Logic Pro X Masterclass - Part 1

Welcome everyone to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama to our wonderful Milton Court concert hall and the electronic music de

part

ment hosting this

masterclass

today. My name is Mike Roberts. I'm the director of electronic music and it really is a pleasure to be able to Welcome everyone here for our Logic Pro 10

masterclass

. The masterclass teaching this afternoon is Johnny Buchanan, he is one of our longest standing teachers and combines being one of the best teachers I know with a busy and successful career as a composer producer. The music tech journalist isn't a creative genius in every aspect, so I think we're going to have a fantastic, wonderful afternoon watching Jono follow his production workflow from start to finish using Logic Pro 10, so join in to me to give you a warm welcome. the stage Johnny Buchanan hello everyone I hope you can hear me thank you very much I just want to echo Mike welcoming you to inter Milton Court this afternoon for what we hope will be a really exciting afternoon it pains me to say it but it is In fact it's been 20 years since I first walked into the electronic music de

part

ment across the street despite my youthful appearance, and what was notable about that first trip to the electronic music department was that it was the first time I had seen a group of musicians. using a software program that I had never seen before until that moment, a lot of people were sitting there with headphones on working on what at the time was a software program called audio

logic

(now the computers we had in electronic music at that time ) only allowed you to record a single mono audio track at a time and it's extraordinary to take a moment to think about the incredible developments that have taken place in the recording environment and in digital recording and music in the intervening 20 years and the whole thing . this afternoon is to really walk you through some workflow

logic

in terms of being able to apply the creativity that we're going to discuss to your own projects, so what we have to start with today is It's a type of song, hopefully, promising, which starts off something really basic and simple that we're going to tackle through some recordings this afternoon to see how we can work with the editing, production, mixing and mastering skills that, like I said, I hope will then be You can apply it to your own pieces and in particular we are focusing on the recording, as you can probably see behind me.

We have drums, guitars and vocals ready to add to this project and we will get to that in due time. but just before we begin, I am very aware of the fact that in this room there will be some people who are new to logic; In fact, there may be Garage Band users who were thinking about taking the step forward. some intermediate users, some people who know their way around, but maybe it's too much the program that they've never seen before and there will be the ninjas, the people who could easily be here doing this master class that they know. logic like the back of your hand the idea this afternoon is that we're trying to bring you some content no matter what level you're at and I think even for people who feel like they know logic very well, we'll be looking at some things you may not have had a chance to check out before, so without further ado, let's get started just to make sure everyone's awake.

Actually, we'll start with some really basic MIDI programming tips, especially for people. who may have never seen the logic before, but also just to show you some things that you may not have come across in terms of workflow in particular, so here's the start of my project, which you can see on the screen behind You guys, it seems like there are a lot of projects. which haven't really had a chance to develop yet, we're already only five things in the project and you can see at the top of the arrangement I've mapped this with verse and chorus bridge tags added into the arrangement. bar so we can see where we are in the song.

In fact, I should have said that this is a song project, so let's listen to what we have so far and I don't think this is going to be too intimidating, this will probably sound like a lot of the projects that you have on your hard drives in your computers at home. Thank you so much for coming it's not okay so I hope this isn't too intimidating as you can hear we only have a few little ones. rhythmic elements, we have a basic piano part that supports the kind of harmonic structure of the piece and we have the subbass part that is right underneath everything else, supporting everything, so, like I said, what we're going to do What we're going to do All you have to do is start with some really basic little MIDI programming techniques just to make this arrangement a little more developed than it is now.

You can see at the top of Logic Pro. Obviously I have this pointer tool which is my main tool and next to it I have what's called the command tool. This is a tool that is available to me if I hold down the command button and what I'm going to start by doing is just joining the first two bars of This project is like this using marquee and then I'm going to go back to the pointer tool and click here . This is a really easy way to be able to produce a little slice at this point, the logics are asking me what I want to do. the notes that join bars 5 to 6 I want to shorten them, so I'm going to press ok and then what I can do is copy them back here, so what I've done there is just create a little bit more interesting introduction. than just jumping straight to the beginning of the verse and hopefully this will help musicians have something more interesting than just a track to listen to when we start making recordings;

However, we can go a little further than simply copying the first one. two bars into the verse so the next thing I'm going to do is select this piano part. I'm going to Ctrl-click on it and bounce it into place. Now what this means is that I'm going to turn this MIDI region into an audiophile Middies, great as long as we have keyboards connected and we want to make real-time recordings and we want to start building an arrangement musically, for that we need MIDI and it's a incredibly powerful tool and flexible language, but there are some things we can only do when working with audio files and what I have in mind for this particular piano part is exactly that it is an audio-only process, so I'll call it inverted piano and I'm going to bounce that now, what has happened now is that the logic has created a perfect copy of this media file, but now it is an audio file and if I open the editor in this particular window and go into the files area here I can see the waveform display for this new piano note and within the function menu there is a whole range of things due to this file, including inversion, and if we exit the editor again we will see very clearly On the screen now we have the original piano notes as MIDI followed by the reversed version as audio and if we run those two we'll hear them like this, so that's helping me get a little bit of shape coming out of this intro. area in the verse and again I think that will help the musicians know where they are within the project.

Now the next thing I have, as you can see, on some of the empty tracks under the project where we are now is I've got some sounds that I liked in the writing stage that I haven't had a chance to develop into proper parts yet and In particular, what I have is a second synth bass part and the reason this is here is because the sub bass provides a huge amount of weight and body to the track, but it doesn't really provide me with much harmonic content. Subbases are fantastic, they're popular in so many different forms of music and they're great for giving us the weight, that's what makes your chest vibrate a little bit, but they don't connect to the rest of the tracks very easily unless you have Be careful, they stay there at the bottom, being a little cloudy, and what I want to do. is to add a kind of secondary bass between the sub and the rest of the track to tie these elements of the production together, so what I'm going to do is just copy this part to the track below and if Just these two, I think we'll hear the difference between the two sounds.

