Category Archives: Logic Pro

Feb 01 2011
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Home studio, Logic Pro, Music

Time for a new pair of gloves

Ableton LiveLogic has always felt very much like a snug-fitting glove. I know it like the back of my hand and as soon as I fire up my template song, I’m instantly in a very familiar world. I know where everything is and can instantly jump into the process of creating a track.

That’s probably why, when I fired up Ableton Live yesterday, I felt like a lost puppy. I was suddenly staring at a screen full of icons, grids and text. None of it meant anything. I recognised what appeared to be faders and panning controls but everything else was foreign. Meaningless.

Having started out on Cubase and subsequently moving onto Logic, I’ve been almost solely subjected to the linear approach of timeline-based sequencing and production. Dabbles with Reason are perhaps an exception, but even that follows the same time-honoured approach to building tracks.

Rarely a week goes by when I don’t spot someone using Ableton. Whether it be a YouTube video or an episode of ‘In The Studio’ from Future Music, I’ve always been fascinated to see professionals and fellow enthusiasts singing its praises and claiming it has revolutionised the way they make music. Really?

As its name suggests, Live is partly aimed at those wishing to take elements of their studio out on the road. However, this holds little interest for someone who makes music solely in the comfort of his spare room and is partly the reason I’ve never bothered to seriously look into Ableton’s offering.

Last night, however, I decided to try the demo (and it is worth mentioning at this point the fantastic approach Ableton take with this, offering any of the Live variants on a free 30 day trial with absolutely no limitations or missing features. Bravo.).

This isn’t the first time I’ve tried Live, if I’m honest. I did so several months back but instantly got fed up with not knowing what I was doing and went straight back to my warm Logic gloves.

The same thing happened last night.

In fact, I got so fed up with it that I ended up heading downstairs to shoot some people in the face on Call of Duty.

Later, having expelled many bullets and a large glass of red wine, I went to bed, laptop in hand (my fiance is away, therefore this type of behaviour is temporarily acceptable and not at all antisocial). I decided to watch some of the videos on Ableton’s site. It was this one which convinced me to give it another go, because the guy presenting it finally explained what the mystical piece of software is all about and why ‘being different’ is actually a very good thing indeed.

Ableton allows you to build grooves in a way no other DAW will. For example, in Logic or Cubase, you can bash a few midi notes in and create a ‘region’ on a horizontal timeline. These regions can be copied and moved at will, allowing you to build and arrange your production as you go along. The timeline itself allows you to instantly recognise where you are within your track. Which all sounds fabulous. But it can also be debilitating and often leads nowhere; you get so tangled up in the process of arranging that you forget about the process of writing.

Live offers a ‘session view’ which turns this process completely on its head. Instead of viewing a timeline, you create your own loops, across any number of bars you wish. Once you’ve created, say, a drum loop, you can leave it playing and record a bass part over the top. And so on. This sounds simple, but that’s the point. Without having a massive, gaping timeline to distract you, you can get on with the process of building a piece of music from scratch, even if it is only a bar in length. Many refer to it as a sketch pad for music and that’s a perfect analogy.

It’s early days, however, and I need more time to play but immediate thoughts are positive. I can see Ableton becoming a very useful part of the writing process.

Further updates will follow…

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Jan 30 2011
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General, Home studio, Logic Pro, Music

A history of bedroom production – Part 3

2007: Returned

Kit list: Apple Mac G5, Garageband, Reason 4, Logic Pro, Korg Triton

Apple Mac G5Eagle-eyed readers of the previous part of this series will have spotted a somewhat seismic gap in the noted period. Eleven years to be exact, for those too lazy to check.

If truth be told, I continued to make music between 1996 and 2000. This coincided with me reaching my late teens and, as confused as anyone is at that stage in their lives, I gave in to many a distraction. Going out, drink, girls… Work, even. Once you’re unleashed from the shackles of being a kid and suddenly in possession of the keys to your own car, you’re inclined to make the most of it. And more often than not, that usually involves leaving the house.

