Logic Pro X Masterclass - Part 1

welcome everybody to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama to our wonderful concert hall milton court and to the electronic music department who are hosting this master class today my name is Mike Roberts I'm the head of electronic music and it really is my pleasure to welcome you all here for our Logic Pro 10 master class running the master class this afternoon is Johnny Buchanan he's one of our long-standing professors and he combines being one of the finest teachers that I know with a busy and successful career as a composer producer music technology journalist not all-round creative genius so we're gonna have a wonderful and fantastic afternoon I believe as we watch Jono follow his production workflow from beginning to end using Logic Pro 10 so please join me in giving him a really warm welcome to the stage Johnny Buchanan hello everybody I hope you can hear me thank you so much I just wanna echo Mike by welcoming you on inter Milton Court this afternoon for what we hope is going to be a really exciting afternoon it pains me to say it but it's actually been 20 years since I first walked into the electronic music department across the street despite my youthful looks and what was remarkable about that very first trip into the electronic music department was that it was the first time I'd ever seen a group of musicians using a software program that I'd never seen before up to that point lots of people were sitting there with headphones on working away in what at that time was a software program called logic audio now the computers that we had in electronic music at that time allowed only for a single mono audio track to be recorded at once and it's extraordinary just 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 point of this afternoon is to really take you through some of logics workflow in terms of being able for you then to go and apply the creativity that we're going to look at to your own projects so what we've got to start with today is a hopefully promising sort of song start something really basic and simple which we're going to take on through some recordings this afternoon to see how we can work with editing and production and mixing and mastering skills which hopefully as I say you'll then be able to apply to your own pieces and in particular we're focusing on recording as you can probably see behind me we've got drums and guitars and vocals ready to add to this project and we're going to get to those in due course but just before we start I'm really aware of the fact that in this room there are going to be some people who are brand-new to logic in fact maybe Garage Band users who were thinking about making the step up there are going to be some intermediate users some people who know their way around but maybe they're a bit too the program they've never seen before and there are going to be the ninjas the people who could just as easily be up here doing this master class who know logic like the back of their hand the idea of this afternoon is that we're trying to bring you some content regardless of the level that you're at and I think even for the people who feel they know logic really well we're going to be looking at some things that maybe you haven't had a chance to check out before so without further ado let's get going just to make sure everyone's awake we're actually going to start with some really basic MIDI programming tips particularly for the people who have maybe never seen logic before but also just to show you some things that maybe you haven't come across in terms of workflow in particular so here is my project start which you can see on the screen behind you it looks like loads of projects that haven't really had a chance to develop yet we've got just five things in the project already and you can see that at the very top of the arrangement I've mapped this out with verse bridge and chorus tags added in the arrangement bar so that we can see where we are in the song I should in fact have said this is a song project so let's just hear what we've got so far and I don't think this is going to be too intimidating this is probably going to sound like a lot of the projects that you have got sitting on your hard drives on your computers back home [Music] [Music] [Music] thanks so much for coming no okay so hopefully this isn't too intimidating as you can hear we've just got a few little rhythmic elements we've got a basic piano part that's underpinning the sort of harmonic structure of the piece and we've got the sub bass part which is just sitting underneath everything else just propping it all up so as I said what we're going to do is to start with just with some really basic little MIDI programming techniques just to make this arrangement a little bit more fleshed out than it is right now now you can see at the top of Logic Pro I've got obviously this pointer tool which is my main tool and next to it I've got what's called the command tool this is a tool that's available to me if I hold down the command button and what I'm going to start by doing is just lassoing the first two bars of this project 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 of me being able to just produce a little cut at this point logics asking me what I want to do with the notes that bridge bars 5 into 6 I want to shorten them so I'm going to press ok and then what I can do is to copy these back to here so what I've done there is just to create a slightly more interesting introduction than just jumping straight into the beginning of the verse and this hopefully is going to help the musicians have something more interesting than just a click track to listen to when we get around to making recordings however we can go a bit further than just copying the first two bars of the verse so the next thing I'm going to do is to select this piano part I'm going to ctrl click it and I'm going to bounce it in place now what this means is that I'm going to turn this MIDI region into an audiophile Middies great whenever we've got keyboards plugged in and we want to make real-time recordings and we want to start building an arrangement in a musical way that's what we need MIDI for and it's an amazingly powerful and flexible language but there are some things we can only do when we're working with audio files and the thing that I've got in mind for this particular piano part is exactly that it's an audio only process so I'm going to call this piano reversed and I'm going to bounce that down now what has happened now is that logic has created a perfect copy of this media file but now it's an audio file and if I open up the editor on this particular window and I come into the file area here I can see the waveform display for this new piano note and within the functions menu there are a whole range of things like due to this file including reversing it and if we come back out of the editor we'll see very clearly on the screen that we've now got 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 [Music] so that's helping me just have a little bit of shape coming out of this introductory area into the verse and again I think that's going to help the musicians know where they are within the project now the next thing I've got as you can see on some of the empty tracks underneath the project where we are right now is I've got some sounds which I liked the writing stage which I haven't had a chance to develop into parts of their own just yet and in particular what I've got is a second synth bass part and the reason why this is here is because the sub bass is providing an enormous amount of weight and body to the track but it's not actually giving me much harmonic content sub bases are fantastic they're popular in lots and lots of different forms of music and they're great at giving us the weight that's the thing that's kind of making your chest rattle a little bit but they don't connect to the rest of tracks very easily unless you're careful they kind of sit there at the bottom being a bit murky and what I want to do is to add a secondary bass sort of between the sub and the rest of the track in order to sort of glue these elements of the production together so what I'm gonna do is to simply copy this part down to the track underneath and if we solo these two I think we'll hear the difference between the two sounds the sub is that low big rich sound I was talking about before whereas the second synth bass is just going to provide a little bit of bite at the start of the note okay so you can hear that biting and then the