Logic Pro X Masterclass - Part 2

thank you that's very kind that's very kind thank you very much okay I hope you had a good break okay so obviously the first half we've added our drums and guitars we're gonna take this opportunity just to have sort of fresh pair of ears on our project which is always really valuable worth bearing that in mind whenever you're working on something for a long period of time ears get tired so it's fair to say I think we should just refresh where we are with this project just remind ourselves what we've done so far and just run it down from the top once and then we'll start thinking about vocals [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so I pulled those guitars down in volume partly because they're too loud but also because of what we're about to do next which is to think about the vocal part of this track and to help me with that I'd like you to give a very warm round of applause to Kate who's coming up to sing for us [Applause] hello hello okay so in a minute Kate's gonna sing now you will remember that when we were working with the drums at the beginning I told you that we needed to be careful because all of the mics on Tom's kicked around the risk of running through the computer up to the PA and we were going to get a feedback loop and we run exactly the same risk here obviously we didn't have that problem arias because there were no microphones onstage for him but what we're gonna do is just experiment with this a little bit because I'd really like to build a vocal change for Kate to record through which you get to hear sort of being constructed so what do I mean when I talk about a vocal recording chain well if I come down to my vocal tract which is just sitting here at the moment with the exception of the preamp setup as it is at the moment with phantom power ready for Kate's recording through the microphone which we'll come to in a moment because it's particularly tasty what I've got is the phantom power all ready to go but what I haven't got are any plugins ready for Kate to sing now that's fine I suppose I could just go into your record arm mode and press record and Kate could do her thing but I really want her to feel like she's connected to this project and from the beginning what we've now have done is to add reverb to snares and the guitars are much kind of bigger and they're much more spatial and so Kate sort of struggling in a sort of dry recording space to add her performance to that isn't going to be particularly easy so I'm gonna run a little bit of a risk I'm gonna back the volume down a bit and I'll adjust it again if I need to just to make sure we don't get any feedback but what I'm gonna try and do is just put you into record mode and fingers crossed yeah well that could have been worse can we just see if we've got some level [Music] okay hopefully you can hear that a little bit so what I'm going to do is to start thinking about the sorts of plugins I would recommend you think about when it comes to configuring a recording for a vocal the first thing I'm going to do is to double click here and put in logics channel EQ let's bring that over here for a moment I want to be able to hear the kind of sweetness which is sort of naturally in Kate's vocal enhanced even more we've got a lot of weight and power in this song and I kind of want her vocal to sit on top of that and provide this really Airy floaty quality amongst other properties as well so I'm gonna just dial this up a bit and hopefully k if you can sing for us a bit we'll hear what the effect of this high shelf filter can do yeah - too big but you know that so if I put that back up again we can hear that warmth Kate one more time please go around in circles here too - babe but you know that I'm the best thing you thank you ok so we've got some EQ now what we're getting is all this really lovely character and a huge part of that is of course because Kate's a fantastic singer but she's being helped out by annoy Minh u87 microphone a beauty if you will so we've got this fantastic mic onstage ready to capture this great sound for us so we've got you key that's gonna give us a little bit of warmth and a little bit of extra tone what I'm also going to do is to configure a compressor for Kate to sing through as well because I think that's gonna help her feel sort of from a volume point of view that she can open up a little bit where she wants to when it's not gonna overload or become too much I'm going to select the vintage Fe T model for vocal recording which is just sing here this is a really great sounding compressor and I'm going to add a fair amount of this and of course at the moment Kate's deliberately singing quietly for me because I want to talk to you at the same time so it's entirely possible that these settings that we're working on going to be quite right when she decides to open up and sing a bit later but that's fine we can adjust those when the time comes so I'm gonna set a nice low threshold so we're compressing plenty of the sound and I'm going to set the ratio nice and high as well so anything above the threshold point that she sings is being reined in a little bit again I'm turning off auto gain or I'm going to add a little bit of this but I can't really know until we actually do this for real how much of that is going to be the right amount okay okay can we have a little bit more vocal and we'll see how the compressors behaving mmm could you sing a little bit more strongly for me fantastic okay so we've got our compressor beginning to respond as well now at the moment Kate's still in a dry space we've got her tone a bit more under control and we've got the compressor also bringing dynamics under control but I can also monitor reverb in real-time as we make recordings as well so what I'm now going to do is to fire up this nice long reverb and we'll hear that that's really lovely isn't it okay let's also add one more reverb just because I'm a bit of a reverb addict will have a medium plate on this as well a bit of that too please Kate okay now what we've got is a space in which I think Kate will feel like she's much more part of the track I need to remember to drop the vocal sorry the PA level now because we are about to make a vocal recording and what this is going to allow us to do is to this channel that we've configured here is going to let us just I hope let Kate feel like she's part of the recording but what I'm going to do is just make sure that the compressor is open through this recording stage I'll make it a bit smaller so that we can see the vocal going down as well I can resize these windows but this I think is probably the plug-in I'm most likely to need to make adjustments to as we make a recording so let's also make the guitar of the vocal tract nice and big so we can see this as it goes down and we'll head back to the top of the project so what I'm going to do is to give Kate one bar of counting before we get into the intro section of the song if that's okay we've got the channel all set up and ready to go so let's make a recording and see how we go if you could sing relatively gently for me this first time that would be fantastic thank you okay and obviously I should have said this with Tom but it's even more critical now this microphones alive so if you could stay nice and quiet while Kate