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Plus, Avid brings back perpetual licences for its DAW
>Avid’s Pro Tools has long held a pretty distinct position within the DAW market. In certain circles it’s something of an industry standard – still the go-to application for a lot of larger recording studios and producers regularly recording bands or large-scale projects. It has, however, far less of a foothold among dance music producers and home studio musicians, who tend to gravitate towards the likes of Live, Logic, Cubase or FL Studio.
Recent years have seen Avid make moves aimed at addressing this latter fact though. The primary way it’s done this is through the launch of Pro Tools Artist, its most affordable tier, which offers a slightly scaled-back version of the DAW with more emphasis on virtual instruments and a generous library of loops. Now, with the launch of its 2023.9 update, Avid is making an even bolder play for the Logic and Live market through the introduction of Pro Tools Sketch.
Sketch is a new non-linear version of Pro Tools that can run both on desktop and iPad. While it’s not entirely a distinct application – on desktop, a version of Pro Tools is required to run Sketch – it is designed to function as a selfcontained music making environment, albeit one that works in tandem with Pro Tools’ traditional timeline.
Sketch is focused around a clip launching workflow that owes an obvious debt to Ableton Live. In its look and use, however, Sketch is probably closer in design to Apple’s GarageBand. In its current version, Sketch offers a significantly pared back take on the Pro Tools toolset. Sketch allows users to create using up-to 16 tracks of audio or MIDI loops and an unlimited number of scenes.
Tracks can make use of an included 1GB+ library of loops and samples, along with over 30 instruments for Avid’s Playcell sample player and more than 100 presets for the SynthCell virtual synth. There are also nine effects that can be applied to individual tracks. Simple audio and MIDI editing tools allow users to program and adjust their loops.
The main drawback compared to working with the full DAW is a lack of plugin support, although Avid tells us that AAX plugin support is on the roadmap for the near future, for the desktop version of Sketch at least. Given Pro Tools’ use of the AAX format, it will be interesting to see if and how plugin support might come to the iOS version, which would likely need to rely on Apple’s AUv3 format.
The most appealing asp