The sub is that big, rich bass sound that I was talking about earlier, while the second synth bass will just provide a little bit of bite at the beginning of the note, okay? so you can hear that bite and then the sub takes over and fills the hole underneath, okay so the layers sound pretty simple, but what you might want to do now is develop this second bass line so it's a little bit softer. It's a more interesting experience than just playing the sustain notes which is the first part and, in particular, I'm going to focus now on this area, which is the bridge, this is the point where I want the song to develop a little more. impulse. than what you have now, so I'm going to reopen the editor for this particular part and very easily select both notes and drag them back so now they're super short every time we click on one.

Note that you can hear it coming through the PA system and you can hear it triggering every time I click on it, so what I'm going to do is just disable the MIDI output path there for a moment so I can continue talking. while we make this edition. Now what I want to do is have this note repeat in eighth notes, so what I'm going to do is select the eighth note as my quantized value within this window and that will instantly create New Eighth Notes for me. Now I could copy and paste all of these notes one after the other to create the rhythm I'm looking for, but there is a dedicated tool that will allow me to do what is called the Brush tool and What the Brush tool allows me to do is drag through a full range of notes creating in that interval the notes that I want like this, but it's very easy for me to get a little lost and end up with some notes that I don't really want.

I don't want to, so what I'm going to do is refine the view here a little bit, undo that step and go back one step and I'm going to use what's called collapse mode. Now what it does is show me only the notes that are already present within this small part of MIDI and as a result it is now much harder for me to make a mistake. I can drag here very quickly and fill this gap and I can do the same with the note below and then if I want to add more notes or different pitches to this MIDI region at a later date, I can exit collapse mode and I have all the range of shades available ready to wear so now what should we have if I come?

As we leave here there is a bit more interesting, more biting part, which runs through the arrangement across the bridge and indeed we do it now, let's look at the editor again for a moment, you will have seen it, of course, in brush mode and working in this. Just as all the values ​​assigned to these MIDI regions are exactly the same, the reason all of these notes are green is because they all have the same velocity data. Now I could open the velocity tool and start dragging individual notes to make that change but what I'm more interested in doing is performing a function using MIDI transform now what MIDI transform allows me to do is take a region like this, go into the functions and from here I can choose a whole range of potential processes that will allow me to do interesting things with MIDI that could benefit my project and in particular what I want to do is open up the random speed.

The moment I click on this, I can now start manipulating exactly what I want, these random speeds. Of course I want them to be random, but I can control how random all of those speeds will be, since they started working a moment ago, where I think of sort of 60 as a value, so what I could do is increase the upper limit , lower the little lower limits a little bit and then press select and operate and what that does is it instantly gives a more random approach to velocity and if you haven't come across the MIDI transform window, it's incredibly powerful.

Great for doing things at double or half speed or processing MIDI in a wide range of different ways and really worth a look, so let's get out of the mode just for a moment. There is one more part I want to build from the pieces already inside. In this project I'm going to take this sub bass part and copy it to another little synth that I have lined up here so far, all we're really doing is just copying one part onto another and that's adding richness and power to the arrangement, but it doesn't necessarily allow us to move away from the kind of original tones that we started the project with, so what I'll do next is open the inspector, which shows me this window. on the left side where I can also make changes to specific parameters via MIDI, so up here I have a little region tab and if I open it this allows me to pick some choice parameters for here and what I want to do. it's very fast,just add a transpose value to this second part that will take this part up an octave, let's hear how it sounds from now on with octaves assigned across the board in the chorus section of the song, okay that's great but all these Sounds are really static at the moment, they are all consistent, they don't change and although they add a lot of power, we don't have any kind of animation in this part at the moment.

This allows me to introduce automation mode, the idea of ​​being able to add data based ​​in parameters to a specific region, what does that mean? What it means is that this particular part is triggered from an instrument called a retro synth and if I open it up you can see it very clearly here, what I want to do is take a specific parameter inside this synth and have it change as it plays the part, particularly its tone. I really want that to bite and go from being pretty dull as it is now to being a lot brighter, so as we work on the chorus we're in a position to hear it being added, so what I'm going to do is make sure you can see this below and we're going to go into automation mode and what that's going to allow me to do is record a parameter in this region as we go, now there are multiple automation modes and to write new information I'm going to select the lock mode and what that allows me to do is select any parameter on the screen and type a line of data for it, let's see how it works, so the parameter that I have chosen here is the envelope that activates the filter, the amount of bite that we hear at the beginning of the note and as a result, sometimes we get a little more intensity and the rest of the time a little less and as a result, I get this nice line that shows me those changes in pitch as the part plays now, once If you've recorded an automation parameter, it's worth it.

Keeping in mind that what you probably want to do at this stage is protect it; In other words, you want it to play, but you don't want to inadvertently add new lines of data that you didn't actually intend. I'm not careful and suddenly decide that I want to adjust the volume of this part. It would be very easy for me to add a line of volume automation data to this part, which is not really what I want at this stage, so what I do. What I'm going to do is change my mode back to read and what that does is it plays the data that already exists but it doesn't allow me to add more to this particular region.

I would go back to lock mode if I wanted to. To do that, what we've done now, and you'll notice there's no keyboard on stage, we've developed the arrangement a little bit more to make it a little fuller, a little richer, but we haven't really had to record. something new to make that happen, so I hope that now we are all awake and have had a chance to look at some basic MIDI programming so that the arrangement is a little more complete by the time our musicians start doing it. the stage and I think it's about time we bought the first one right now.

It would be my great pleasure to introduce Tom Hutchison, a graduate of last year's jazz course here at Guildhall School, to come and play drums for us, please give Tom. a big round of applause, hello, Itzhak. I am your round floor longer than me. I need to graduate from the Guildhall School of Music in theatre, that's the only fair thing. I think that's okay, so Tom will come and play some drums for us. We'll do that in his own time, but now that Tom is on stage, we have a chance to really explore this team that we've set up for today because so far, everything I've done has only required the centerpiece. from my arrangement here my technology here for today's workshop and that is a 15-inch MacBook Pro everything we are doing today goes to this machine there are no external hard drives the audio that we are going to record goes to this machine there is nothing hidden everywhere else, this is the complete team.