the chords that'd be magical thank you okay let's make a recording [Music] [Music] Thank You Kate thank you all of you for staying nice and quiet as well now I sent Kate up bit of a blind alley there which of course you weren't able to hear because we're the only two people wearing headphones and this brings me really neatly on to the next part of what we need to consider if you are making recordings in the same space as the artists that's recording and that's true for most of us most of us don't have studios with partitions or separated spaces so it's really easy to make one potentially fatal error which is cakes wearing closed back headphones which means that the amount of spill coming out of her headphones is contained whereas mine our studio models which means that they spill much more and if I don't really keep my headphone levels under consideration it's entirely possible the amount of spill that's coming out of my headphones will make its way over to Kate's mic and get captured as part of the recording and a little bit of that happened right in the beginning and the other thing that happened this time was that I hadn't really quite got the preamp level right or indeed the makeup gain dial right within the compressor either so I'm actually gonna be bold I'm going to delete this file I'm going to ask Kate to perform it again for me and this time hopefully she's got a level it's gonna be a little bit easier to work to if that's ok let's try that one more time so exactly the same thing again four clicks in and then the intro thank you Kate [Music] [Music] [Music] beautiful was that easier to sing to you that time great okay right one more pass we're going to make one more recording of this I mean to ask Kate to sing it a bit stronger this time I'm gonna trust with my preamp settings which I've turned up for this quite a vocal performance are gonna be okay for this louder one two yeah this is the time to cough clear throats the tension in the room unbelievable let's get all of that out right now we could do this for the next two hours so what we're gonna do now is we're going to try one more time if you can sing it a little bit stronger for me that would be fantastic and I'm going to ask you all to keep quiet one more time [Music] [Music] [Music] fantastic thank you okay so we now got a lead vocal and I think we can do some really great things with that so within this project we can go back to the beginning I'm just going to close these down now before when we looked at recording multiple takes we were in cycle mode but you can see that this time I press stop and went back to the beginning but logic is still recorded those into a separate take folder and I'm going to repeat the same trick that I did with Marius which is that I want to duplicate this part because Kate and I have also talked about maybe adding some harmonies to this project as well okay do you want to hear the lead vocal as I record the homilies great okay so we'll take the compressor out because I think this setting is working nicely for us now I'm going to loop up the chorus as I did for Marius which means that Kate you're gonna hear four beats into the top of the chorus and we're gonna go around four times this time just because I'm a bit of a slave driver and I want Kate to work hard we've talked about to lower harmonies and to upper ones as well so she's gonna record all four of those so again this is the time to cough ah comedy coughing right okay so we'll go around this if we can just four times of course absolutely so we're going to just check this through let me know when you're ready okay fantastic okay so we're gonna go back to the top of here and in fact actually it's really great the Kate asked me to check that because I can now hear this coming through my headphones so I'm gonna just turn those that level down altogether yours will be as it was before okay let's have these harmonies here we come [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you so much right of enforce the cake please [Applause] yeah there you go relax forget now fine okay so um what I've done it is to mute the harmonies we're gonna come to those in a little while what we're gonna do now is to focus a little bit more on this lead vocal performance now again as I said a moment ago we've got takes recorded within this particular project and we saw with the guitar recording with Marius that we can take two takes and very easily double track them and have them both work within the same project well I don't want to do that with Kate what I want to do instead is to choose my favorite takes for different parts of the song so I all started singing gently the first time that's take one and then I asked her to go for it a bit more the second time around which is take two and I think that probably if we open these up and have a look at them and we see the two takes side by side working on excuse me the gentler performance for the first half of the song going into you the stronger one will work really nicely there you can see that what I've done in order to make that happen is simply just to swipe across the take that I want to use if I want to substitute this one line I can do that by just literally swiping over that individual take and I can swap any line in or out that I want to in order to just create what we call a comp and up here at the top you can see the comped file waiting for me now you can also see that what logic is done in order to just ease the transitions between those regions is to create what we call a crossfade a little moment that's just going to make sure that we don't get any clicks as we move from one audio file to another now I definitely want the whole of this first take to run through up to this point I think and then we're going to switch across to the chorus into the second take so I think from a take point of view that's going to work nicely for us but what I also want to do as well as editing from a selection process and it's both just before I move on actually here bearing in mind that I wasn't joking before we could have recorded sixteen passes and generally speaking you won't just want to vocal takes you will want to spend time really building a session this way and my advice team would be to record all of those tracks on top of one another because quick swipe comping like this makes it really easy to then make selections for one part after another as opposed to recording on multiple tracks and loads of mutes well kind of stuff this is really straightforward so once I've got a comp that I'm happy with well I can then do is to close that down and then what I want to do is I want to commit these changes and say yep I'm happy with this particular edit and to do that I'm going to click here and I'm going to flatten this performance and what that does is to throw away those other takes it just gives me one audio region sitting on top of my project with the crossfade in at that point where we've selected it and hopefully now we've got a sound that we can work with it's time to move to the volume back up so we can actually hear it and we should hear that pass going from let's just run it from the bridge we should hear this slightly gentle performance going into the stronger one on the chorus [Music] and now I'm coming [Music] now [Music] she's good isn't she okay so we've