Logic Trainer News

October tips and tricks (apologies) - coming soon...

2009-10-31T12:58:00.000-07:00

Creative drum loops in logic 9.. coming soon

First of all, sincere apologies for the late arrival of this month's tips and tricks. A little health issue laid me low for a while, but all is fine and the the October TnT will be with you in a couple of days.

This month I've decided to look at a couple of ways to get creative with drum loops in logic 9. Ever fancied adding turntable-style starts and stops to a loop? We'll discuss how to add these to drum loops and also how to creatively "fatten" a loop with loop-layering... a sort of delay but without using a delay. We'll even add an amp from the new amp designer for good measure. Head on over to the tips and tricks to see this month's tutorial...

Useful tip for Phase locking audio edits on drum groups..

2009-10-23T07:11:00.000-07:00

Would you like to be able to tighten up drum edits by using one of the tracks as a quantising reference?

Well, it's been possible since the first release of Logic 9, but it's one of the features that may have been missed by many when looking at the long list of new Logic 9 features.

Here's how to do it:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3656

David

ps - Stay tuned... new logic tips out in a few days.
Don't forget - if you want tips on specific issues - please drop me a line!

VE Pro Arrives

2009-09-28T06:27:00.000-07:00

The long awaited VE Pro finally hit the streets this week and at first look it's been well worth the wait!

So I've downloaded and installed the VE Pro software. Just for those of you who aren't up to date - this is a cross-platform, cross plug-in-format solution to run MIDI and Audio over LAN with either a 32 bit or 64 bit front end. It can be run on a slave machine and piped to a second machine with a gigabit ethernet cable.

What on earth does that all mean? Well... it means the following:

1. I can have plugins running on a PC and use them in Logic if I want.
2. I can have 64 bit plugins running in logic and have logic see all the RAM in snow leopard.
3. I can use this as an all in one mixing solution alongside logic in the same box. See below...

So what are its advantages?

Well - as a user of Vienna Symphonic software, it's long been a problem that you would need to house millions of instruments in an increasingly large orchestral template within logic and then hope your screen was big enough to mix the lot of it. Also, if you move from one project to the next you would have to shut all instruments and then reload all of them yet again. This has all changed with VE pro.

Whether you work on an external slave machine, or in one box - there is a simple "preserve session" button, which allows you to unlink the setup from your current sequencer - holding the instruments and settings in tact whilst you load a new song. Then you just relink and use those settings with the new project. As the advert says... "simples"!

Having tried it on my home mac (in a one box setting) it was utterly flawless. No crashes, no stumbles - it just allowed me a quick and easy way to load Vienna Instruments in one place, but crucially - all my other instruments and plugins too. The only thing you can't do is load logic internal plugins within it - so if you want to use logic compressors, EQ's etc - you'd have to use it in a multi output mode (haven't tested this yet) and send things to a 2nd output for processing on a separate channel strip. For the basics of how to do this, see this months tips and tricks PDF.

Information on the VE Pro can be found here:

http://vsl.co.at/en/65/71/1738/1356.vsl

Worth also noting that this system now works with Pro Tools as well as Logic, Cubase and Nuendo.

Watch this space for more information.

Go back to www.logictrainer.co.uk

Melodyne DNA is finally here!

2009-09-19T06:29:00.001-07:00

The new Melodyne - just arrived in BETA!

So the long awaited DNA is finally here.
Looking at videos on the Celemony website, there are a number of remarkable features in the new program.
But for those that have been in the technology wilderness for a while, or those new to the game - what are we talking about?

Well here it is in a nutshell...

Human beings are not perfect. They sing and perform a little out of tune or out of time sometimes... or both, or a little more than a little... so blandly, Melodyne is the tool to help you straighten out recordings that need a bit of help. But it is SO much more than that. Melodyne (in its previous incarnation) allowed you to change the formant (or timbre) of a sound - so make yourself Barry White or the Chipmunks without changing the pitch of the note. It lets you add or subtrack vibrato, change the drift of pitches that waiver within their duration and it even lets you add slide or glide inbetween notes - as well as letting you correct rhythmic problems, changing the volume level of individual notes and a host of other features which allowed creative uses like building solos and parts that the original player didn't come up with, building backing vocal takes from single vocals and many others. These features spawned new instruments like the "Liquid" series of phrase based material that you are given a melodyne interface to edit.