Well, what Tom has surrounding his drum kit, as you would expect, is a full array of microphones. Now no computer has microphone inputs. What we need is a bridge between the microphones we want to record and the computer. that we are recording them and for that process to happen we need what are called audio interfaces and we are working with two today we are working with two Apogee interfaces and to show you exactly how the equipment is put together, let's just take a quick look at how it is built our system. As I said, we have a MacBook Pro sitting at the heart of our platform and connected to it, we have two Apogee interfaces, we have an Element 88 and We have the Apogee set interface, now the Apogee 88 contains eight inputs and eight outputs and the set It contains eight analog inputs and outputs, as well as countless digital options.

If we want to make digital recordings, we can also bring them to the set. In fact, I calculated earlier that we have 56 input and output channels connected to this MacBook Pro, before you think, that's excessive, when would you need that many channels? Imagine that what we were doing here was recording an orchestra instead of In addition to a drummer, a guitarist and a singer, in addition to room microphones to illuminate the room, we might need spot microphones at each desk in the orchestra and very quickly it became I could easily assign that number of channels and of course we could record.

Those on the MacBook Pro very easily is a Thunderbolt connection that connects the Apogee interfaces to the computer and what we've then done, of course, around Tom's team is put our microphones in, so we're actually using nine streams of microphone from your computer. I have one on the kick drum which is the AKG d12, a dynamic microphone designed specifically for recording kick drums. We have two microphones in the box, the top one is the Shore sm57 and I have an AKG for one below. then we have sennheiser inai no fours at Tom's. These are great clip-on mics, hopefully Tom won't touch any of them.

In fact they are designed almost to stay out of the way which is a serious consideration when you are dialing in a drum kit and worth keeping in mind if you are going to go home and do it tomorrow then we have our overheads which are again AKG c41, for now overheads are a really very important part of a drum kit's sound whenever possible. you're working in a studio or an environment that is geared towards recording drums with the overhead and it's really going to give you the character that they're going to capture the space that you're recording in and while we're there in no way a recording studio here these are the four one four that I'm most excited about because they capture the room sound the most and lastly we have another sm57 in Tom's hats so how does that all work?

Each microphone connects with a separate cable to its own dedicated inputs on one of Apogee's interfaces so we're ready to make a recording. If we go back to logic for a moment, what we can do to prepare to record is simply click the plus button here at the top which starts the new track list and if I were doing a multitrack recording like I intend to do with Tom right now, I could select the audio, then I could choose the number of microphones I wanted, which would be nine and they would run a really cool feature is I can select input number one as the first input and then I can click the button ascending and what that will do is go through and assign the next input number to each new track, so input two will be on track two and so on, that makes life really easier, but today I wanted to make sure that our tracks They had names so they could see them, the recordings were all ready to go.

We actually have some drum tracks already set up and ready to go and they're here at the bottom so you can see right away that from the kick drum to the hats we're set up for audio recording on all of this. group of tracks here now in a moment what I'm going to do is check that the levels coming from Tom's kit are what we need and I'm going to put these tracks together and get ready to record, but we need to be careful and the reason why we need to Be careful is that this is really a live recording session, which means these microphones are on and the PA systems are on and if we are not careful, the sound caused by logic will come out. off the PA system, into Tom's microphones, through the computer and back to the PA system, we'll end up with a feedback loop and even if I don't define you with howling feedback, there's only one possibility of course. that the backing track that I want Tom to record for you will be picked up and go to his microphones and that's the last thing I want, there's no way around it or getting rid of it at a later date, so what I'm going to do is turn the volume back down so that while we're recording we don't run the risk of spilling, so one of the things Tom needs to do now is just play whatever we're going to put together on these tracks to make sure. everyone is making a noise and then we'll start thinking about the part we want to record for the song, so Tom takes it away so you don't want to stop, who can blame him?

Okay, so we have our tracks all set up and ready to go and you can see the recording lights at the bottom showing us the input levels. Now you can notice that I don't actually need to go to the audio interfaces to make adjustments to any of the mic preamps. that we're using, you can see that up here on top of the mixer, I can do that, within the logic, the condenser mics that we're using on the ceiling and the one under the cabinet require 48 volt phantom power and that turns you on. I can also see that I have individual play dials for each channel, so if I wanted to make an adjustment to any level, I could do it directly within the logic instead of having to reconfigure it outside in another piece of software so that the levels me They look pretty good, so I think what we'll do is do a take.

I'm going to go back out of the mixer and bring the song project back to the beginning. Obviously I created this new introduction. at the beginning of the track, so Tom has two measures of musical count and what I'm going to do is just move the ruler from the beginning of that now, when I press record, it will jump back one measure and give us an empty measure. - Tom, you'll get a click bar and then you'll get two intro bars. Levels are disabled in the room, so with any luck, I'll have a chance to record in real time here. okay let's give them a round of applause thank you very much Tom see you later okay the reason I didn't want you to clap too soon was because it's very easy when you're making recordings just to get a little excited and press stop too soon and it The last thing Tom played for us was a lovely big crash cymbal on the outro which of course we want all that resonance to sound naturally and carry through to the end. and it's very easy when you're recording any instrument to just press stop and suddenly think, "Oh, there's no turning back," so I was very interested in us having that kind of natural decay through the recording, to make sure that we didn't I won't end up howling at this stage.

I'm going to take all of these out of record mode and we can turn the volume back up and we can start listening to the performance that Tom recorded for us. Let's go back to the beginning. and just listen and there's that decay that I was talking about, so now we have this great collection of drum tracks, however, there are a couple of things that I would really like to edit over, so before I start thinking about doing them. To match the project sonically, we need to think a little more carefully about how we might adjust the timing at a couple of points.