sub kind of takes over and filled in the hole underneath okay so layering sounds pretty straightforward but what I might want to do now is to sort of develop this second bass line in order to make it a slightly more interesting experience than just having it play the sustain notes that the first part is and in particular I'm going to focus now on this area here which is the bridge this is the point where I want the song to develop a little bit more momentum than it has right now so I'm going to again open the editor for this particular part and very easily I'm going to just select both of these notes and drag them back so they're super short now every time we click on a note you can hear it it's coming through the PA system and you can hear it being triggered every time I trick I click on it so what I'm going to do is just to turn off the MIDI output routing there for a moment so I can carry on talking while we make this edit now what I want to do is to have this note repeat in eighth notes so what I'm going to do is to select eighth note as my quantized value within this window and instantly that's now going to create new eighth notes for me now I could copy and paste all these notes one after another in order to create the rhythm that I'm after but there is a dedicated tool which is going to allow me to do that which is called the brush tool and what the brush tool lets me do is to drag across a whole range of notes creating at that interval the notes that I want just like this but it's very easy for me to slightly lose my way and end up with some notes that really I don't want so what I'm going to do is to refine the view a little bit here undo that step and go back one step and I'm going to use what's called collapse mode now what this does is to only show me the notes that are already present within this little part of MIDI and as a result it's now much harder for me to make an error I can drag across here very quickly and fill in this gap and I can do the same thing 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 just come back out of collapse mode and I've got the full range of pitches available to me ready to go so now what we should have if I come back out of here is a slightly more interesting more biting part running through the arrangement through the bridge and sure enough we do now let's just look at the editor again for a moment you'll have seen that of course in brush mode and working in this way all of the values assigned to you these MIDI regions are exactly the same the reason that all these notes are green is because they all have the same velocity data now I could open up the velocity tool and start dragging individual notes around in order to make that change but what I'm more interested to do is to carry out a function using MIDI transform now what MIDI transform allows me to do is to take a region like this come into the functions menu and from here I can choose a whole range of potential processes which will allow me to do interesting things with MIDI which might benefit my project and in particular what I want to do is to open up random velocity the moment I click on this I can now begin to manipulate exactly what I want these random velocities to be of course I want them to be random but I can control just how random they're going to be all of those velocities as they started life a moment ago where I think about sort of 60 as a value so what I could do would be to increase the upper limit drop the lower little limits a little bit and then hit select and operate and what that does is to instantly bring a more randomized approach to velocity and if you haven't come across the MIDI transform window it's amazingly powerful it's great for making things double speed or half speed or processing MIDI in a whole range of different ways and really worth checking out so let's come out of solo mode for a moment there's one more part that I want to build from the pieces that are already within this project I'm going to take this sub bass part and I'm gonna copy it down to another little synth that I've got lined up here now 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's not necessarily allowing us to get away from the sort of original pitches that we started the project with so what I'm then going to do is to open up the inspector which brings me this window on over on the left hand side where I can make changes to specific parameters over MIDI as well so up here I've got a little region tab and if I open this up this allows me to choose some choice parameters for here and what I want to do is very quick just add a transposition value to this second part which is going to take this part up an octave let's just hear how the since now sound with eighths assigned across the board in the chorus section of the song [Music] okay that's great but all of these sounds are really static at the moment they're all consistent they're not changing and whilst they're adding lots of power we haven't actually got any sort of animation going on within this part at the moment now this allows me to introduce automation mode the idea of being able to add parameter based data to a specific region what does that mean what it means is that this particular part is being triggered from an instrument called retro synth and if I open that up you can see it very clearly here what I want to do is to take a specific parameter within this synthesizer and have it change as the part plays back in particular its tone I really want that to bite and go from being quite dull as it is right now to being much brighter so as we work through the chorus we're in a position to hear that being added so what I'm going to do is just make sure you can see this underneath and we're going to go into automation mode and what that's going to allow me to do is to record a parameter to this region as we go now there are multiple automation modes and in order to write new information I'm going to select latch mode and what that lets me do is to pick up any parameter on the screen and write a data line for it let's see how that works [Music] [Music] so the parameter that I've chosen here is the envelope which is triggering the filter the amount of bite we're hearing at the beginning of the note and as a result sometimes we get a bit more bite and the rest of the time we get a bit less and as a result I get this nice line showing me those changes to tone as the part plays back now once you've recorded an automation parameter it's worth bearing in mind that what you probably want to do at this stage is to protect it in other words you want it to play back but you don't want to inadvertently add new lines of data that you didn't really mean to if I'm not careful and I suddenly decide that I want to adjust the volume of this part it would be very easy for me to then add a volume automation data line to this part which isn't really what I want at this stage so what I'm going to do is to switch my mode back to read and what that does is to play back the data that already exists but it doesn't allow me to add more to this particular region I'd go back to latch mode if I wanted to do that so what we've done now and you'll notice there's no keyboard on stage we have fleshed out the arrangement a little bit more so it's just a little bit fuller a little bit richer but we haven't actually had to record anything new in order for that to take place so hopefully now we're all wide-awake and we've had a chance to look at some basic MIDI programming just in order to make the arrangement a little bit fuller for when our musicians take to the stage and I think it's high time we bought out the first of those right now it would be my great pleasure to introduce Tom Hutchison a graduate of last year's jazz course here at the Guildhall school to come and play some drums for us please give Tom a big round of applause hello Itzhak I your longer round floor than I did I need to be a graduate of the Guildhall School of Music in drama that's the only fair thing I think okay so Tom's going to come and play some drums for us and we're gonna do that in due course but now that tom is actually on stage we've got a chance really to explore this rig that we've set up for today because so far everything I've done has only really required the central piece of my arrangement here my technology here for today's workshop and that is a 15-inch MacBook Pro everything we are doing today is going into this machine there are no external hard drives the audio we're going to record is going onto this machine there's nothing hiding