Now enter the new version:

Previously all of this was only possible on monophonic material - meaning that you could edit a voice, or a single instrument, or even a polyphonic sound source providing you wanted to edit the whole sound or chord in one go - so a chord was seen as one "blob" (in melodyne language). This meant that if you had a recording of a band, but the guitarist was out of tune, it was just tough. Not any more! Now a polyphonic recording can be separated out into individual instruments and individual notes of each instrument - meaning that you could just choose the G string of the guitar in the band after the recording is in the can - for example!

Now it's not quite as simple as that, as there is a whole host of potential issues that melodyne has to deal with, like overtones for example - which involve you as the editor deciding whether a note is a real note, or an overtone that melodyne is hearing as a real note (or vice versa). The guys at Celemony have thought this carefully through and given you options to add these or remove them at will and even change whole parts from major to minor with just a button click.

Also available (if you have used this before you'll know how good this will be) is a new copy and paste function and the ability in the plugin version (there are standalone and plugin versions for Mac and PC in all formats) to play the part from within the plug in - which wasn't previously possible.

So - I'm sold... i think... I haven't played with the BETA version yet - which is about as long overdue as an England one day cricket victory, but you can be assured - if i can get it to do half of the things shown on the sample videos, it's going to be a fun Autumn!!!

More details can be found here:

http://www.celemony.com/cms/

Go back to www.logictrainer.co.uk

Freezing Tracks

2009-09-17T11:06:00.000-07:00

Quick extra tip on freezing, as requested
A student asked me to show them how to freeze a track in Logic.

It's not really a full T&T, so I've posted it here.

Go back to www.logictrainer.co.uk

"Can I turn the clock back?"

2009-09-16T02:28:00.000-07:00

Would you make Logic look like it used to if you could?

I asked a long time Logician what he would like to see me cover in the tips and tricks section of this site, and amongst other things he asked for something interesting enough that I am transfering it to the blog as well as the tips and tricks section.

“Can I get Logic 8 to behave more like Logic 7?”

Obviously my first question was to ask why he hadn’t upgraded to Logic 9 and he muttered something about “typical bloody help centre… it’s not the latest version etc”, so I let that go and asked him what it was about Logic 8 that wasn’t to his liking. He said that he found it hard to get used to the “all in one window” philosophy – which is easy enough to overcome with the use of screensets and separate windows if you want them, but also he didn’t want the pointer to turn into a loop tool at the top right-hand side of a region. I scratched my head a bit and thought about it – and muttered something like “well you change the pointer behaviour in logic 9 - they’ve taken care of that….”, but I realised that might not go down too well – and thought about ways of solving it…and realised to my horror that the first question I sat down to answer, had a single word one..."NO!

I then put a fairly discreet post on a blog to other “Logic-seniors” saying – Have I missed something in Logic 8? The results of this blog-to-answer-a-blog will be posted soon.. but to my knowledge this can’t be done… so I’m not going to put it up as a T&T!

More later.
David

Go back to www.logictrainer.co.uk

PC next for me...

2009-09-15T03:25:00.000-07:00

My next computer will be a PC. Why? So, you run logic, you're a mac user and you laugh at those PC guys with their wimpish little dells etc....?

Except you can get a 3ghz PC with 8 cores and 60+ gig of RAM without having to kneecap the bank manager... but you can't run logic on it...can you?
Sigh.
So - wouldn't it be great if you could use all that power of a custom built PC to house VST versions of the plugins you own and yet play them across a network onto your mac?

No that's ridiculous....

Is it?
Now you can!

VE Pro

This new amazing piece of software by my good friends at Vienna Symphonic has been long awaited by those of us that write orchestral music with MIDI but can't afford 3 quad core G5's!

I'll never get the spec exactly right, so best to suggest that you read this - which has me salivating already!

Of particular note is the ability to have a session loaded, and then load a new song in logic whilst still keeping the instruments loaded in VE Pro - no longer will we have ridiculous load times!
Also, they are rumouring having multiple outputs and a couple of other great features up their sleeves that they haven't made public yet - but as someone that uses their products and promotes them too, next week's likely release date can't come soon enough!

The little things

2009-09-15T01:24:00.000-07:00

This post is my own slant on a couple of new features and changes in logic 9. If you haven't used logic before, or are just starting out this might not mean a great deal - but if you've been a user for a while and are considering upgrading, read on!

It's not the big things...

