Here’s another trick that I use from time to time, and might be applicable, but you need to test it out. I’ve noticed that if the headroom is tight before all the channel are fed to the mastering plug-ins, i.e. you see the signal going over to red quite a lot. Especially with Ableton Live the mastering plugins tend to do odd things with the clipping with hot signals. It’s not natural, rather a kind of chopping of transients and it all will otherwise make it sound very boxy.

What I do in Logic Pro is to place a Gain plug-in just before the mastering plug-ins and this way take down the signal. Usually between -1db and -3dB will make a nice difference. The plug-ins then operate with a lower signal and could do better adjustments. This is really how each one perceives it — you need to test this out yourself.

What about Ableton Live? Well, there’s this FreeG tool from Sonalksis that does the same thing. Here’s the link if you want to download this free plugin.

FreeG is nice to have, anyway. If you ever do Ableton Live warp work, and you want to adjust the volume levels between various tracks, use this tool, and look at the average values, not peak, and try to make each one close to 0dB average.Then when you do DJ work later, the volumes are balanced.

Maybe this is old news for some of you, if so sorry. But I think sooner or later someone using Ableton Live for DJ use will ask the standard question: how do I set a specific loop point during playback of music with N bars (N being 1, 2, 4 and so on)?

Well, the thing to learn are the two Set buttons below the bigger Loop button in the envelope view (see image).

When you press the position set button during playback, the current location is recorded and the Loop is automatically enabled with usually a default length to end of track.

When you hit the Length Set button after a while, the length is recorded and the loop point is now looping around this length. To progress, just disable the Loop button and the loop is again non-activated, until you again trigger the next one with the Position Set and Position Length buttons.

The actual resolution, assuming you have global quantization in the loop, will be rounded to the quantization levels. If you have 1 bar quantization, you could hit the length set button immediately after the position set, and it will be a one-bar loop. Same if you have 2-bar quantization, the default resolution will be 2 bars, so you can’t go wrong and define a bad quantization loop range this way.

Now, in real DJ life, you could bind these buttons to your controller so you have one button for loop enable/disable, one for the position set, and one for the length set.

I’ve been recently cleaning up old tracks for the next podcast of my own productions, and usually the first thing I do is to place an EQ on each and every track before even starting to clean up the mix.

With Logic Pro it’s so easy, just click on the eq area and you get an instance of the EQ plug-in. With Live, you need to drag in the EQ8 to each track, but it’s doable.

One of the biggest enemies as a mixers we have is muddiness. It happens easily when you have lots of tracks playing at the same time, frequencies battling about the same range, ending up as a mush of sound, and you can’t really hear anything interesting. There’s a reason why minimalist dance music sounds so clear, few tracks!

Anyway, just be like a sculptor and sculpt out various main frequencies for each track. Sometimes even the dreadful 2k range will make sense (this is the metallic range) for certain instruments, so they are popping out from the mix.

This is very similar to what ancient composers had to do, they had to learn inside out what the range and tonality was of each instrument, so then when they composed (in their head!) they could figure out the balances, and that’s why a symphony orchestra sounds so massive, and still so clear.

We working with electronic tracks have an even harder time, as each synth and sample is its own new world, so we just need to go in and carve out the frequencies, and take out others so that the total balance will make it sound clear and interesting.

I sometimes even suspect that one reason many subscribe to using external big mixer boards is that they immediately have access to eq for each tracks, and they could quickly balance the frequencies, not that solid state analog circuits also give warmth compared with digital harshness that we in the fully digital world always have to try to minimize.

I just read the latest Remix magazine, October 2007, and it had a couple of really intriguing articles. One was about the techniques DJ Moldover is using, the customized Novation SL keyboard with ribbon controllers was just plain amazing, as well as the custom 4-bar chopping Reaktor plug-in that is available as a download — I need to test that one out. If you have a chance to check out Moldover sessions on YouTube, try to see what he’s doing, he’s one of the bleeding edge controller DJs out there.

Anyway, the other thing he mentioned — and to remember, he is the ultimate mashup of clips — is that he deliberately saves the pitches for clips in only the following keys: A, B, C, D, E, F and G. Can’t be simpler. With complex mode it’s also a no-brainer. This makes his choices much easier than to try to remember to pitch some parts down, and others up. I will most likely re-save my clips into this simplified format, as well.