anywhere else this is the entire rig okay what Tom's got surrounding his drum kit as you would expect is a whole series of microphones now no computer has microphone inputs what we need is a bridge between the microphones that we want to record and the computer to which we're recording them and for those for that process to happen we need what are called audio interfaces and we're working with two today we're working with two interfaces from Apogee and to show you exactly how the rig is put together let's just have a quick look at how our system is built so as I said we've got a MacBook Pro sitting at the heart of our rig and connected to that we've got two apogee interfaces we've got an element 88 and we've got the Apogee ensemble interface now the apogee 88 contains eight inputs and eight outputs and the ensemble contains eight analog inputs and outputs as well as well as myriad digital options if we want to make digital recordings we could take those into the ensemble as well in fact I calculated earlier on that we've got 56 channels of input and outputs connected to this MacBook Pro now before you think well that's overkill when would you ever need that number of channels imagine that what we were doing up here was recording an orchestra rather than a drum kit and a guitarist and a singer then as well as the hall mics to pick up the room we might need spot mics on every desk of the orchestra and very quickly you could easily assign that number of channels and of course we could record those into the MacBook Pro very easily it's a thunderbolt connection that connects the apogee interfaces into the computer and what we've then done of course around Tom's rig is to put up our microphones so we're actually using nine microphone feeds from his computer we've got one on the kick which is the AKG d12 a dynamic microphone specifically engineered for recording kick drums we've got two mics on the snare the one on the top is the Shore sm57 and I've got an AKG for one for underneath then we've got sennheiser inai no fours on the Tom's now these are great clip on mics hopefully Tom's not going to hit one in fact they're designed almost to sort of stay out of the way which is a serious consideration when you're marking up a drum kit and worth bearing in mind if you're going to go home and do that tomorrow then we've got our overheads which are again AKG c41 for now the overheads are a really really important part of a drum kit sound whenever you're working in a studio or in an environment that's geared towards drum kit recording the overheads and really gonna give you the character they're going to pick up the space in which you're recording and whilst we're in by no means a recording studio here is the four one four that I'm kind of most excited about because they're picking up the sound of the hall the most and then lastly we've got another sm57 on Tom's hats so how does all that work well every single microphone is coming across in a separate cable into its own dedicated inputs on the on one of the apogee interfaces so that we're ready to make a recording so if we switch back to logic for a moment what we can do in order to get ready for do recording is simply to click the plus button here at the top which launches the new tracklist and if I was making a multitrack recording as I'm intending to with Tom right now I could select audio I could then choose the number of microphones that I wanted which would be nine and run one really nice feature is that I can select input number one as the first input and then I can click the ascending button and what that will do is to go through and assign the next input number to each new track so input two will be on track two and so on and so forth so that makes life really easy but I wanted today to make sure that our tracks were named so you can see them going down the recordings were all ready to go so actually we've got some drum tracks already set up and ready to go and they're down here at the bottom so you can see straight away that from the kick all the way down to the hats we are set up for audio recording across this group of tracks here now in a moment what I'm going to do is to set check that the levels coming from Tom's kit are as we need them to be and I'm going to arm these tracks and get ready for recording but we need to be careful and the reason why we need to be careful is this is genuinely a live recording session which means that these mics are on and the PA systems on as well and if we're not careful the sound triggered from logic is going to come out of the PA system go into Tom's mics come through the computer and go back to the PA system we're going to end up with a feedback loop and even if I don't defin you with howling feedback there is just a chance of course that the backing track that I want Tom to record to you is going to be picked up and go into his microphones and that's the last thing I want there's no way that I can prevent that or get rid of it at a later date so what I'm gonna do is to turn the volume back down just so while we're recording we don't run the risk of any spill so one of the offs Tom to do now is just play anything we're gonna arm these tracks make sure they're all making a noise and then we'll begin to think about the part that we want to record for the song so Tom take it away [Music] so you doesn't want to stop who can blame it okay so we've got our tracks all armed and ready to go and you can see the record lights at the bottom showing us the input levels now you might notice that I don't actually need to go to the audio interfaces in order to make adjustments to any of the mic preamps that we're using you can see that up here at the top of the mixer I can actually do that within logic the condenser microphones which we're using the overheads and the one underneath the snare require 48 volt phantom power and that switched on you can also see that I've got individual game dials for each channel so if I wanted to make an adjustment to any levels I'd be able to do that directly inside logic rather than having to reconfigure that outside in another piece of software so the levels look pretty good to me so I think what we'll do is we'll go for a take I'm going to come back out of the mixer and take the song project back to the beginning I've obviously built this new introduction into the beginning of the track so Tom's got two bars of musical counting and what I'm going to do is just move the rule of the beginning of that now when I press record it's going to jump back a bar and give us an empty bar - Tom you're gonna get one bar of click and then you'll get two bars of intro the levels are off in the room so with any luck where I'm going to just have an opportunity that's recording going down in real time here we go [Music] okay let's give them a round of applause [Applause] thank you very much Tom we'll see you later on okay now the reason that I didn't want you to applaud too soon was because it's really easy when you're making recordings just to get a little bit excited and press stop too soon and the last thing that Tom played for us was a lovely great crash cymbal on the outro which of course we want all of that resonance to ring on naturally and go all the way through to the end and it's really easy when you're recording any instrument just to press stop and suddenly think oh there's no way back so I was really keen for us to have that sort of natural decay coming through the recording so in order to make sure that we don't end up howling feedback at this stage I'm going to take all of these back out of record mode and we can turn the volume back up and we can begin to hear the performance that Tom recorded for us let's go back to the top and just have a listen [Music] [Music] and there's that decay I was talking about so we've got this great collection of drum tracks now however there are a couple of things that I'd really like to edit about them so before we start thinking about making them blend within the project sonically we need to think a little bit carefully about how we might just tighten up the timing in a couple of spots now here I've got multiple audio tracks all sitting on top of one another and what I really want to do is to find a way where I can kind of treat them as one if I make a change to one audio file I want that to pass all the way down through the other tracks so that I don't have to be constantly selecting multiple tracks at once so I'm going to come into the mixer and what I'm gonna do for these drum tracks is to set up what's called a group and that's