Well, it's been about 2 months now since Apple finally let all the unsuspecting logic users loose on the latest version of Logic Pro.. (yes I know it's officially Logic Studio, but I'm an old fashioned kind of guy!) and most people are agreed that this upgrade is in line with what Apple have done to OSX with their release of Snow Leopard, ie. Evolution and not Revolution.

Having said that, I for one am heartily glad that they have kept the heart of the program entirely intact and sought to work on those areas that have annoyed long-time users due to faulty or poor implementation; systems not being compatible with software issues; 3rd party applications not being able to address enough system RAM through logic, and other seemingly small bits and bobs. However, it's the improvement of the small extras (at least they appear that way to many) that make the life of a pro-user so much easier. "What's that?" I hear you cry....

Yes, I know...

There is a great Flex time addition - Apple would have seriously fallen behind Avid/Digidesign, Ableton and (God forbid) Steinberg if they had not implemented an incredibly similar audio editing-in-time algorithm (finally some audio quantising that actually works) and I know that there are 900 new guitar amps (well not quite, but you know what i mean), but it's the extra changes, like....ready?

Deep breath....

Being able to edit the contents of audio take folders in time (and without glitches);
Having a bounce in place feature - allowing MUCH quicker "striping" of midi to convert it to audio and placing it back in the song where it was previously;
Being able to add effect tails to bounces without guessing
Being able to seamlessly move channel strip setups and the contents associated with them between projects (this one's invaluable if, like me, you create millions of versions of the same song as a type of backup mechanism and then fancy having a bit of MIDI from 10 versions ago that got lost along the way...);
Being able to add written notes to tracks; having a sensible way to replace poorly played or recorded drums with a "replace with sampler instrument" feature (I know this could be done before, but it was a pain the backside, and now it's SO quick!);
Knowing that when i load up my CPU hungry audio units, logic will allow snow leopard to do it's thing and not get in the way of RAM being allocated where necessary - with no limit (that I am aware of); having menu items... well... in the right menu for a change; being able to see an image of the last saved screenshot as the image next to the song on your hard drive, so that quick view allows you see which version to open...
Have much, much faster project load times...period;
Having sensible white boxes around the window containing "key focus" (in apple-speak)
Having a much improved fade-tool;
Having logic tell me when it's about to have a crash, or have low-memory issues, so I can save it just in time;
NOT removing access to editing the deeper elements of the program (like the environment) that some doom-sayers said might be made impossible to access

Breathe out....

To be honest, I'm not even half way through that list - I could go on and on (I think we all know that...), but it's just my way of saying - It's not always the largest feature changes that make the biggest difference in our lives as pro-users: In fact it's nearly always the smaller changes to areas that are long time niggles that put a smile on my face, and for that, in this case - I'm heartily grateful!

I'd like to see...

So what needs sorting out next? Well I think that this is a question I'd like to throw open to readers of this blog - as I think we all have our own agendas...

My top three issues:

Give the EXS24 a fairly radical overhaul. I have become an advocate of Keymap which is the sampler editor that the EXS24 should be - but as the platform leader for MIDI work (in my opinion), I find myself working in software instruments with their own GUI's and integrated Midi implementation as the EXS24 feels a bit outdated and not a patch on those other instruments - like Kontakt for example....
Update the piano roll (we all know it's a matrix editor... sigh..) to make it quicker and easier to use. Make velocity editing (I can't believe i'm going to say this) more like cubase - more linear and easy to change quickly. (This might seem a small change, but if you've read this far...)
Make a more obvious integration between the automation event editor (only available by key command - ridiculous!!) and the event editor. All that needs to be done in the event editor is to add a tab next to "additional info" that says "automation" - this can be already forced into this window by a complex series of opening one window and closing the other with a secret handshake, but it should be straightforward and would make automation editing MUCH easier.

Conclusion

So - more of the same please..... continuing revolution to an already great product - and long may the revolution continue - otherwise, consultants and trainers are obsolete!

What would you add to the list?

Send me an email to tell me what your list would be, and I'll post the sanest ones in a later blog.

Bye for now

Go back to www.logictrainer.co.uk

Welcome

2009-09-14T12:17:00.000-07:00

Hi from Logic Trainer.Just to welcome you to Logic Trainer's news - This is the place to find out the latest in the world of Logic Studio - and the world of music technology in general.

Go back to www.logictrainer.co.uk