now got this fantastic lead vocal which we can begin to craft in a whole range of ways now kate is obviously a professional singer and it's fair to say that I could live with this performance the whole way through but it's also true that if we were working with singers who maybe we're a little bit less secure in their pitching one thing we might want to do would be to begin to explore the idea of working with tuning a vocal now earlier on we looked at what we can do with flex time when it comes to working with drum parts and if I open up Flex mode on this performance well I can see is that there's a dedicated flex mode specifically called flex pitch which is for exactly what I'm talking about and if I select this logic very quickly is going to go through and produce a pitch line having detected the pitches that have been have gone into Kate's performance now I can see those a little bit here and I've got this kind of overview display but if I select the edit button here what I've got a chance to do if I select track is to see the waveform that's just make this a little bit smaller so we can see it clearly and then what I can do is to go and find that detected pitch and overlay it on top so we can see very clearly how logic has assessed the pitch of Kate's performance and where it's putting so in other words this piano roll display on the left hand side is showing me where logic has detected these pitches so that we can begin to make edits to those if we want to so I'm going to solo this vocal part and we'll just have a listen to it and just begin to see how the pitching is a love attack can be cool break [Music] here my heart beating louder okay so let's just focus on that particular section what do all of these lines actually mean okay well let's select one note like this one if I click on it it's going to make a noise and I can hear the formants the individual components that make up that particular note and you can see it highlighted up on the screen there as well as a wavy line now the first thing to say is that and I can probably make this even larger so we can see even more clearly the first thing that's happened is that logic has detected this pitch as very nearly sort of being a D somewhere between D and E flats the reason I can see that is because I can see the line between those two pitches but I can also see that this block of sort of analyzed pitch is slightly above the bottom layer in other words this note is slightly sharp if it's supposed to be a D and it's slightly flat if it's supposed to be an E flat and what I can do is to make really tiny microscopic adjustments to pitching based on the nodes around the edge of any individual note so I've got six little nodes in the corners of each of these and what they do is to allow me to adjust different parameters so in the top left hand corner I've got what's called pitch drift how does this note Bend in from the previous one now it might drop down from the previous wall or it might Bend up from the previous one and pitch drift allows me to manage that transition between two notes what I can do up here at the top is to go for fine-tuning now as I say logics detected this notes clearly as an e flat sand at the moment it's telling me it's 38 cents below that particular pitch okay well we can adjust that in a minute here we've got pitch drift at the other end this note sort of stops before the next phrase but if it bent into another note that's where I can adjust that here I've got control over vibrato and that's what the main part of this wavy line is Kate's got amazing control over vibrato what tends to happen we've seen is that they'll establish a note and then they'll begin to introduce pitch variation which we call vibrato and you can see the wavy line and the height of that is showing me how much for broto I've got in this note and then I can make adjustments to it if I want to I can also control its volume if there's one note that just absolutely pings out and is much louder than everything else I can turn its volume but also more usefully if you suddenly get to the end of a phrase and your singer is running out of air it's a nice way of being able to just boost the volume of things that maybe have just tailed off a little bit so on a per note basis I could go through this entire vocal performance and make adjustments to all of those notes and actually to be honest that would produce without question the most natural results because of course every single note is different again just like Tom Kate isn't machine so pitch is going to come and go from one note to the next however I can also make global changes and we're going to start there just to see what happens when I do so if I select all of the notes within here over on the left hand side I've got a pitch correction slider which at the moment is off at zero what we heard a moment ago absolutely no pitch correction at all so what we're going to do is to run the verse again and this time what I'm going to do is to slowly increase the pitch correction and we'll compare no pitch correction with tuned vocals we'll have to wait and see whether or not logic is going to push that sharp or flat and maybe we'll have to make a manual adjustment to it so here it is untuned again a love heart can be cool a merry break [Music] okay so there's just those two phrases now let's turn on pitch correction and see where that takes us straight away the wave form is snapped and we've got those notes now much more well perfectly chewed whether or not they've tuned to the right semitones or not only play will tell us a love can be cool okay so the answer is no what's happened is these notes have pushed themselves a little sharper than we'd like them to and in fact that's consistently true all of these notes should be these so what we're gonna do is to run it through again and now all I have to do to make this adjustment is to click on these notes and pull them down again as I click on each one we're gonna hear the components that make up that detected pitch and then as we run them through hopefully we should be able to make pretty quick changes to this vocal this one sharp as well let's carry on oh man you're pretty cool that one's gone sharp too [Music] here my heart beating louder cuz I've got nothing to lose there's one two now then what we've got here is a really interesting moments which we've actually seen a little bit earlier as well which is that logic knows that there is a pitch ramp here but it's detected this as one note so if I want to be able to make an adjustment here I've got a problem because at the moment we've got one block of data even though the detected line clearly sweeps all the way down here so how am I going to solve that well I can just punch in grab the scissors and chop this here and instantly what we've got now are two notes which can be just adjusted manually so let's carry on okay so I've got one little adjustments make here as well there we go okay now I've obviously been describing what I've been doing as I've been going through but you can see how quickly it's possible to take a vocal like this and pull it in tune I think now probably I'll leave vocals absolutely bang in tune but what we're gonna do now is to look at what happens when we make another adjustment so I'm gonna just make all of this a little bit