available here just above the automation window where we were before I can click here and select group number one now if I go back into this window for a second and open up the group settings we have a chance to configure this group and make it make sense in the context of our piece so the first thing I'm going to do is to name it drums and what I'm going to do is to make sure that the group is active make sure it's actually making a noise and and behaving itself and in addition to that what I want to do is to make sure that I've selected what I want this group to be for and in particular I want to make sure that I can edit with it and what that means now is that if I select one of these audio tracks the others will all fall into line and sort of behave alongside the first one so let's come back out of the mixer for a moment and go back to where we were a second ago so as I said there are a couple of spots within this performance where the timing could be a little bit tighter there's actually kind of an error right at the beginning but there are also some other bits later on which I think we could tighten up and so let's just have a look at how we might go about doing that in order to see where I'm talking about let's go back to the very beginning of the project and just have a listen to the first couple of bars that Tom recorded and we'll see if we can spot this little timing error okay so we've got this little interesting musical skip now I kind of want this stumpy four to the floor feel the whole way through the introduction so I want to move this particular note now in the bad old days what that would mean would die would be that I'd have to go and grab the scissors chop this file try and find the start of it move it back try and then chop after it so as not to affect everything that came afterwards and one way or another it would be a little bit of a nightmare trying to get this thing to go in time it was possible but it would take quite a long time what I can do now is to ask logic to help me out with that by going into what's called flex mode and if I click this button here what I can do is to open up Flex editing which allows me to treat audio files elastically in terms of their time now what I mean by that is that obviously when I press record and when I then press stop at the end any audio file is of a fixed length it obviously has a start point and an end point but along the line as that all audio recording goes down all of these individual little moments happen we call those transients you can see them on the screen here very clearly on the kick drum and what flex mode allows me to do is to detect those and move them around let me show you exactly what I mean I'm gonna select a mode here that's perfect for exactly what I'm intending to do which is called slicing mode and the moment I select that logics now having a think it's going through these multiple audio streams which group together remember and it's slicing up this file so that it's detected those individual moments so that I'm in a position to start editing them and you can see that when that process is finished I get a display that looks like this the waveforms grayed out a little bit it's got a bit darker and I can see all these little white lines which is sitting there ready for me to manipulate these and move them around in time now as I said the problem we've got is sort of here the second hit in bar three let's just hear it again so what I want to do is to make sure that this one doesn't move so I'm going to click here what I also want to do is to make sure that this one doesn't move so I'm also going to click here and then I can select the problem hit and simply drag it back to bar 2 or back to beat 2 I should say and what that's done is to cascade through all of the audio files that we've recorded and hopefully that's corrected that moment of timing so now that kick drums in time now we don't have to tell Tom that he made an error because it's gone ok so that's great but we've also got some spots later on where the timing could be a little bit tighter and now that I've actually sort of flex edited this drum part I'm in a position to manipulate those as well now this again I could go through and do manually I could find the spots that I want to move like I drag them around but now that we've got these little transient marker detection points within the audio files I can actually quantize this audio as well so this is obviously quantized as a technique that we more readily associate with MIDI the idea that we can take individual bits of data and have them changed in this way but because effectively all of these transient markers represent points in the timeline we can ask logic to move them on mass so I can select 1 over 16 and hopefully some of the other timing errors further on in the project have also been corrected let's take a listen [Music] [Music] okay sounds pretty in time to me now this brings up our first kind of moral musicals our lemma of the afternoon is it my right to take Tom's years of drumming experience I can't play the drums so the fact that Tom's come down and play for us is a real boon for me I need to think carefully about whether or not I need to bear in mind that just making him sound like a drum machine isn't necessarily the most musical decision I could make yeah the timing wasn't quite as tight as I'd like it to be but I also don't want him to simply sound like any old drummer who's just been put in time with every single hit that he's played moved absolutely in time so do I only have a binary choice here do I have to decide whether or not I want no flex editing no quantize at all or this hundred percent sort of super quantize field well fortunately not down here at the bottom I've got a quantize strength option and what this allows me to do if I turn it down is to move Tom's some of the way between where he played each hit and perfect timing which allows me to retain some of the feel of what he played at the same time as tightening timing sufficiently and I'm gonna leave this at about 80% so that I've kept some of the feel of Tom's performance in the track so we've now looked at Flex editing for the first time this afternoon we're gonna see it again later on but what we've done here with Flex editing is to just tighten up the timing of this performance and I'm finished with that now so I'm going to come out of Flex mode so we've now made an edit from a timing point of view but what I want to do now is to start thinking about the sound of the drums we've got all of the raw data that's come through from those microphone channels and they're sounding pretty good but what I want to do now is to have control over the entire drum kit as if it were kind of one instrument which it sort of is so the next thing I'm going to do is to select all of these tracks and I'm going to create what's called a track stack I'm just ctrl clicking any of these regions and now I can select track stack here now this little window pops down at the top asking me what sort of a track stack I want to create do I want to fold a stack now what this means is I'm going to end up with a fader a channel which is controlling all of the drums that are assigned to this particular stack fold the stack doesn't give me much more control than having a volume control useful but not quite as much control as I would like what I'm gonna do instead is to select a summing stack which is here I'm going to create this option and what this does is to give me a new auxilary channel to which all of these drums are now routed rather than going straight from the mixer to the stereo output what's happening now is they're being routed into an auxilary where I can do stuff to them which is going to be incredibly helpful however what I need to do first of all is to name this actually what I'm also going to do is just change the icon here as well because I want to remember that these are drums this is my drum stack now the first thing that happens is that this makes my life much easier in the arranged page because if I close this down I can now see that my entire drum part has been allocated to this stack this part here is now controlling the entire drum sound which means if I I can turn it up and down using this fader and that will affect all of the volumes of all of those individual parts together but I don't just want to turn them all up and down I want to think a little bit more carefully about how I might process the drum sound overall and this gives us a chance to introduce the concept of compression which is