audio routing approach involves the use of subgroup Aux channels, re-routing the outputs of the tracks to be subgrouped, while Mix (and Edit) Groups link channels together without any signal re-routing. Tracks (channel strips) in Pro Tools can be grouped by either audio routing or by linking. Tracks can be grouped in Pro Tools for both mixing and editing purposes-I’ll focus mainly on mix groups.

Pro Tools is a perfect example-there are three track-grouping features available, and each has its specific advantages. This has been done since the days of analog consoles, and today’s DAWs usually offer several ways to accomplish it.

One of the basic requirements for mixing and editing is the ability to group tracks together and make adjustments to several grouped tracks all at once.

Pro tools unhide tracks