clearer so we can see more of these notes at the same time I'm gonna select all of them once more and this time what I'm going to do is to come down to the vibrato function here and I'm going to just pull this down all the way to zero okay now what this is gonna do is to remove Kate's vibrato e to gether now this is obviously not going to produce a particularly natural result because now we're going to sort of just pretend that she's thought like a talk box something which an instrument which is almost controllable like a keyboard let's just hear what that sounds like a love heart can be cool hear my heart beating louder okay so this is the production trick that's kind of going in and out of favor for the last 20 years if you decide that this is something that you want to bring to your productions either to individual little components or to an entirely vocal we've heard it right okay but nevertheless if this is something you want to bring to your production then obviously this is an area where you can get really creative with breaking up little bits of vocal maybe we saw and pulling them and flying them back into your project I'm gonna put the vibrato back in but I'm gonna maybe just rain it a little bit and down to I don't know three quarters something like that so now let's hear this vocal and what I'm going to do is just to make an adjustment to its level overall as well from a compression point of view just to get a rough sense of what I can do in trying to sort of balance this vocal parts within the track from exclusively working with compression I love it how can we crew I love his Huckabee so I'm not it breaking my heart beating cuz I've gone [Music] and now I'm coming [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so hopefully this dispels one of the other great myths about compressors which is that they can be responsible for setting an overall volume for a part within a project that will work from start to finish it's not what compressors do in the first half we talked about dynamic range and how we can range things in in order to get them under control but Arrangements are hugely dynamic we could build a section to this piece that drops down to just an absolute whisper and so the compressor at that point working really hard is of course going to produce a vocal that's too loud equally it's the case that further into the project where it really kicks off and we're getting a bit of that with Maris's guitars coming in the vocal feels like it's drowning don't confuse compression and dynamic control with overall volume level in order to really get this vocal feeling like it belongs in the track we need to write a volume automation line for this vocal to work now you're probably really aware of the fact that in addition to all of the hardware that we've got on stage one really popular piece of technology that there's a sort of whole culture around these days is Hardware controllers the ideas of having dials and sliders and things that we can push and pull in order to actually make physical changes it goes back to the days of working with mixing desks which give you these great tactility this opportunity to get hands-on with the parts that you're actually working with and actually one thing that's worth bearing in mind is that if you happen to have access to your own an iPhone or an iPad you actually have a hardware controller ready to work with logic now what do I mean by that well there's a free logic remote app which will allow you to connect a phone or an iPad ready for you to be able to write volume data and other parameters as well and I've got a phone and we're going to do precisely that now with this vocal line so here you can see logic remote I hope from where you are which is basically showing you a channel fader and that's the vocal and this is my master output now on here what I could also do is to select automation modes so if I go into touch mode we should see now that the vocal is in touch mode which means I can go back to the beginning of my project and what I can now do is to add a volume automation line to this vocal as it goes through they come around a little bit over there because I feel a bit marooned over here and we'll just watch this go in in real-time I love it I can be crew I love is Huckabee so I'm not it breaking do my heartbeat is how cuz I've got nothing to do and now I'm coming [Music] now let's start [Music] [Music] it'll take okay that's pretty cool right okay so what I've got now is this volume automation line which is running through now it's not gonna be perfect from start to finish by any means but what it does is to give me a rough shape of the vocal and if you were in any doubt as to whether or not compressors could do this automatically hopefully there you've got your answer they aren't the same thing a really common mistake that people make now of course this isn't perfect and there are things that I might want to change about it and we'll come back to that in due course so what I'm going to do is to again protect my automation data go back into read mode and then I'm going to close down automation mode altogether now we also asked Kate to produce four different harmony parts for us and what I'm going to do really quickly is to copy exactly the trick that I did with Maris's guitars we're going to unpack these two new tracks that's going to copy the compression and EQ treatment that we set up on this part which I think are going to work really nicely what I'm then going to do is to create a track stack really quickly from these so that we've got all of the backing vocals being controlled sort of under one roof and we'll call this backing vocals what I can then do is to close this down we can add more reverb if we want to although there's plenty already on here we could add a secondary EQ treatment what I want here is a tone that's gonna feel thinner than the lead vocal I don't want these to be fighting the lead vocal so what I'm going to do is to scoop out some of the bottom end I'm also going to just notch out anything that feels like it might get a little bit too much in the sort of upper mid-range and we will leave the top end in at the moment just to sort of create this nice sort of floaty vocal so in two or three quick little steps we've now got a stack of backing vocals which we can balance against the lead vocal in the chorus let's just set a rough level for those by running the chorus section and using the volume fader for this track stack now a storm comes like a hunter my little break guys it'll take and let's try that in the project as well and see how they sound together [Music] break take [Music] okay I think that's gonna work nicely but it's time now differently to have a look at this volume automation and data on the lead line which is inconsistent particularly through this chorus section now overall the chorus vocal is too loud and there's a really neat little tool here called a volume select tool which I can access just from the toolbar I can select a whole range of automation nodes come back to the pointer tool and just drag the whole lot down to make that whole of this section quieter without affecting the volume of what happened up to that point let's just try that now [Music] [Music] great okay that's working better and what I'm also going to do is to make a slight