the first of the plugins that we're going to really look at in depth this afternoon the idea of being able to put a compressor on a sound and what it means to do that so let's just put it here front and center so what do compressors do why do we use them in audio recording and in mixing and even in mastering as well why our compressors so important well to understand the arts for that question we really need to understand what we talk about when we talk about dynamic range the idea of what volume is so whenever we make recordings mm-hmm what we have are the quietest moments the bits in between all of those drum hits where effectively the sound has a chance to recover to near silence or indeed silence right at the end and we also have the really loud bits we have the bits where Tom's hitting his drums hard and those are producing spikes and the peaks that we're looking at and everything in between between the quietest moments the loudest moments will we call that 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 play quietly if you want them to play super loud you indicate that on the score massively important that we have dynamics in music but what compressors allow us to do is to mess around with dynamic range and rein it in in other words to take the distance between the quietest moments and the loudest moments and pull them closer together so that we get a more controlled punchy ER sound now I'm starting to use the sorts of adjectives that you will hear or read if ever you really look into you working with compressors you'll hear people using phrases like they inflate sound or they make it harder or they make it pump more but interestingly actually that's not really what compressors do at all until the very last stage of working with compression what compressors actually do this to make things quieter I'll explain what I mean what I'm going to do here is to turn off the auto gain the automatic gain compensation within logics compressor so that it's off it's now not doing anything and what we can then do is to start to explore some of the other parameters within compression and understand how volume is reined in or pulled back when we work in this way the first parameter we're going to look at is threshold now what threshold does is to set a point somewhere in the dynamic range and it basically says at this point this compressor I am going to start applying dynamic range reduction in other words above this point somewhere in the middle I'm gonna start pulling down the volume of the loudest moments above that hence downward compression this idea that we can actually rain Peaks down a bit now how hard do we want to make the compressor work do we want it to take those Peaks down a little bit or an awful lot well that's controlled by the ratio amount so these two dials are really important if I turn ratio up what that basically means is above the threshold point the amount of additional volume we get is less whereas if I make ratio much more natural and we set a smaller value here the sound is allowed to get almost as loud as it did before it was compressed now as I've said what compressors do is to make sounds quieter and we should be able to hear that if I set a really low threshold here so that lots of the sound is being compressed and if we turn the ratio up as well then we should see the compressor working quite hard and because we're not adding any automatic gain we should hear when I punch the compressor in and out the drums are being squashed they're being flattened and they're actually getting quieter let's just try that now the drums are in solo mode let's just run them from the top of the verse so this is with no compression at all okay so you can hear what I mean what we've got now is the drums being squashed really hard now the kind of sound they're producing obviously it drops away and volume and that's kind of unimpressive but the sound that's happening in those moments is squashed you can hear that all of the individual drum components are being sort of melded together squeeze really hard and that's exactly what we want from compression it's just that we don't really have it acting loudly enough now now before we start compensating for that and turning things up it's also worth bearing in mind that what we've got within logics compressor isn't one compressor at all we've got lots of different modelled compression approaches since compression became a really important part of the recording process in the 1950s all the way through to now there are loads of manufacturers who have built incredible sounding hardware that takes a different approach to working with compression and within logics compressor we've got a number of those emulated or modeled here so we've got different designs which we can see really carefully here but they all sound different as well because they're emulating the behavior of these compressors too so what we're going to do in a minute is to hear those one after another working but firstly we're going to deal with this issue of volume I've lost lots of volume as a result of my downward compression but also I've told you that people refer to compressors as kind of inflators things that make things bigger and the reason for that is because of this dial here make up gain what make up gain allows you to do is to turn up the volume to come seit for the volume loss that you've had as a result of the compression process there's a sentence for you okay shall I say that again so make up gain allows you to take the volume back up to restore the peaks to where they were in the first place but because we squeezed the dynamic range as a result of doing that we're obviously going to bring up the quieter moments of the performance as well we flat the dynamic range and now we're turning everything back up again and as a result we get those words that we hear associated with compression this idea of inflation or of sort of in some way enlarging the impression of the sound as we listen through it so I'm gonna run the drums again and what I'm gonna do is to first of all set a makeup game level but I'm also going to audition some of these other compressor models and begin to see how they sound from one to the next [Music] [Music] okay so you can see that I'm adjusting the makeup Gengar because what I don't want to do is to overload the output of this drum bus so we pull this down I might just take it down a little bit more and actually this vintage opto model I really like on drums it gives this really gluey sound it really puts the grip drums together and feels like they really belong together but what I really have done here is to smash the drums to pieces by dropping the threshold a lot and by turning the ratio up a lot I've got this really unnatural sound it doesn't really bear any relation to the nuance and the individual hits that Tom played when he first made a recording what would be great is if I could blend that that original set of recordings with this compression treatment so that I could set a balance between the natural dynamics of his performance with this super squashed effect that's what we call a parallel treatment in production having an original set of sounds running alongside a parallel processed version of them as well unfortunately we've got a parallel process built directly into logics compressor right here on this mix dial down in the right hand corner what we're hearing now at the moment is exclusively the outputs just the compressor if I turn it around here we hear just the input this is just what Tom played without any processing at all and what I think we're gonna need is probably a balance somewhere in the middle which gives me some of that compress sound alongside the original part as well it's dial it in as we go and I'm gonna put it back in with the track and we'll see if we can find a sort of sound solution that feels like it suits the drums really nicely let's run it from the top [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so that's working nicely for me it's worth pointing out by the way I think at this stage the one part the rig that I didn't introduce to you is that I'm working here on a parent general ed KZ 40s and you guys have got the PA system and it's fair to say I think that we're not hearing exactly the same mix as a result so what I'm trying to do here is to make some critical choices that feel right to me up here and obviously the PA system is giving you a slightly different sound so let's just bear that in mind as well so it could be entirely that if you had control of the mixed dial you'd