Now here I have several audio tracks, all on top of each other, and what I really want to do. is to find a way that I can treat them as one, if I make a change to one audio file I want it to go to the other tracks so I don't have to constantly select multiple tracks at the same time. once, I'll go into the mixer and what I'll do for these drum tracks is set up what's called a group and that's available here, right above the automation window where we were before. I can click here and select the group. number one now, if I go back to this window for a second and open up the group settings, we have a chance to set up this group and make sense of it in the context of our piece, so the first thing I'm going to do is call it drums and what I'm going to do is to do is make sure the group is active, make sure it's actually making noise and behaving, and on top of that what I want to do is make sure I've selected What I want this group to be for and in particular I want to make sure I can edit with it and what that means now is that if I select one of these audio tracks, the others will align and behave along with the others.first, so let's step out of the mixer for a moment and go back to where we were a second ago.

As I said, there are a couple of points within this performance where the timing could be a little tighter; actually, there's kind of a bug right at the beginning, but there's also some other parts later on that I think we could tweak, so let's take a look at how we could do it to see what I'm talking about, let's go back to the beginning of the project and Just listen to the first few bars Tom recorded and we'll see if we can catch this little timing error. Well, we have this interesting little musical leap. Now I want this.

The four stubby ones on the floor sit throughout the entire intro, so I want to move this particular note now, in the old days, what that would mean that I would die would be that I would have to go and grab the scissors, cut this file, try it and find the start, move it back, try and then cut it so as not to affect everything that came after and one way or another it would be a nightmare trying to get this working in time, it was possible but it would take quite a while, what I can do Now it's asking logic to help me with that. going into what's called flex mode and if I click this button here, what I can do is open up the Flex edition, which allows me to treat audio files elastically in terms of their time.

What I mean by this is that obviously when I press record and when I press stop at the end, any audio file has a fixed duration, obviously it has a start point and an end point, but along the line, a As the entire audio recording slows down, all these little individual moments happen, we call them transients. I can see them on the screen here very clearly on the kick drum and what the flex mode allows me to do is detect them and move them around. Let me show you exactly what I mean. I'm going to select a mode here that's perfect for exactly what I'm intending to do what's called slice mode and the moment I select that logic, now I think it's going through these multiple audio streams that are grouped together and remember and it's cutting this file so that it detects those individual moments so that I am in a position to start editing them and you can see that when the process is finished a screen appears that looks like this, the waveforms have faded a little bit, they have darkened a little little and I can see all these little white lines that are sitting there. are ready to manipulate them and move them in time now, like I said, the problem we have is here, the second beat in measure three, let's listen to it again, so what I want to do is make sure that this one doesn't move, so I'm going to click here.

What I also want to do is make sure that this one doesn't move, so I'm also going to click here and then I can select the problem and just drag it. go back to measure 2 or go back to beat 2, I should say, and what you do is you cascade through all the audio files that we've recorded and, hopefully, that time of sync has been corrected, so now that hype is on time, now we don't do it. I don't have to tell Tom that he made a mistake because everything turned out well, so that's great, but we also have some points later where the timing could be a little tighter and now that I've actually loosely edited this drum part.

I am also in a position to manipulate them. Now, again, you could go through it and do it manually. I could find the points that I want to move as I drag them, but now that we have these little transient marker detection points inside. In audio files I can also quantize this audio, so obviously this is quantized as a technique that we more easily associate with MIDI. The idea that we can take individual bits of data and change them this way, but because effectively all these transients. markers represent points on the timeline, we can ask logic to move them en masse so we can select 1 out of 16 and hopefully some of the other timing bugs later in the project have been fixed as well.

Let's listen, okay, sounds about right on time to me. Now this brings up our first type of moral musicals. Our motto of the afternoon. Am I entitled to take advantage of Tom's years of drumming experience? I can't play the drums, so the fact that Tom came to play for us is a real blessing for me. I need to think carefully about keeping in mind that simply making it sound like a drum machine isn't necessarily the most musical decision I could make. Yes, the timing was not as tight as I would like. be, but I also don't want him to sound like just any old drummer who's just been put in time with every beat he's ever played moved absolutely in time, so do I just have a binary option here?

Do I have to decide yes or no? No, I don't want any flexible editing, or any quantization or this kind of one hundred percent superquantization field. Well, luckily not down here, I have a quantize intensity option and what this allows me to do if I turn it down is move. Tom is somewhere between where he played each shot and perfect timing, allowing me to retain some of the feel of what he played while adjusting the timing just enough and I'll leave this at about 80% so He kept some of the feel of Tom's performance on the track, so we now saw the Flex edition for the first time this afternoon.

We'll look at it again later, but what we've done here with the Flex edition is simply adjust. I adjusted the timing of this performance and I'm done with it, so I'm going to exit Flex mode, so now we've done an edit from a timing standpoint, but what I want to do now is start thinking. As for the drum sound, we have all the raw data coming from those mic channels and it sounds pretty good, but what I want to do now is have control over all the drums like nice. of an instrument, which is something like that, so the next thing I'm going to do is select all of these tracks and I'm going to create what's called a track stack.

I just Ctrl and click on any of these regions and now I can select the track stack here, now this little window appears at the top asking me what kind of track stack I want to create. Do I want to fold a stack? What this means is that I will end up with one fader per channel. which is to control all the batteries assigned to this particular stack, doubling the stack doesn't give me much more control than having a useful volume control, but not as much control as I would like, what I'm going to do instead is select a stack Of course it is here.

I'm going to create this option and what this does is give me a new aux channel that all of these drums are now routed to instead of going directly from the mixer to the stereo output. What is happening now? Are they being routed to an auxiliary where I can do things to them that will be incredibly useful? However, what I have to do first is name this. Actually, what I'm also going to do is just change the icon. here also because I want to remember that these are batteries, this is my battery. Now the first thing that happens is this makes my life a lot easier on the fixed page because if I close this now I can see my entire battery part. has been assigned to this stack, this part here now controls the entire drum sound, which means that if I can turn it up and down using this fader and that will affect all the volumes of all those individual parts together, but I don't just want to turn them up and download them all.