adjustment to the relative balance of the different backing vocals that Kate recorded too so we're gonna come into here remember she performed the lower ones first so what I'm going to do is just to go and find these individual tracks on the low harmonies I'm gonna just pull these volumes down a little bit so we've got a slightly balanced slightly more favoring the upper harmonies okay so very quickly by asking Kate to go into cycle record mode we've been able to create this kind of stacked backing vocal effects and of course what we could also do would be to add more or think about spacing those out across the stereo field as well something will also come back too so what we've got now is a project that's just beginning to feel like it's getting somewhere we've got drums we've got guitars and we've got our vocals let's have another listen before we move on to the next stage [Music] I love is Huckabee so I'm not it breaking you my heartbeat is out cuz I've got nothing and now I'm coming [Music] [Music] okay so I've been able to bring some of the guitar level up a little bit more now that we've captured the vocal and the guitars are going to be fighting or influencing the way that Kate performs so what next well we're getting close to having a mix file that's ready for us to print we're gonna have one more listen through and just check that there isn't anything that I want to adjust and we'll make those adjustments in real time listening out for tone and volume and dynamics changes things that we might just want to make tweaks to before we commit our mix file let's have a listen [Music] i love it tsakuba so I'm not it breaking do my heart beating louder cuz I've got nothing and now I'm coming [Music] turn [Music] it'll take [Music] okay so we've got one consideration before we print this mixed file which is that obviously today what we've been doing is recording this all live none of this existed before we started our project so it's no great surprise that some levels have slipped here in there and you can see that in the output for the entire project I'm ever so slightly in the red not bad half a DB come on it's alright right okay so what I'm going to do before I commit this mix is just to make sure that we're offsetting that okay now I could go through and find out exactly where that distortion is coming from I'm gonna make an adjustment there to volume automation data in order to rein that in but I'm gonna do a slightly quick fix here and just put a gain and plug-in in the output channel and I'm gonna just take a couple of DBS off this before we print this mix all together now when it comes to mixing your projects logic is gonna make this straightforward for me what I'm going to do is to put an empty bar at the top I'm going to just create a cycle over this making sure that I don't pinch the end off the project at all and what I'm going to do is just make sure as well that I'm gonna reset this little meter before we commit this bounce and I'm going to open up the bounce window now we're gonna be back here in a little while looking at this properly so for now all I'm going to do is to select a really ultra high resolution file as you can see we've been working at 96 K I'm going to carry on working at 96 K for now and I'm also going to carry on working at 24-bit and I'm going to select an offline bounce and we've seen that process how can a moment to go to an extent but this time we're going to commit a mixed file to the desktop just so it's easy for me to go and find in a moment I'm going to press bounce and logics just gonna sprint through and produce another offline bounce for me so that I've got this quick mix file created for me ready to go into the next stage so whilst that's just finishing up let's talk about what that next stage is what we've got next is this idea of what happens when we go into the mastering of a particular piece of music I'm just going to save this project and I'm going to close it and we should find that we've got a mixed file ready to work with sitting up here in the top right hand corner and actually as we're here let's now immediately just start a new project as well I'm going to select one audio track because that's all we need this time and I'm going to pray create at the beginning of the projects file import and we're gonna go and grab that audio file which is sitting on the desktop right here ready for us to work with now when I import a new audio file because this has been created within logic it's even asking me even though it's an audio file whether or not I want to import the tempo data which is great I definitely do I'm not so worried however about the markers so I'm not gonna worry about those for now so let's make this nice and big so we can see this file really clearly and we should see the waveform that's gone into our mix file ok so what exactly is mastering well let's talk about mastering in a more typical form than working with a one-minute bit of song generally what mastering engineers do is to try and consolidate and bring together a number of different pieces of music you'll probably know that lots of pop records these days and made with producers in different countries so even though the same artist is at the center of those projects different producers work in different studios different countries all over the place are producing their take on the sound their approach to songwriting so it's going to stand to reason I've been encouraging you to think about the originality in your own music and we'll talk some more about that in a while too so if those producers are doing their job of course it stands to reason that the tone and the volume shaping and the overall level of all of those separate tracks isn't going to be the same so what mastering first and foremost is for is bringing a whole number of pieces of music together and making changes to them so that as a body of work they make more sense and the same thing is true with compilation albums if you suddenly decide that you want to put a compilation album together with tracks from the 60s where people weren't pushing the volume of tracks nearly as much as they do today you're going to need to make balances and adjustments to those tracks so that they feel like those pieces of music belong together so at the most basic level what mastering does is to allow you to take lots of different pieces and make them feel like they work well together however that's not the whole thing it's also fair to say there's no getting away from the fact that we tend to associate volume with quality this is a really important point if you go to a gig it's loud because loud is impressive you'll all have done this either with your teachers or your friends you'll make a piece of music that you're really proud of and they come into the room you say I've got a listen to this do you turn it up or down yeah always up come on let's have it I have this from my students I always know which pieces of music they're proudest of because they blow my heads off with it it's like get this whereas the ones they're not quite so happy with just okay so we associate volume with quality excites us loud volume excites us but it's also slightly competitive it's fair to say I'm afraid then when we listen to a Lao piece of music followed by a quieter piece of music subconsciously it's