make different choices but that also brings us onto a really important point as well I get asked a lot in teaching and in journalism and in the various things that I do that use logic on a daily basis well what is the right setting what is the right parallel compression treatment for a set of drums when you're recording them for a project like this well how specific does the question need to be before you realize that there is no answer to that question the reason that we were born with ears was so that we could make really critical choices about how we want to process sounds everybody in this room left to their own devices would make different music they'd set up different effects stems they'd set up different approaches to processing sound in different ways and that's why music making is something we still do and continue to feel creative about we can't just say well you know what actually yeah 49% is exactly the right amount of parallel processing because there's no way for me to do that we'd all make different choices so be comfortable in those choices absolutely audition them but when you find something you think works go with it okay so what we've done here is you set up a parallel compression process on these drums and that's because we've got a track stack which is allowing us to process all the drums together that's great but what I also want to do is to be in a position where I can start thinking about spatial treatments reverbs in other words not only for the whole drum kit but also for specific pieces within the drum kit so let's deal with the first one first what I want to do is to add a kind of ambient style reverb treatment to the whole drum kit and I've got one here a small room which is going to give me I think some extra presence around the kit again let's just solo that so you can hear this treatment being added to the entire drum part tell you what let's run this over the bridge and so you can hear it going in okay so we've got this little bit of focus around the sound in case you're thinking I'm not really hearing that what we can actually do within logic it's really worth bearing this in mind is we can actually solo just the reverb what that means is like I'm really focus in on the sound that the drums are going into in order to customize it for my project so what I've done here is just to solo the reverb return and if I put that back in with the dry drums isn't it amazing how much easier - it is to hear the reverb now that you know what it sounds like without the drums so we've now got a reverb treatment and ambient treatment that's sitting on just the drum kit but what I also want to do is to add a reverb to just the snares well as we know we've got a track stack if I set up a reverb here a longer reverb which is what I've got in mind for the snares then obviously that's going to affect everything the kick drum things are gonna get start getting really swampy and that's not really what I want so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to open this stack back up here and then I'm gonna jump into the mixer and what I can then do is to go and find the to snare channels which is sitting here snare top and snare bottom I'm gonna select both of these tracks and then what I can do is to select a new auxilary and I can select long verb now this is a long reverb treatment the term I've set up for the project and we're gonna have plenty of that on the snare and if I run over the end of the track we should hear plenty of that additional reverb being added to the snares coming out of the chorus [Music] well don't have that sounds out there but on the gin legs that sounds fantastic we've got loads more power now in the snares now crucially it's not really being added well it's crucially not being added to the whole of the rest of the drum stem we've just selected the snares so just because I set up a track stack doesn't mean that I don't still have access to individual components within the drum kit so I could come back into the snares I could adjust compressors on them individually I can EQ them individually I can still go sound by sound but the track stack allows me to set up treatments that affect the entire drum kit so what we've now got is an edited drum part which we've corrected timing on but we've also started thinking about from a sonic point of view and actually we've also spent quite a lot of time thinking about the rig that we're using today and I think it'll be a good idea now just to kind of summarize what we've looked at so far with regards to drum recording so if we can switch across that we fantastic and we'll have a quick look at the techniques that we've looked at so far so specifically with regard to drum recording what we did first of all was to connect each microphone to its own input channel now obviously we did that before you arrived otherwise you'd been waiting for ages but for every single microphone we need a dedicated input on our audio interfaces and what the reason why we're using two audio interfaces is because we needed more than the eight individual analog ins that one interface provided us with so each microphone goes in to its own input channel what we then did was to think about Game Change at the top of logics mixer we have a chance to adjust the preamps for every single channel within the mixer we didn't have to go out of logic in order to do that now this is a really crucial detail that I've put in the second point here as well I see students doing this all the time which is that they'll plug in a microphone and in order to adjust the level on it they'll reach for the mixer fader and they'll pull it down now what you're actually doing there is you're turning down the volume of the sound that's being recorded so in other words you're taking an overloaded sick and you're turning its volume down so if you've got distortion in that channel as a result of the preamp level being too high it will still be distorted if you turn the volume down okay so to control gain don't touch the mixer faders I didn't touch mine at all until we'd actually made those recordings it's the preamps that you're recording through the control volume not the mixer faders then what we did was to look at flex time for time-based editing so we looked at two things there we set up flex time and we started looking at timing correction changes both by quantizing the entire part and also by finding one little error and pulling it in time by setting up those transient markers and moving those around so that we got what we wanted from them but it's really important that you make musical decisions about quantizing audio remember those musicians have practiced hard and maybe their feel rhythmically is even better than yours so try and preserve it whenever you possibly can and then what we've done is we've consolidated multiple audio stacks into what we call a track stack that's created an auxilary where all of those drums are routed so that we can make changes to their tone as one instrument so we've still got individual control over the individual tracks as we saw in the mixer but we've also got a chance to set up compression which we've looked at in depth now and other effects which will affect the entire drum Channel okay we're in good shape we now have drums added to our project I think it's time we now switch to guitars so I'd like to welcome Mary us onto the stage he's going to come and play for us hey Mario so if you're not a graduate at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama you don't get as big around in force isn't Marius everybody there you go I did what I could for you okay so Marius has come to play guitars for us and unlike Tom you will notice the first thing about that is that he is not surrounded by microphones now of course it's fair to say that loads of guitarists really like working with physical amplifiers and with microphones to match those but it's also fair to say that for the rest of us he won't guitarists the sounds of those amplifiers and those microphones can get quite annoying and what I mean by that is let's suppose you live underneath Marius and he decides he's gonna plug in his Marshall stack at 3 in the morning cause he's got a great idea for a song well I don't want to be Merritt his neighbor okay so I'm sorry I mean I'd love to be your neighbor but not under those circumstances so what we're going to do today is to configure an amp solution for Marisa guitar without actually having to put a microphone anywhere near an amplifier and the reason that's possible is because of amp designer which