I want to think a little more carefully about how I might process the drum sound in general and this gives us the opportunity to introduce the concept of compression, which is the first of the plugins we're going to use. To really look in depth this afternoon at the idea of ​​being able to put a compressor on a sound and what it means to do so, so let's put it front and center here, so what do compressors do, why do we use them in audio recording? and in mixing and even in mastering also why our compressors are so important to understand the arts for that question we really need to understand what we're talking about when we talk about dynamic range the idea of ​​what volume is every time we make recordings mm-hmm what we have are the quieter moments, the moments between all those drum hits where the sound actually has the opportunity to recover to almost silence or even silence right at the end and we also have the really loud moments, we have the moments where that Tom hits. your drums are loud and produce peaks and the peaks that we're seeing and everything that we're seeing between the quieter moments, the louder moments, we'll call it dynamic range and dynamic range is really important in music if you're a film composer and You suddenly ask your string sections to play quietly.

You want them to sound soft. If you want them to sound very loud. You indicate that in the score it is very important that we have dynamics in the music, but what compressors allow us to do is play with dynamics. range and control, in other words, taking the distance between the quietest moments and the loudest moments and bringing them closer together so that we get a more controlled and punchy ER sound. Now I'm starting to use the kind of adjectives you'll hear. or read, if you ever look at how you work with compressors, you'll hear people use phrases like: they make the sound bigger, they make it harder, or they make it pump harder, but interestingly, that's not really what compressors do until the end. last stage. of working with compression which compressors actually do this to make things quieter.

I'll explain what I mean. What I'm going to do here is turn off the auto gain, the auto gain compensation inside the logic compressor so that it's off and now it's not working. anything and what we can do then is start to explore some of the other parameters within compression and understand how the volume is controlled or reduced when we work in this way. The first parameter we will look at is the threshold. Now, what threshold? What it does is it sets a point somewhere in the dynamic range and it basically says that at this point this compressor I'm going to start applying dynamic range reduction, in other words, above this point somewhere in the middle, I'm going to start turning down the volume of the loudest moments above that, so compression down, this idea that we can actually rain the peaks down a little bit now, how hard do we want the compressor to run?

Do we want it to lower those peaks a little or a lot? That's controlled by the ratio amount, so these two dials are really important, if I turn up the ratio, which basically means it's above the threshold point, the amount of extra volume we get is less, whereas if I do make the ratio much more natural and we set a smaller value here, the sound is It was allowed to get almost as loud as before it was compressed now, like I said, what compressors do is make the sounds quieter and We should be able to hear that if I set a really low threshold here so that a lot of the sound is being compressed and if we also increase the ratio then we should see the compressor working pretty hard and since we're not adding any auto gain we should hear when I go in and I get the compressor out, the drums are getting flattened, they're getting flattened out and they're actually getting quieter, let's try to get the drums in solo mode now, let's put it in from the top of the verse, so this is without any compression, it's okay, so you can hear what I mean, what we have. now the drums are being crushed very loudly now the type of sound they are producing obviously goes down and the volume and that's not impressive at all, but the sound that happens at those times is crushed, you can hear that all the individual components of the drums are being crushed. sort of fused together, they squeeze very hard and that's exactly what we want from the compression, it's just that we don't really have it acting hard enough now, before we start compensating for that and turning things up, it's also worth keeping in mind that what the compressor we have within the logic is not a compressor at all, we have many different modeled compression approaches since compression became a really important part of the recording process in the 1950s until now, there are many manufacturers that have built amazing sounding hardware that takes a different approach to working with compression and within the logic compressor we have several of those emulated or modeled here, so we have different designs that we can look at very carefully here, but they all sound different also because they are also emulating the behavior of these compressors, so what we'll do in a minute is listen to them run one after another, but first we're going to address this volume issue.

I have lost a lot of volume as a result of my downward compression, but I also told you that people refer tocompressors as sort of inflators that make things bigger and the reason for this is that because of this dial here, the compensation gain allows you to do is to turn up the volume to compensate for the volume loss that you've had as a result of the compression process, there is a phrase for you, okay, I say it again, so the recovery gain allows you to turn the volume back up to restore the peaks to where they were in the first place, but because we squeeze the dynamic range like As a result of doing that, we're obviously going to highlight the quieter moments of the performance, we also level out the dynamic range and now we're changing everything. we go back again and as a result we get those words that we hear associated with compression, this idea of ​​inflation or somehow expanding the impression of the sound as we hear it, so I'm going to play the drums again and what First of all, what What I'm going to do is establish a level of makeup play, but I'm also going to audition some of these other compressor models and start to see how they sound from one to another.

Okay, so you can see I'm adjusting the Gengar makeup because what I don't want to do is overload the output of this battery bus, so we turn it down. Maybe I turn it down a little bit more and actually this vintage optical model that I really like on the drums gives this really catchy sound really brings the grip drums together and feels like they're really together, but what I've really done here is destroy the drums by lowering the threshold a lot and raising the ratio a lot. This really unnatural sound has no relation to the nuances and individual hits that Tom played when he first made a recording.

It would be great if you could combine that original set of recordings with this compression treatment so you could establish a balance between the natural dynamics of your performance with this super squished effect which is what we call parallel treatment in production with an original set of sounds running alongside a parallel processed version of them as well, unfortunately, we have a parallel process built right into the logic compressor right here in this mix, marking down in the right corner what we're hearing now for the moment is exclusively the outputs just the compressor if I turn it here we hear just the input this is just what Tom played without any processing and what I think we'll need is probably a balance somewhere in the middle which gives me some of that compressed sound along with the original part, and I go adjusting as we go and I'll put it back with the track and see if we can find some sort of sound solution that feels like it suits the drums really well, let's run it from the top okay, so it works really well for me.