easy for us to I'm not saying it's right but I'm saying it's easy for us to assume that the first piece is second is better than the second so what a lot of mastering engineers needs to bear in mind is that unfortunately there's a little bit of a volume competition going on and something we need to bear in mind is that in order for our tracks to feel as rich and full as many of the commercial tracks that we can hear out in the big wide world we do need to consider dynamics and inflating the volume of the tracks that we work with so what does it mean to actually put together a mastering chain and what sorts of plugins might we want well let's build the chain right now so we can begin to explore some of these concepts first of all what I'm going to do is to come and build or put at the very top of my chain an EQ and I'm going to this time select a linear phase EQ now then if the tone in my mix file is wrong in other words if I need an EQ at the very beginning of my chain why didn't I fix it in the mix stage if the track is clearly too bright or too dull or it doesn't have enough mid-range why didn't I fix that at the mix stage well I haven't put an EQ here because at the moment the mix file is wrong I've put it here because the plugins that I'm going to use after the EQ might have implications for tone so in other words when we start working with compressors and when we start working with limiters to get the volume into our track a little bit higher it could be that the bottom end of those tracks Springs forward a little bit it could be that the top end springs forward and what we need to do is to make an adjustment to tone but right now if I immediately think you know what I know this track is too is too dull for instance I should really go back to my mix project and fix it there it's going to be much easier for me to make really choice settings than it is at the mix days than it will be to try and fix things at the mastering stage so why have I picked linear phase EQ rather than channel EQ well it's exactly the same plug-in in terms of its components in terms of the way that things are set out but what the linear phase EQ is to preserve phase all the way through its processing what that actually means is that logic has to look ahead a little bit when I press play it's going to buffer this sound it's gonna take it into the linear phase EQ and just think about it to preserve that phase so this is a plug-in you could use and should use at the mastering stage but I would avoid it when you're tracking and working at the recording stage because it's going to hold you up and introduce a little bit of latency so we'll come back to the EQ if we need to in due course the second plug-in I'm going to use is a form of compression but rather than working with stereo compression what I want to do now is to break down the individual frequency bands of my project and have the option to be able to compress those individually well what does that mean well if I select the multi presser we'll be able to see this is a multiband compressor which basically means I can compress the bass differently from the lower mid-range differently from the upper mid-range differently from the treble so in other words I can select different frequency areas and we'll hear those in a moment and make absolutely bespoke choices about how dynamically I want them to respond and the reason why that's important is if I use stereo compression at this moment it's entirely possible that the compression is going to see the kick drum or the bass line and it's going to respond which means that the vocal the hi-hats and all of the frequency content at the other end of the spectrum are going to respond because there's one compressor across the entire frequency range the multiband compressor lets me break it up into different chunks so we'll come back there in a moment as well next what we're going to do is to think about that volume offset that I was talking about we need our track to potentially be a little louder than it is right now if it's gonna feel like a mastered mixed file that belongs out with more commercially released tracks so the adaptive limiter is going to be the plug-in we'll turn to when the time comes for that but as well as the plugins that actually make a difference to the sound what I also want to do is to make sure that from a monitoring point of view I'm also keeping tabs on the way that the project is respond sorry I don't want the loudness meter that's just what that outs what I want to do instead is to select the multimeter and what this is going to let me do is to see various parameters and components of the file to go through I'm just gonna park that down here now the analyzer here is going to show the frequency content of the track as it plays through I can also see phase here and overall output volume so that's just gonna stay there and it will keep you seeing exactly what prison in this mixed file as we go so let's just take out the adaptive limiter for a moment the linear EQ is flat so I'm going to keep that exactly as it is it's not making any difference to tone and we're going to turn our attention to the multiband compressor to find out what we can do in here so as I said what this allows us to do is to break the frequency bands down into separate groups so that they can be adjusted individually now the great thing about the multi presser is that you can solo those individual bands so in other words this mix is going to sound weird we're only hearing what we could I suppose refer to as the lower mid-range in this project right now so I'm soloing this band and then what I'm going to do is to set the range from a frequency point of view around the area that I'm interested in these crossover points allow me to do that now at the moment this is an incredibly wide band and I want to focus just on sort of low mid range for now somewhere between about 120 Hertz and let's say yeah okay 430 maybe 400 somewhere around here now what this will do when I hit solo is that we'll be able to hear this band playing by itself they should put a loop around a section of the piece and we'll hear what this band sounds like on its own [Music] and now I'm coming [Music] okay so straightaway we can hear what's present in this frequency band it's the bottom end of Kate's vocal range we can hear the Tom's really clearly there's a lot of snare in there as well and the body of the guitars in other words an enormous amount of the track and it's engine room in particular low mid-range is kind of the engine room of a track and to show you what I mean by that I'm gonna come out of solo mode I'm gonna turn the volume of this band down we'll make it a little bit wider and I've just dropped its volume and we'll hear what this track sounds like with much less volume happening in the low mid-range and then I'll punch it back in [Music] and now I'm coming [Music] and now I'm coming okay so you can hear there's loads of drive and energy in this particular band of frequencies but what I want to do is to sort of make the most of that to have the dynamic range of this particular part of the frequency spectrum just be a little bit more under control so what I'm going to do is again solo it I'm gonna drop the threshold point which is right here into this collection of frequencies into the volume in this