Consequently, my music suffered and eventually died a complete (albeit unmourned) death in 2001 when I met Lindsey Allen. Lindsey was the beautiful, blonde-haired girl who would become my soulmate and, in ten years time, accept my nervous, sweaty request of marriage on a sweltering day in Kefalonia. Back then, however, we were just happy to bask in all the glories of newfound romance. All of a sudden, making music was of little interest.

Skip forward to 2007. We own a house and have stable jobs. We’ve even shopped at a garden centre. Basically, we’ve grown up a bit.

Before the house purchase, we lived in a couple of tiny places. They were far too small for any kind of studio to exist, however I did, on occasion, dust off the Triton and remind myself of what I was missing. It was only now, with our own bricks and mortar, that I could seriously consider getting back into it. For days, I eyed up the then empty spare bedroom. It was perfect.

So, with little trepidation I began researching the required gear. I didn’t want to go back to the PC, having torn out my hair multiple times in the past building – and consequently fixing – them. No, I decided to turn to Apple.

Initially, a G4 sounded like a safe bet; cheap yet still capable of running some form of midi sequencer. It harked back to the days of the Atari (something I also briefly considered investing in).

Then, I noticed that a G5 could be had for a small premium. And with that, I bought a dual 1.8ghz variant through eBay, from a guy who worked at the Planet Rock radio station (the machine clearly had relevant roots).

My first experience of the G5 was Garageband, which came handily ready-installed. Bearing in mind I’d not properly worked with

Garageband

Garageband

any kind of DAW or sequencer for several years, I was entering almost unchartered territory. However, what I discovered was jaw-dropping.

 

Instantly, Garageband let me back into my midi-driven roots. But along with that was the sheer power of the thing. Bearing in mind this was essentially a free piece of software which came with any new Apple Mac, it was actually a very respectable standalone DAW with plenty of useable sounds. I couldn’t quite believe just how far things had come on. Back in the 90s, you had to be a real geek to have any idea of how electronic music was sequenced, let alone be so easily exposed to the tools used for doing so.

This got me a little excited. If this is what mass-market fodder like Garageband is like…

ReasonThe next step was Reason 4 and having dabbled with earlier variants and it’s often forgotten ancestor Rebirth some time ago, I was instantly familiar with its self-contained loveliness and addictive tab switching to reveal dangly virtual cables. It was obviously a huge step up from Garageband but it also fully reignited my passion for making music. The sounds you could create were a world away from anything I’d used in the past.

There was only one stop left: Logic. It had been a long time. Would we still get on? Would we recognise each other? What if it had gone a bit weird, met new friends and consequently become a pretentious sod?

It hadn’t. Logic Pro sealed the fate of our spare bedroom. I was back.Logic Studio

I’m not going to dwell too much on why, or go into any detailed discussion on the reason I love Logic (if you’ve kept reading this far, you’re doing well, I wouldn’t want to lose you now), but I’d never have thought after my brief and underwhelming dabblings with it on the PC in the late 90s, that it would become such a staple in later life.

I instantly got to work. Any new piece of software I can lay my hands on, whether it be a DAW, soft synth or effects plug-in, seems to inspire me instantly and Logic was no different. Within a couple of days I’d written a full-length track, the first for about ten years. Listening back, it resembles much of what I’ve described in the last few paragraphs; someone getting reaqauinted with music making. Someone experimenting with a new set of toys. It’s therefore a bit paint-by-numbers and by no means a masterpiece but I do at least have it to hand, which is more than can be said for my earlier works.

So, here it is, the aptly named Returned. I can only apologise for the dreadfully contrived intro:

p.s. My blogging buddy Chris has been charting his own history of bedroom production. It’s quite different to mine and I really recommend a read. His third and final part can be found here.

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Jan 13 2011
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Home studio, Logic Pro, Music

N…n…n…n…new plug-in courtesy of BT and iZotope

It’s taken it’s time. 15 years, if you believe what Mr BT (Brian Transeau) says.