It's worth noting. By the way, I think at this stage the only part of the team that I didn't introduce you to is what I'm working on. here on a KZ 40 general parent education and you guys have the PA system and it's fair to say that I think as a result we're not hearing exactly the same mix so what I'm trying to do here is make some critical choices which seem adequate to me here and obviously the PA system is giving you a slightly different sound so let's take that into account too, so it could completely be that if you had control of the mix dial you would make different decisions, but that too brings us to a really important point.

I get asked a lot in teaching and in journalism and in the various things I do that use logic on a daily basis. What is the correct environment? What is the appropriate parallel compression treatment? a drum kit when you're recording them for a project like this, well, how specific does the question have to be before you realize there's no answer to that question? The reason we were born with ears was so we could actually do things. critical choices about how we want to process sounds, everyone in this room, left to their own devices, would make different music, set up different effects, set up different approaches to processing sound in different ways and that's why making music is something we still do and we still feel creative, we can't just say well you know what actually yes, 49% is exactly the right amount of parallel processing because there's no way I would do that, we would all make different decisions, so get comfortable. in those options, listen to them completely, but when you find something that you think works, do it, okay, so what we've done here is set up a parallel compression process on these drums and that's because we have a stack of tracks which allows us to process all the drums together, that's great, but what I also want to do is be in a position where I can start thinking about spatial treatments, reverbs, in other words, not only for the whole drum but also for specific pieces within the drum set, so Let's first deal with the first one, what I want to do is add a sort of ambient style reverb treatment to the whole drum set and I have one here in a little room that I think will give me some extra presence around from the kit again, let's just solo it so you can hear this treatment added to the entire drum part, we'll tell you what, let's run this over the bridge and so you can hear it well, so we have a little bit of focus on the sound.

In case you're thinking, I'm not actually hearing that what we can really do within the logic, it's really worth keeping this in mind, is that we can just just the reverb, what that means is I'm really concentrating in the sound that The drums are coming in to customize it for my project, so what I've done here is just solo the reverb return and if I put it back in with dry drums, isn't it amazing how easy it is? listen to the reverb now that you know what it sounds like without the drums, so now we have a reverb treatment and an ambient treatment that is applied only to the drums, but what I also want to do is add a reverb to just the snares.

As we know, we have a stack of tracks, if I set up a reverb here, a longer reverb, which is what I have in mind for the snares, then obviously that will affect everything that the kick drum will start to get really swampy. and that's not really what I want, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to open up this stack again here and then I'm going to jump into the mixer and what I can do is I can go find the trap. channels found here, top box and bottom box. I'm going to select both tracks and then what I can do is select a new auxiliary and I can select the long verb.

Now this is a long reverb treatment, the term I have established. ready for the project and we're going to have a lot of that on the snare and if I go to the end of the track we should hear a lot of extra reverb added to the snares coming out of the chorus, well I don't have that. It sounds out there, but on the gin legs it sounds fantastic. Now we have much more power in the traps. Now, crucially, it is not aggregating well. It is crucial that it is not adding to the rest of the drum base we just selected. snares, so just because you've set up a stack of tracks doesn't mean you don't still have access to individual components within the drum kit to be able to get back to the snares.

You could adjust the compressors on them individually. I can equalize them individually. I can still analyze sound by sound, but the track stack allows me to set up treatments that affect the entire drum, so now we have an edited drum part where we've fixed the timing, but we've also started to think about it. from a sonic point of view and in fact we've also spent quite a bit of time thinking about the equipment we're using today and I think it'll be a good idea now to just summarize what we've seen. so far with regards to drum recording, so if we can change that that would be great and we'll take a quick look at the techniques we've seen so far, specifically with regards to drum recording, what we did first was connect each microphone to its own input channel now, obviously, we did it before it arrived; otherwise I would have been waiting for years but for each microphone we need a dedicated input on our audio interfaces and what is the reason we use two audio interfaces.

This is because we needed more than the eight individual analog inputs which gave us an interface for each microphone to go into its own input channel. What we did next was think about Game Change on top of the logic mixer, we have the opportunity to adjust the preamps for each channel within the mixer, we didn't have to go outside of the logic to do that. This is a really crucial detail that I also put in the second point here. I see students doing this all the time. which is that they will plug in a microphone and to adjust the level they will reach for the mixer fader and turn it down, now what you are actually doing is lowering the volume. of the sound being recorded, in other words, you are overdriven and you are turning down the volume, so if you have distortion on that channel as a result of the preamp level being too high, it will still be distorted.

If you turn the volume down, that's fine, so to control the gain don't touch the mixer faders. I didn't touch mine at all until we did those recordings, it's the preamps that you're recording through the volume control, not the mixer faders. Then what we did was we looked at flextime for time-based editing, so we looked at two things there, we set flextime and we started looking at time correction changes, both quantifying the entire part and also finding a little error and pulling. in time setting those transient markers and moving them so that we got what we wanted from them, but it's very important that you make musical decisions about the quantization of the audio.

Remember that those musicians have practiced a lot and maybe their rhythmic feel is even better than yours. So try to keep it whenever you can and then what we've done is consolidate multiple audio stacks into what we call a track stack which creates an auxiliary where all those drums are routed so we can make changes to their pitch as a single instrument, so we still have individual control over the individual tracks like we saw in the mixer, but we also have the opportunity to set compression, which we've discussed in depth now, and other effects that will affect the entire drum channel, okay, we're In good shape, now we have the battery added to our project.