particular frequency area and then my ratio control is here so just as before we have a chance to decide how much squeeze we're going to get to the upper frequencies or the volume of the upper frequencies in this particular band let's hear that in solo mode and see how the compressor responds and now I'm coming [Music] okay so you can see it going up and down as it responds particularly to the bottom of the snare drum let's just put that back into the mix and see how it feels now again remember if I push this up and down I'm effectively offsetting the gay this is like makeup gain for each individual frequency band [Music] and now I'm coming [Music] cuz I've got nothing to do [Music] and now I'm coming [Music] [Music] okay what I'm also gonna do is to select the sort of upper mid-range into the treble band as well and repeat some of that process I'm going to set up obviously individual controls for this area but there's also an enormous amount of information here this is going to be much more of the vocal some of the brightest stuff that Kate sang as well as much more of the crunch in the guitars as well so again let's set a ratio in here I'm going to work this particular band a little bit harder and we'll see what this sounds like [Music] and now I'm coming [Music] cuz I've got nothing and now I'm coming cuz I've got nothing to do and now I'm coming [Music] [Music] okay so that upper band you can really hear it responding to Kate's vocal and what I've done is to make an adjustment as well to the attack time how quickly the compressor responds and we've left release time where it is how quickly it drops away again as signals recover from the threshold point now it's fair to say we're making some pretty subtle changes here and you could be thinking well I can't hear it well the whole point about mastering isn't to completely reinvent the wheel as I said before if I had significant problems with the mix file here I'd be much better off going back to those individual tracks and making changes there what I'm in trying to do here is to get individual bands ever so slightly more under control from a dynamics point of view and of course I could do the same thing at the top end with the treble which we could make a little bit brighter or sweeter if we wanted to or back it off if things are too harsh and also what we could do would be to get the bass the bottom end of this track also more under control if that felt necessary so you can see that the multiband compresses an amazingly powerful tool and the bottom end of it if again I've suddenly created so many sort of volume drops as a result of my compression choices that overall the track is way quieter than it was before I've got a chance to boost it a little bit here as well okay so we then come on to the adaptive limiter and what this extraordinary plug-in is capable of doing so compared to the multiband compression this is pretty straightforward in terms of what we've actually got happening here let's just deal with the only two dials that really matter here in terms of changing the overall volume of our track what do I mean well first of all let's deal with the second one first the output ceiling sets the volume above which the the overall volume simply cannot climb can't get any higher than this this is what we call a brick wall limiter and it does what it says on the tin it's like a brick wall the volume isn't gonna get louder than this point so I'm gonna set this at - naught point 1 decibels okay some people think the digital distortion starts exactly at 0 dB there is another school of thought that suggests that it stops one tenth of a decibel louder than that if you can hear the difference you have the most magic pair of ears in the world okay so bear that in mind and celebrate okay so we've got I'm gonna set my output sailing and - naught point one dB tenth of a decibel off zero dB the all-important dial is the one over here on the left hand side and this is gain now this is going to turn the volume of my track up be very easy for me to stop that sentence there but of course it's not as simple as that if I'm turning the volume up a why isn't it going to distort and secondly we already know because I had to create that little gain offset in the mixed project but I've only got two decibels of headroom in this project in other words these Peaks that allow us two moments in this waveform probably about here well there's not a whole lot of room here so if I suddenly start just turning those up in terms of volume a bit like turning up my volume fader then of course very quickly things are going to distort so what does gain mean in this context well imagine it like upside down compression before we had our dynamic range we set a threshold point we then used ratio to pull down the volume to eight points downwards compression makes things quieter imagine that upside down okay what we've done now is to set an output ceiling and the loudest moments of our track are going to move up and push against that ceiling and depending on how hard we push the gain dial the quieter moments all of those bits in between the transients the bits where we haven't got really attacking qualities in our sound are going to have volume added to them so in other words what we're doing is increasing average volume now to explain what I mean by that let's just take an example and suppose we recorded door slam and we recorded someone using a pneumatic drill okay we could match the volume the loudest moment in those two files so that they were exactly the same the peak of that door slam and that pneumatic drill which one would sound louder anyone don't be shy well they would sound the same at the very beginning and then what would happen the drill would take over it would you would be left with the impression that sound was louder because it's louder for longer it's a sustained tone so we'd get a big shock from the door slam but a second later it'd be silent whereas our drill persistent a really loud noise you see people responding as I go down the street pass drills like this they're really horrible loud sustained noises okay now I don't want to start comparing our mixed file to a drill let's be careful but what would talking about is the same thing effectively we're talking about volume being loud for longer giving us the impression that it's louder overall let me show you what I mean if we turn the game down to zero what I'm going to do is I'm going to push this file up in volume as we listen back to it now at the moment remember that the loudest moment here I think is about two DB's off maximum okay so as I go past plus two effectively we know that the loudest moments in the track are being pushed up to maximum volume as we keep going beyond that point the bits at minus 3 or minus 4 or minus five are also getting pushed up in volume and the whole thing is going to feel on average louder that's what this sounds like if we run it from the top i love it tsakuba so I'm not it breaking do my orbital cuz I've got nothing and now I'm coming [Music] [Music] okay so of course the temptation is to go up to 12 because Levin's like so 30 years ago okay so we could go up to 12 and keep pushing things but as I said the idea here isn't just to create an absolutely flat line by the way just a double check oh yeah we're at minus naught