Now, for the first time, you too can smash up, stutter, pan bounce and generally ear candy-ify your own musical creations, just like the king of show off dance himself.

Of course, BT almost single-handedly created the art of stutter, originally manipulating audio by hand; looping, crunching and warping wave forms to almost impossible 1/1024th note values and beyond.

It’s impressive stuff, if a little flashy and over indulged in some of his tracks (if you’ve reached this point and wonder what the hell I’m talking about, listen to the start of Suddenly for an example of these effects in action: 

). That said, I occasionally reach certain stages of my own productions and think a nice little kick drum stutter or wildly panning and pitch bending string sound could spice things up a bit. I’ve tried – and failed – to manipulate the audio myself but it is, if truth be told, the kind of thing you’d only achieve if you had the patience of a saint and exactly zero friends.

So, it was with some excitement that I was directed (via Twitter, obviously) to iZotope’s newest addition to their product lineup.

Yes, for $149 you can become a bedroom BT.

They’ve teamed up with the man himself to finally bring his creation to life in an attractive plug-in format.

I’ve downloaded the trial and had a very brief play. The plug-in works in Logic as a midi-controlled AU. Insert it into an instrument channel, choose the piece of audio you wish to screw with via the side chain input and you’re away. Stutter Edit responds to key presses on your controller keyboard and gives you full control over what looks like ever parameter you could hope for.

In a quick thirty minute test, the results were indeed very impressive but it goes without saying that I need to spend more time with it. Due to it’s nature of relying on midi input and therefore recording key presses in order to trigger the effects, one minor criticism is that it could prove a little cumbersome and fiddly. We’ll see.

One thing it is sure to do, however, is work its way into the mainstream. I think this is inevitable. While it won’t be on par with the Autotune bandwagon, it’s apparent ease of use, instant gloss and low price means producers will quickly latch onto it. Mark my words, you’ll be hearing it stuttering away on Radio 1 in no time.

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Nov 21 2010
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Home studio, Logic Pro, Production tips

Maschine/Logic Workflow For Non MPC Heads

 

Native Instruments Maschine

Maschine - Not a natural partner for Logic

 

Feeling I needed something a little more ‘hands on’ for my beat making and sampling needs, it was with a degree of caution that I added Native Instruments’ Maschine to my studio.

If you’ve arrived here, you’ll most likely know what Maschine is, therefore I won’t bother explaining it in great detail, only to say that it is NI’s attempt at drawing the beat making crowd away from their MPCs and into a very clever marriage of dumb midi-driven hardware and powerful plugin-based software.

Does it work?

It’s a complicated answer, unfortunately. Certainly, from an MPC-syle beat creation perspective, Maschine is a joy to use. Sampling, too, is brilliantly implemented, making the process of building loops what it should be – fun and endlessly addictive. Time simply disappears while you’re using this thing.

Hip Hop producers will love it and will be able to create sparkling productions completely within Maschine itself, with no need to switch to a DAW. Me? Not quite so simple, unfortunately.

I have no interest in working with scenes and building up entire songs in that manner. The reason I bought Maschine was to gain an easy, more old school way of sampling and creating loops and drum tracks. The problem arises when you move over to your DAW of choice and mine happens to be Logic which, I’m sorry to say, is simply not a good partner for Maschine.

Yes, you can drag and drop midi, but its a little cumbersome and, due to limitations with Logic’s use of AU plugins, Maschine itself is pretty much useless as a soft synth. That’s unless you’re willing to start adding the ancient art of program changes into your projects. I’m not.

While considering the very real prospect of giving up and selling my shiny new bit of kit I came across a number of workflow suggestions and one in particular caught my eye.

If you don’t mind (or even enjoy) working with Audio as opposed to midi, I highly recommend using that method of getting your Maschine-created beats into Logic. There’s one problem, though. Maschine will only allow you to drag entire groups into Logic which is fine and dandy unless you take some pride in the individual processing of your sounds. The solution is stupidly simple, but easily overlooked.