I think it's time for us to switch to guitars, so I'd like to welcome Mary to the stage. He will come to play for us. Hello Mario. If you're not a graduate of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama you don't get as much strength, right Marius? Everyone is there. I did what I could for you. Okay, so Marius has come to play guitar for us. and unlike Tom, the first thing you'll notice is that he's not surrounded by microphones now, of course, it's fair to say that many guitarists really like working with physical amps and with microphones to go with them, but it's also fair to say that for the rest of us aren't guitarists, the sounds of those amps and those microphones can get quite annoying and what I mean by this is, let's say you live below Marius and he decides he's going to plug in his Marshall at 3 in the morning because he has a great idea for a song, well, I don't want to be Merritt his neighbor, okay, so I'm sorry, I mean, I would love to be your neighbor, but not under those circumstances, so what we're going to do today is to set up an amp solution for the Marisa guitar without having to place a microphone near an amp and the reason this is possible is thanks to the amp designer which is a dedicated plugin within the logic that allows us to configure with very careful a sound that, hopefully, is It will suit this particular project, so what I have for Marius in terms of recording is that we have a line coming out of his guitar and that is connected to an audio interface channel different, so it's set up here and we can see it very well.

Clearly, if I go into input monitoring mode, hopefully we'll have some sound, so MERIS is still playing for us. This is the sound of Marissa's guitar without me doing anything to it. We have to gain control just to keep the volume down. control, but otherwise it sounds like this, okay, so a completely dry direct input, what I'm going to do now is activate the amp designer, which I can do by going into the amps and pedals section here and the amp designer. applications is waiting for me right here and here is its interface or at least here is a face of its interface, we will get to that in a moment, now in real time Marius can play through this amplifier and we can see that we have a range. of the things thatwe can control as far as applications go, we have an EQ stage, we have built-in reverb, we also have other effects, we have gifts and master dials and we have this section here which I'll get to in a moment, but just to give you an idea of some of the flavors that are available to us within the presets in Amp Designer, we can look at clean, crunchy and distorted sounds and I'm just going to throw a couple at Mario's just to see how he responds to them, this might be a good place to start , okay, so right away, what we can do is listen to this sound, okay, stop, so what we're going to do is maybe.

Think something maybe a little more contemporary. Let's try this. Okay, let's take a look at one of the crunchy answers. Well, let's try this. Thanks Marius. Now, right now, what we're doing as we're auditioning these options is that we're pairing amps with cabinets and what we're also doing is using this virtual mic here to establish a position imagining that we actually have a mic in front of a real amp or a cover here so of course you can just flip through the presets. And I can think about just auditioning things and they're inspiring Marius to play different things, but also what I can do is create completely custom options and what I could do is come here and choose a particular amp like this.

Or I can flip through some of the other ones and you can listen to them ready to go and ready to join this recording we're about to do. What I can also do is combine them or deliberately set up a custom cabinet. solutions and what I can also do is think about the microphones that I might want to use if I were actually creating a real recording situation, so I have options of ribbon and dynamic condenser microphones and while I'm doing one of these, what I can do is go through the cursor over this diagram, which will allow us to see the proximity of our virtual microphone to the speaker.

This makes a big difference in the sound we're actually going to work with and if I ask Maris to play a little bit more I'm going to move this mic around and we'll hear the pitch changes that come from there. Thank you so much. Okay, what we have now is the opportunity to hear some of that in action and of course this is what happens when you put microphones in front of the amplifiers, there is a big difference in tone and volume when you move the microphones, so even if you intend to use this stage of our masterclass 2 to go away and think about working with amplifiers, think very carefully.

About microphone options, in particular, combining different microphones and placing them at different distances can give you really personalized boutique sounds, but as you can see, now we can also do it completely in the virtual world. For one particular project, I have something a little more motivated in mind, so I'm going to focus on the distorted options here and I think that might mean we need to make a little volume adjustment because I don't want to blow everyone's minds, this is the amp solution I think we're going to go with. work today. You may wonder why I would ask them why not.

Okay, so what we're going to do is jump here to the bridge and we need to. I went over the MERIS choir and I've been talking about the part I'd like you to record, but in addition to just writing this part, what we'll also do is look at another feature of logic as we do it. I have deliberately entered cycle mode here because I want to enter cycle recording mode. What this basically means is that when I press record at one point we start recording this guitar part, what's going to happen is that MERIS will get its four beat. counting and then we'll get to the end of the chorus and at that point logic will jump back to the top of the bridge again, it'll let you do a second pass, okay, so I'm coming.

Back to recording mode, this time MERIS is making a nice noise for us and what we're going to do now is leave this and we'll see where we are. I'm going to make it nice and big so you can see. clearly as we go down, let's make sure it actually fills the screen, okay, and MERIS when it's done, thank you very much, great, okay, so without starting to think about editing and doing various things that we might want to do with ATAR. instead, what I'm going to do right away is duplicate this track. What that means is that without having to reconfigure the audio inputs right away, I have the exact same amp solution on another track here, so what do I do?

What I'm going to do is gather the original parts. Now I also have an idea for a part that could work quite well in the chorus, so this time I'll stay in cyclic recording mode, but this time we'll just focus. In this part of the song without further ado, I'm going to return it to record mode. We have exactly the same setup as we had before. You will have a beat at the top of the chorus and if you can play it. twice for me again that would be great thank you very much thank you very much Marius let's take you out of recording mode and let you go and have a drink thank you very much Marius okay so let's reverse that for a moment see you the new guitar part of the chorus and go back to this kind of eighth note sequence that I asked Maris to go over the bridge and into the chorus and let's loop around this so we can focus on this part very carefully now toggle recording modes incredibly It's useful and when you're working with a musician, he wants to take a few passes at something, it's good for us to press record like we did with Tom and just say "ok, do it right please", but music isn't really like that.

What we want to do sometimes is go into loop mode and record a series of takes so that we can then start thinking about choosing our favorite parts and it is also true that sometimes we are not only producers but also performers. put on my guitar over here, I could hit record and I might want to wander around there and make some recordings without having to constantly go back and forth between two separate places, so that's one of the reasons why loop recording can be useful , but it's also fair to say that there's a bit of a hidden agenda here, which is that what I really wanted to do with the merits of the guitar parts is use both instead of one or the other.