is a plug-in dedicated within logic which allows us to configure really carefully a sound that hopefully is going to suit this particular project so what I've got for Marius in terms of recording is we've got one line coming out of his guitar which is plugged into a different audio interface channel so that's actually set up here we can see it very clearly and if I go into input monitoring mode with any luck we've got some sound okay so MERIS keep playing for us this is the sound of Marissa's guitar without me doing anything to it we've got to gain control just to keep volume under control but otherwise he sounds like this [Music] okay so a completely dry direct input what I'm gonna do now is to fire up amp designer which I can do by coming into the amps and pedals section here and app designer is waiting for me right here and here is its interface or at least here is a one face of its interface we'll come to that in a moment so straight away now in real time Marius is able to play through this amp and we can see that we've got a range of things that we can control as far as the apps concern we've got an EQ stage we've got inbuilt reverb we've got other effects as well we've got presents and master dials and we've got this section over here which I'm going to come to in a moment but just to give you a sense of some of the flavors that are available to us within the presets in amp designer we can look at clean crunched and distorted sounds and I'm going to just throw a couple at Mario's just to see how he kind of responds to them this one might be a nice place to start okay so straight away what we can do is to hear this sound [Music] okay my stop then what we're going to do is maybe have a think about something maybe a little bit more contemporary let's try this one okay let's have a look at one of the crunchy answers well let's try this [Music] [Music] thanks Marius now at the moment what we're doing as we auditioned through these choices is that we're matching amplifiers to cabinets and what we're also doing is using this virtual microphone here to set a position imagining that we actually have got a microphone in front of an actual amplifier or a cap here so I can of course just flick through 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 to create completely bespoke options as well what I could do would be to come in here and choose a particular amplifier like this one or I can flick through some of the others and you can hear them ready to go and ready to sort of join in with this recording that we're about to make what I can also do is to either match those or deliberately set up custom cabinet solutions and what I can also do is to think about the microphones that I might want to use if I was actually creating a real recording situation so I've got dynamic condenser and ribbon microphone choices and as I make one of these what I can do is to hover over this diagram which will allow us to see the proximity of our virtual microphone to the speaker now this makes a massive difference to the sound that we're actually going to be working with and if I ask Maris to play a bit more I'm gonna move this microphone around and we'll hear the tone changes that come from there [Music] thank you very much okay so what we've now got is a chance to hear some of that in action and of course this is what happens when you put microphones in front of amps there's a huge difference that comes in tone and volume from moving microphones around so even if you're intending to use this stage of our master 2 class to go away and think about actually working with amps think really carefully about microphone choices in particular combining different mics and putting them at different distances can give you really really custom boutique sounds but as you can see we can also do that completely in the virtual world as well now for this particular project I've got something a little bit more driven in mind so I'm going to come down to the distorted options here and I think that might mean we need to make a little bit of a volume adjustment because I don't want to blow you all away this is the amp solution that I think we're gonna work with today [Music] you might be wondering why I would ask you why not okay so what we're gonna do is to jump in here for the bridge and we need go through the chorus MERIS and I have been talking about the part I'd like them to record but in addition to just putting this part down what we're also gonna do is to look at another feature of logic as we do that I've deliberately got into cycle mode here because I want to go into cycle record mode what this basically means is that when I press record in a moment we begin to put this guitar part down what's going to happen is that MERIS is gonna get his four beat counting and then we're gonna come all the way through to the end of the chorus and at that point logics gonna jump back to the top of the bridge again it's gonna allow him to go over a second pass okay so I'm gonna come back into record mode this time there's MERIS making a nice noise for us and what we're gonna do now is to put this down and we'll see where we're at I'm gonna make this nice and big so you can see it clearly as we go down let's make sure it's really filling the screen for you okay and MERIS when you're ready [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you very much great okay so without actually starting to think about editing and doing various things that we might want to do with ATAR instead what I'm going to do straightaway is to duplicate this track now what that means is that without me having to reconfigure the audio inputs for it straightaway I've got exactly the same amp solution sitting on another track here altogether so what I'm gonna do is to meet the original parts marriage now I've also got an idea for a part that might work quite nicely through the chorus so this time I'm gonna stay in cycle record mode but this time we're just gonna focus on this part of the song without further ado I'm going to punch him back into record mode we've got exactly the same settings that we had before you'll get one bar into the top of the chorus and if you can play that twice for me again that would be great thank you very much [Music] [Music] thank you very much Marius let's take you out of record mode and we'll let you go and have a drink thanks very much Marius okay so let's just reverse that for a moment let's meet the new chorus guitar part and go back to this sort of chugging eighth note sequence that I asked Maris to corn through the bridge and into the chorus and let's put a loop around this so we can focus on this part really carefully now cycle record modes incredibly useful and when you you're working with a musician he wants to have a few passes at something is well a good for us to press record as we did with Tom and just say right get it right please but music isn't really like that what we want to do sometimes is go into a loop mode and actually record a number of takes so that we can then begin to think about choosing our favourite bits and it's also true that sometimes we aren't just producers but players as well I might set on my guitar over here I might press record and I might want to wander over there make some recordings without having to constantly go backwards and forwards between two separate places so that's one reason why cycle record might be useful but it's also fair to say that there's an I've got a slightly hidden agenda here which is that what I really wanted to do with merits of guitar parts is to use both of them rather than one or the other I want to be in a position where I can use both parts make them nice and stereo really wide and have loads of power as a result and I can do that if I've worked in cycle record mode because up here at the top within this reason you see this little number two and what that's showing me is that we've got two separate passes within this region now if I click on that number one of the options that's available to me is either I can select one take or the other up here but what I want to do is to unpack this performance to new tracks and what that does is to bring both of the guitar parts that Marius recorded into my arrangement here's the first one and here's the other one so now we've got both of them sitting there waiting ready for me to go to town on how I might choose to set these up with effects now again just to make things easy I'm going to meet the second part so we're just focusing on this one for now and the reason that I want to do that is because