Before dragging your audio across, solo one of your sounds in Maschine (for example, the kick). Then drag the audio into the DAW. The resulting audio file will contain just the soloed sound. Repeat the process for each sound and you’ll relatively quickly have individual audio files for each of your Maschine parts, all ready to be processed and arranged in Logic. A little bit long winded, but effective.

It’s convinced me to keep Maschine, anyway…

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May 30 2010
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General, Home studio, Logic Pro, Music

New Track: Excuse Me

Thanks to
http://www.acapellas4u.co.uk/
 I’ve been experimenting with some acapellas recently, following a glut of writers block.

They’ve helped immensely and I’d recommend the site to any producers similarly struggling with sources of inspiration.

Anyway, here’s what happened when Jay Z met a lesser known Stevie Wonder track:

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May 06 2010
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Home studio, Logic Pro, Production tips

Production Tip – Side chaining in Logic Pro

Logic Compressor

Logic's Compressor

Few electronic music genres fail to benefit from the pumping, sucking sound of side chain compression, yet it is one of those effects which many new producers struggle to get to grips with – not least because there are so many different ways of achieving it.

Finding the easiest method has troubled me for a while, but thanks to a recent issue of Future Music, I now have just that and feel it worth passing on to anyone who cares to read this blog.

I won’t bother explaining what side chain compression is. Partly because it’s almost impossible to put into words and partly because, if you’ve reached this page, there’s a damn good chance you’re familiar with it anyway. If you’re not, listen to the opening few bars of Eric Prydz’s Call On Me. The ‘ducking’ string sound at the beginning is probably the most commercial example of it.

The tutorial I’m using is based on Logic Pro and its bundled compressor, but the same principle will apply for most DAWs. It also assumes a fairly good working knowledge of Logic.

Make sure you set this all up in your standard template so it is always present for every project you start.

The key is to create a hidden, silent, infinitely looping midi track. Pick a sound or single hit, although don’t be naturally tempted to reach for the kick drum bank – a tight hi-hat or short, snappy snare will actually do the trick better. These types of sounds are far tidier, frequency-wise and will ensure that they trigger a clean side chain signal when played. It’ll probably also help here if you boost some of the mid and top end and roll off some of the lower frequencies in the EQ.

Stick your chosen sound on a four bar loop and loop infinitely. Depending on what type of sound you’ve picked, you may need to whack the level up to get a good signal, but I’ll let you be the judge of that. Regardless, this can be tempered for each project, depending on how severe you want the side chain effect to be.

Send the output of the track to a bus and mute the bus track.

To keep things tidy, hide the track you have the looped four bar hit on by clicking the ‘H’.

That’s your side chain trigger set up. Simple as that. Now, whenever you want to squash the bejesus out of a synth patch, for example, add a compressor to the track in question and choose bus 3 in the Side Chain drop down box at the top right. Bring the compressor threshold way down to -30-40dB, the ratio as low as you like, knee at 0 and bring both the attack and release down to around 10ms. Adjust as you see fit.

As with many side chain tutorials, the above may seem complicated at first, but this is in fact the simplest method I’ve found yet. Have fun.

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Feb 15 2010
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Home studio, Logic Pro, Music

New Track: You’ve Got Something

This week, I’ve been experimenting with the EVOC20 Logic vocoder, mastering and, for the first time ever, some harmonies. From my own mouth. Sorry.

For those interested, this track features elements of ‘I Can’t Wait’ by ‘New Shooz’.

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Aug 18 2009
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General, Home studio, Logic Pro, Music

90s Piano Riff Ahoy

Something to hopefully cool you down this warm August evening (unless you’re reading this in December, which is quite possible):

Includes a nice dab of Omnisphere for any gear heads listening…

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Jul 12 2009
2 Comments
Home studio, Logic Pro, Music

An Omnisphere Guide for the Underpowered

There’s no getting away from it, Omnisphere is MASSIVE.  In just about every way possible.  Aside from the obvious numbers: 6 DVDs, 50gb install, the sounds it produces are simply fist-in-the-face astonishing.  From burning pianos to ethereal, naturally-sourced choirs, they will take your breath away, regardless of how well you can play; just hold middle C on pretty much any patch and your ears are filled with lashings of top end synthesis.