I want to be in a position where I can use both parts. make them nice and very wide stereo and have a lot of power as a result and I can do that if I've worked in cyclic recording mode because up here, for this reason, you see this little number two and what that shows me is that now we have two separate passes within this region, if I click on that number, one of the options that I have available is that I can select one take or another up here, but what I want to do is decompress this performance for new tracks and what that does is incorporate the two guitar parts that Marius recorded in my arrangement here's the first one and here's the other one, so now we have them both sitting there waiting, ready for me to go to town and tell them how.

You might choose to set them up with effects now again just to make things easier. I'm going to do the second part so for now we'll focus on this one and the reason I want to do it is because in addition to the amp solution we set up for Maris' guitar. I also want to set up a pedal solution that you'll see when you go see guitars playing live or in the studio, which in addition to the microphones for recording those amps, will typically be surrounded by boxes on the floor that they will stomp on, which will provide additional tone and There are pedals for all kinds of things for guitarists, chorus pedals, drive pedals, overdrive pedals, delays, you name it, and what we can do within the logic is set up a pedal solution as well as an amp solution. , now what I want to do is put together a collection of pedals between my play dial and my amp, so what I did was float in this little space that you see a little bit white. line between those two plugins and if I click there, what I can do is go back to the amps and pedals and this time I'm going to select the pedalboard and that moves the amp down, if I gently push it to the side, you can see. that now this new plugin has been added between the previous two and in fact we'll just bypass the amp so we can clearly hear what we're going to do inside the pedalboard.

I have a complete collection of pedals here. that I can put together in a line to further improve this particular sound and the first one that I'm going to incorporate is the classic Drive. I really like it, it will give me a little extra warmth, we can adjust the shade. we can turn up the drive level we can also turn up the overall level and just listen to how this sounds on these parts of the guitar, it's worth remembering this, by the way, it's what Marius would call it, this is the sound of his original guitar, here it's with Drive and here it is with Drive going into the amp.

Ok, it's working very well. What I also want to do is incorporate my favorite ball pedal, which is actually delay. It may seem like a very unsexy choice, but the reason I especially like this. The pedal is because here I can create inverted delays, so delays that not only produce regular echoes, but also these slightly weird and wonderful, slightly psychedelic effects, so I'm going to convert that to reverse mode. I also want to time the delay time so that it's in time with the track and I'm going to go with eighth notes. I think to start with the feedback controls, how many repeats of each echo I get and the mix dial in general, we've seen that on the compressor that says it's the mix. between the raw sound and the super process sound, that is, just delay, let's establish a balance here somewhere where I can also dial in a little bit of dirt and this is also a tone flutter, let's listen to those two endless pedals, it's okay so you hear those delays very clearly and let's plug it back into the amp as well and now we have the right guitar tone so what I want to do is apply this sound to both sides or I'm about to make these stereo so that both interpretations that Marius created for us, so what I'm going to do is just close our little region that's waiting here because we don't need it right now and what I'm going to do instead is go into the settings menu and I'm going to to copy this channel settings and what it's going to do is take all of those choices that you just made in terms of plugins and the specific parameters for them.

Then I can unmute this channel and what I'm going to do here is paste that in and that's going to put the pedalboard in here and now it's very easy for me to just move this one a little bit to the right and this one to the left and we should hear when we put these two parts together one enormous amount of power. Coming from the ADE guitar, okay, now we have all this additional Drive, as it might not surprise you to know that what I want to do is have some sort of grouped control over these two sounds, so what I'm going to do is new.

This time it is to create a stack of clues. I'm going to go find another addition pile, but we'll do this nice and quick. I'm going to call this octave guitar and that gives me control over those two. Now remember. I just copied the channel settings so quickly that I can repeat everything I just did for the chorus guitar, let's reactivate it, let's get out of solo mode completely. I'm going to select my two individual shots. I'm going to unzip those two new tracks. I'm going to select the first one and paste my channel settings. I'm going to select the second one and I'm going to paste my channel settings here.

Also, what I'm going to do is make these as wide as possible and then I'm going to select them both over and over again, create a new track stack. Now you might be wondering why creating two separate track stacks for the guitar part, well I want individual volume control over them so this one will be the chorus guitar and the other one will give us the 8th guitar so here we go The thing to do is go through the project a little bit beforehand and we're going to introduce them and also set them volumes that seem to work pretty well, okay, we're getting all that really nice raspy tone that now provides a sort of accompaniment to Tom's crash. saucer at the end of the project as well, so of course these are settings that I could modify later, but for now what we've done is added a huge amount of power.

You remember what the DI guitar sounded like and now we've got this really nice custom solution that we've created specifically for the project, so again there are things we can learn and summarize when it comes to the project for guitars, so let's take a look at that now , so this time we haven't done it. We have multiple streams coming into our audio interfaces. We are working with only one channel now. I think I might have even forgotten to tell thebeginning of the project that throughout the process we are working at 96 kilohertz in 24 bits. Now that's ultra high resolution okay all on a MacBook Pro and the guitar is the last channel that's recorded at that resolution and as we can see it goes into a channel and then it's sent to the computer as far as it goes to guitar recording.

The first thing we did was recognize that we don't necessarily need to work with amplifiers. We can configure all of that directly through the amp designer and the pedalboard, and they provide the guitar tone now that we have four separate tracks. What I did after setting up a track was to duplicate it which automatically brings up the amp designer settings and allows me to very quickly not make Marius wait when I'm setting up some sort of recording solution for him to add his parts to the tracks duplicates. it's great when you already have the plugins set up, so what we did was explore the loop and record this idea that if we go into loop mode and press record, what we can do is create take folders with multiple takes that we can then use and unzip on individual single tracks the way we've done it, and in fact, I just made exactly that point: we've put them together, we've also created track stacks for them, and we've maximized the fact that we have two takes on each of those recordings, which brings us to the end of the first half, so far we've taken a really basic skeleton arrangement, done some small MIDI edits to it, added drums and guitars and after a short 20 minute break.

I think Mike said it would be 20 minutes. Yeah, 20 minutes we're going to come back and we're going to add some vocals to this project as well, so I'll see you in a moment. Thank you.