point one in the output because the output ceiling is ensuring that we never climb above zero okay so what we're doing is we're adding gain to a point which hopefully feels like it's natural we're not trying to introduce artifacts or distortion or push things too hard here and it's really important that we understand that all of the nuance that's gone into the performances of the musicians that we've had on stage are captured in this mixed file it's not up to us just decide you know what Louds great we just want it to be absolutely slammed I'm delighted to say that modern mass modern mastering convention is looking to preserve dynamics in a way that actually twenty thirty years ago wasn't really happening what we had was just brick wall mixes it's actually worth importing some stuff off CD from the sort of late 90s and just having a look at the waveform you'll find it's a absolutely solid black line okay this whole idea of what we call the loudness Wars look it up on Google it's an amazing period in time fortunately now what we're trying to do is to be a little bit more natural about the way that we go about our mastering processes so keep this processor in mind the adaptive Loomis is amazingly powerful but Judge the music that you're making and work out how much of its dynamic range you want to continue to maintain so when I've got a master that I'm happy with obviously what I'm in a position to do is to close these windows down and get ready to bounce this again now because I unsupported the tempo my track effectively starts in bar 2 but I need to be a little bit careful I don't want to chop the very beginning off it so what I'm gonna do is to go back to the beginning and just add I don't know a semiquaver also just a tiny little bit of silence so I don't just clip the very beginning of the file and what I'm also going to do is to just ever so slightly pull the endpoint back here and we could add a fade again in the toolbox I've got a fade tool and I can add just a fade over this which should just be added to the file that it goes down so this time what we're going to do is we are going to monitor a bounce as it goes down in real-time so we can just hear this project one more time before we finish up just before we do though there's one more consideration I need to make I don't want to show off about it but this MacBook Pro has been handling 96 kilohertz of audio streams the whole afternoon all coming in with multitrack recording projects and all the processing that we've been doing it's not the most compatible format in the world okay so at this stage having got to this point where what I want to do now is to become a little bit more compatible with the outside world it's now time for me to think a little bit about down scaling the resolution of this file so that it can go on CD and go into other workstations as well so at this point what I'm going to do is to take my full frequency file and I'm gonna take it down to 44 point one kilohertz I'm gonna take it down to 16-bit now then I need to be a little bit careful because all of the resolution that we've been working at is just gonna get chopped off snipped completely unless I'm a little bit careful about how I downscale the resolution of this file at this stage so if I apply what's called no dithering at this stage I am simply gonna lose all of that additional resolution and logics not going to think about how to deal with that in a way that hopefully will make more musical sense alternatively what I can do is to select one of these algorithms in here and what that will do is to switch on an engine which is gonna fold down that resolution and think a little bit more carefully about the audio quality now what I would say is be careful with dithering only use it at the mastering stage it's not something you need to think about beforehand but it's also absolutely worth exploring what the options are here and how they work so we're going to create a stereo interleave file and we're all good ready to go but the great thing about the way that I can work is that if I want to I can also create mp3s and m4a files at exactly the same time if I want to I can hit these check boxes come in to each of these and make choices about the quality of the mp3s and the m4 is that I'm bouncing out and logic will create all of them for me at once if I go through and just press the ok button now I want a real-time bounce and actually I only want a full frequency file for now so what I'm gonna do is to select that option press ok and this time on the desktop we can create our file name and I like to add the all-important little mastered things so that I know this is my master version as opposed to you my mix file I love it how can be crew I love is Huckabee so I'm not it breaking do my heart beating louder cuz I've got nothing to lose and now I'm coming [Music] okay [Music] okay so just before I let you go let's just have a little bit of a summary about mastering and understand exactly what we've looked at because this is the section that may be newest to most of you so when it comes to mastering what are we talking about we're talking about post mix processing of a stereo audio file what do I mean about that we've got a stereo audio file and we can add a new layer of processing at this last stage in particular this is a time to think about tone and dynamic shaping we had our channel EQ ready to step in if we needed it and I almost certainly would have made changes there give it a little bit longer and maybe an environment more adapted to mastering but we've also looked at the multiband compressor and the adaptive limiter we've also got powerful metering options which are allowing us to see exactly the changes that we're making so we can see in the multimeter down on the right hand side all of the content that's coming in and how its behaving over time and then lastly what we're in a position to do is to start thinking about bouncing multiple audio files so I've just chosen to bounce a full frequency file on its own but I could also have rendered mp3s and m4a files exactly the same time reading for those files to go off into the distance in the way that I might want them to either uploading to SoundCloud or sending off as email attachments okay so the only thing that's really left for me to do is just to thank you enormous Lee for coming this afternoon but we need to be a little bit careful here as well I don't want you to take away from this project you need to make music that sounds exactly like this that's not really the point of what this afternoon was about what I'm hoping is that you'll take away from it whole series of techniques that you can creatively apply to your own projects whether that's the editing tools we looked at the production tricks we used the mix techniques that we went through or just focused on this martyring section at the end what we've got within logic is this amazingly creative toolset regardless of the musical genres that you favor and hopefully this afternoon you've had a chance to see some new tricks which will enhance your own productions thanks so much you [Applause]

Channel: Guildhall School of Music & Drama

Views: 425,833

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

Id: gZfA4c6GCwM

Length: 68min 39sec (4119 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2018