Omnisphere - bigger than yo' mamma

Spectrasonics Omnisphere - bigger than yo' mamma

This comes at a price, of course, which is that Omnisphere is rather partial to a slice of CPU… or two.  Before getting the synth, I read many reports of it being ‘unuseable’ on anything less that weapon-grade Mac Pro hardware.

As usual, I ignored this advice and went for it.  My studio is centred around a dual 1.8ghz PowerPC G5 with 4GB of RAM.  Once anounced as the ‘most powerful computer on the planet’, this is now somewhat of a dinosaur, it’s lack of a (or several) multi core Intel CPU pushing it firmly back into Apple’s history books.

So, you’d perhaps expect it to literally explode when Omnisphere is loaded up in Logic.  Not so.  It loads up in a matter of seconds and pretty much every patch can be played through without fuss.  So, don’t believe what you read in Blogs…

The problems start to manifest themselves when you attempt to use it for real in a project.  Aside from the obvious problem of finding a track willing enough to allow the somewhat obese aural qualities of the synth to sit alongside other instruments without drowning them out, if you go for any more than two instances, and your Mac is similarly spec’d to mine, you’ll run into the eternally frustrating ‘can’t process audio’ error.

To get round this, I recommend something which is actually quite obvious, but may not come instantly to mind.  Record your Omnisphere part and then bounce it to audio.  Once bounced, create an audio track, plonk the audio file into it and remove the soft synth Omnisphere track.  Hey presto – your CPU can breath a sigh of relief and you can still garnish your tracks with noises God makes when he’s rearranging furniture.  Just remember to leave a gap at the end of your bounce for any reverb or delay which might tail off.

I recently put together this track which is an example of this monolith in action.  It’s also worth noting that of the three Omnispheres used in this piece, two of them are real instances, not audio and it didn’t cause Logic any trouble (although it was right on the edge at times).

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Mar 23 2009
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Home studio, Logic Pro, Music

A Brief Review of pHATmatik PRO

pHATmatik PRO - audio choppage at it's easiest

pHATmatik PRO - audio choppage at it's easiest

Having never been a fan of using multiple audio applications to get one result, I was delighted to find the answer to my sampling and chopping needs, in the form of pHATmatik Pro.

In all honesty, since I’ve moved over to a Mac, Logic Pro and almost 100% soft synths, I’ve been thoroughly put off sampling due to the aforementioned arse-about-face way of achieving anything.  Back in the days of Cubase, midi ports, a horrendous number of leads and my trusty Korg Triton I would happily sample audio into the latter, chop the samples up and assign them to keys.  Granted, even this process was a little long winded, but it beats having thirty-six programs open and transporting one 3gb WAV file between them all in various different stages of transformation.

Anyway, I digress.  If you’re still reading, you presumably want to hear a little more about pHATmatik (why they have emphasised ‘HAT’ I have no idea – there’s nothing titfer about it).  Put very simply, pHATmatik let’s you very quickly chop up an audio file into either 16 or 32 pieces and automatically assigns them to keys on your controller keyboard – all with one click of the mouse.  Simple, and massively effective.  I’m yet to delve into the more advanced features but these include independent parameters for each slice, tempo-synced delay, comb and resonant filters.

In all honesty, though, if your sampling simply amounts to creative play with slices of someone else’s work, pHATmatik has that uncanny ability to inspire.  On my first sitting with it I knocked out a somewhat simple remix of Stevie Wonder’s Bad Mamma Jamma. Not the most incredible thing you’ll hear this year, but when you consider it took me just a couple of hours and that included the time taken to sample and chop the track up, it’s clear how powerful this plugin is.  Download my track here (8mb, but I cant be bothered to re-bounce it, sorry).

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