Do you know how the keyboard modifiers affect what your scroll wheel or trackpad does? Brush up with this free Pro Tools tip article.

In a recent podcast, we were discussing mice with XY gestures like the Apple Magic Mouse. During this conversation, I admitted to being “a bit 1998” in that I use a standard optical mouse with a scroll wheel. Rather than using gestures on a trackpad or mouse I just add modifiers to control window scrolling in pro Tools. Here are the modifiers I use:

• Scroll up/down - scrolls the Mix and Edit window up and down.

• Shift+Scroll - Horizontal scroll in the Edit or Mix window

• Option/Alt Scroll - Horizontal Zoom

• Option/Alt+Shift Scroll - Waveform Zoom

• Ctrl/Start+Shift Scroll - Increase/decrease Clip Gain

On a laptop you have the luxury of a trackpad so for basic up/down and left/right scrolling there’s no need for any modifiers, because of this you might not have experimented with modifiers and the trackpad. On a Macbook Pro, the clip gain shortcut is a useful one, however, for reasons I’ve never understood, the Option+Shift waveform zoom shortcut doesn’t work on my Macbook Pro.