as well as the amp solution that we set up for Maris's guitar I also want to configure a pedal solution you'll see when you go and see guitars playing live or in the studio that as well as and and microphones to record those amps they'll usually be surrounded by boxes on on the floor which they'll 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 logic is to configure a pedal solution as well as an amp solution now what I want to do is to put a collection of pedals together between my game dial and my amp so what I've done is I've just hovered in this little gap you see a little white line between those two plugins and if I click there what I can do is to come back into amps and pedals and this time I'm going to select pedal board and that moves the amp down if I push this gently to one side you can see that now this new plug-in has been added between the two previous ones and in fact let's just bypass the amp so we can clearly hear what we're going to be doing within pedal board over here I've got a whole collection of pedals that I can put together in a line in order to further enhance this particular sound and the first one I'm going to drag in is vintage Drive I really like this it's going to give me a little bit of extra warmth we can adjust the tone we can crank up the drive level we can crank up the overall level as well and just hear how this sounds on this guitar parts [Music] it's worth remembering this by the way is what Marius would call it this is the sound of his original guitar here it is with Drive and here it is with Drive going into the amp ok that's working nicely what I also want to do is to bring in my favorite pedal from pedal ball which is actually delay might sound like a really unsexy choice but the reason I particularly like this pedal is because I can actually create reversed delays here so delays that don't just produce regular echoes but these slightly weird and wonderful slightly psychedelic effects so I'm going to turn that into reverse mode I also want to synchronize 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 feedback controls how many repeats of each echo I get and the mixed dial overall well we've seen that in the compressor that says it's the blend between the unprocessed sound and the super process sound ie just delay let's set a balance here somewhere I can also dial in some dirt and this is pitch flutter as well let's just hear those two pedals without the end [Music] okay so you hear those delays really clearly and let's punch that back in with the amplifier as well and now we've got our guitar tone [Music] okay so what I want to do is to apply this sound to both sides or I'm about to make these stereo so both performances that Marius created for us so what I'm going to do is just to make closed down our little region expected here because we don't need that right now and what I'm going to do instead is to come into the settings menu and I'm going to copy this channel strip setting and what that's going to do is to take all those choices just made in terms of plugins and the specific parameters for them I can then unmute this channel and what I'm going to do in in here is to paste it and that will introduce pedalboard here and now it's very easy for me just to pan this one a little bit across to the right and this one across to the left and we should hear when we put these two parts in together an enormous amount of power coming from the ADEs guitar [Music] okay so straightaway we've got all this extra Drive now as it may not surprise you to learn what I want to do is to have kind of grouped control over these two sounds so what I'm going to do again is to create a track stack this time I'm going to go for another summing stack but we're going to just make this nice and quick I'm going to just call this eighths guitar and that gives me control over those two now remember I've just copied the channel strip setting so very quickly I can repeat all of what I've just done for the chorus guitar go to unmute it let's just come out of solo mode altogether I'm going to select my two individual takes I'm going to unpack those two new tracks I'm gonna select the first of those and I'm going to paste my channel strip setting I'm going to select the second one and I'm going to paste the channel strip setting here as well then what I'm going to do is to make these ultra-wide as wide as they can be and then I'm going to select both of them again and again create a new track stack now you might be wondering why are you creating two separate track stacks for the guitar part well I want individual volume control over them so this one is going to be the chorus guitar and the other one is providing us with the eighth guitar so what we're going to do is run through the project from a little earlier on and we'll introduce these and we'll set volumes for them as well which feel like they should work quite nicely [Music] okay we're getting all that really nice raspy tone now providing a sort of accompaniment to Tom's crash cymbal at the very end of the project as well so of course these are settings I might tweak later on but for now what we've done is to add an enormous amount of power you remember what the DI guitar sounded like and now we've got this really nice custom solution which we've built specifically for the project so again there are things that we can learn and summarize as far as the project is concerned for guitars so let's have a look at that now so this time we haven't got multiple feeds coming into our audio interfaces we're working with just one channel now I think I might even have forgotten to say at the very beginning of the project that the whole way through this we're working at 96 kilohertz in 24-bit now that's ultra high resolution okay all into one MacBook Pro and the guitar is the latest channel to be recorded at that resolution and as we can see it's coming into one channel and it's then being sent on to the computer so as far as guitar recording is concerned the first thing we did was to recognize that we don't necessarily need to work with amps we can configure all of that directly through amp designer and pedalboard and they're providing the guitar tone now that we've got across four separate tracks what I did having configured one track was to duplicate that which automatically brings over the amp designer settings and it allows me very quickly to not keep Marius waiting when I'm configuring a sort of recording solution for him to add his parts to the duplicating tracks is great when you've got plugins already set up then what we did was to explore cycle record this idea that if we go into loop mode and we hit record what we can do is to create take folders multiple takes which we can then use and unpack to individual single tracks in the way that we have and in fact I've just made exactly that point we've put these together we've created track stacks for them as well and we've maximized the fact that we've got two takes in each of those recordings so that brings us to the end of the first half so far we've taken a really basic skeletal arrangement we've made a few little MIDI edits to it we've added drums and guitars and after a little 20-minute break I think Mike said it was gonna be 20 minutes yes 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 bit Thanks [Applause]

Channel: Guildhall School of Music & Drama

Views: 1,621,291

Keywords: logic pro, logic pro x, guildhall school, music, drama, electronic music, apple, recording, producing, workflow, editing, production, mastering, music production, jono buchanan

Id: sqm8Q3jlNVI

Length: 73min 50sec (4430 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/sixwingseven]

This is one of the most thorough classes on LPX yet, in my opinion. Has definitely helped me learn a lot about the software. Hope you find it useful :) First post on Reddit btw :)

[u/Shnarb]

Thanks for posting this!

[u/shadeogreen]

Looking forward to checking this out. Thanks for sharing.

[u/ThisUsernamesWrong]

Awesome, thanks

[u/slipperystar]

Absolutely amazing! Just watched parts 1 and 2. Will take a second sweep over the week taking notes. I love his teaching style, though he gets very detailed, it's all really useful and well explained. Love it!!!! Thanks!

[u/klassickoon]

Clutch

[u/swahl]

This is great. Thanks for sharing! Covered a lot of ground in 2+ hours, introduced me to a lot of things that I knew, or guessed, existed in LPX but never knew how to use or where to find them. I loved his musicians, too; and it leaves me wanting to hear the finished track!