The other technique he is using is to colorize the clips based on how well the keys work together, for example, B and D keys don’t work together, so they have very different colorization, let’s say pink and dark blue. While B and E will work well, so those are pink and red.

I would most likely extend this to use another shade for major and minor keys. Just now I’m just registering the key somewhere in the clip, so that works for me — I visualize a keyboard in my head to see if that works or not when mixing together tracks. Anyway, these techniques were worth mentioning.

Episode three of the BioWaves podcast series is now available. The idea is to present really excellent music from net labels and material from producers that have not yet been signed.

Click here to get info how to subscribe to the podcast series, and there’s more general information available at that page.

Feedback is highly appreciated - place comments below, or email me. Also, I like surprise emails about references to good net labels, or emails from producers with very interesting music.

BioWaves 003 Track Listing:

1. Roger Mercader - Reach [Irdial]
2. Max Cavalerra - Planets [Broque]
3. Panùm - Gaguri (April Vallen Remix) [Microlabel]
4. Thomas Elder aka Uomòz - OneOne [Shift]
5. Phooka - No rabbit no hats [Microlabel]
6. Tyler Smith - The Arrival [Plex Records]
7. Outgate - Another Way [Incolumis]
8. Frank Molder - Orbital Movement [1Bit Wonder]

Download
Download by right-clicking (Mac users, control-click) on this link.

I saw Hitchock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much yesterday, it’s been a couple of years since I saw this one last, and I try to see every movie Bernard Herrmann has scored once or more, as this man was a genius at scoring film music. Now, to be fair, he didn’t score all the music in this music, not even the thing I will talk about next, the use of Arthur Benjamin’s Cantata which he just re-orchestrated.

Anyway, in the last one fifth of the movie there’s this famous scene where a states person is about to be murdered during a concert in Albert Hall, where Herrmann is actually the conductor.

I don’t want to write any spoilers for anyone who has not seen this movie (if not, you should really watch it, just the movie scoring is amazing). Anyway, the cymbals play an important role. The whole scenario of music leading up to this point, with the leading actress Doris Day having an angst if she will tell about what will happen or not, with the music pushing her emotions up one level after another, is one of those magical movie scenarios worth watching. There’s actually no dialog for many minutes, just music, Doris Day with her emotions, and the scenes leading up to the murder attempt.

Herrmann then did the most famous film violin music done ever, the murder part in Psycho, and did the scores for what some say the most influential movie ever, Citizen Kane, but that’s another story.

Something that was already in Logic 7 (and most DAWs as I know of by now) is colorization of tracks. The handy keyboard shortcut in Logic is option-c. This will open up a palette of colors. If you have one or more regions selected, and choose a color, this will be assigned to each one.

Now, if you double-click on the actual palette elements, you get a color chooser, so you could further define what colors are present in the palette.

My main motivation to use this is that I like seeing big patterns, especially when the canvas area is crowded, or otherwise zoomed out. I usually specify certain colors for certain regions: blue for drum regions (can’t live without them), red for bass lines. Now when I think of it, I should use white for solos and melodies, so it’s red, white and blue!

Anyway, similarly, you could use certain base colors to define certain sub-groups of regions, and based on such color meta-info you could quickly get the big picture of the current track content.

I hope this will not start sounding like an Apple marketing blog, anyway, I took home my work Mighty Mouse last night to see how it worked with Logic Pro 8, and based on the quick testing I had to get my own mouse today. And yes, I had a Microsoft wireless mouse before.

Anyway, there are two things on the top of my head that made me get this mouse. First is the obvious one, as the small pointer in the middle could move in two axis, up and down, left and right, I could scroll in any direction in a bigger canvas, rather than chasing for the right side and bottom scroll bars.

Secondly, if I hit the option key and do left-right scrolling, the region width is zoomed in and out. If I hit option key and do up-down scrolling, the region heights are increased and decreased.

I have a feeling that there are even more similar functions hidden or documented inside Logic 8, so I’m off to explore more possibilities. The mouse has two side buttons, so there are ways to program those also for anything that I tend to do over and over again, but I better keep statistics about such operations so I know what to bind.

Anyway, these two-dimensional pointer devices makes it possible to bind more features into the DAW systems where we could operate on two parts at the same time, maybe Ableton Live and other applications will also explore such possibilities.

The Dance Department Beats To Go is another podcast series I’m listening to from time to time. Yes, it it sometimes cheezy, but this is one quick way to find out what the hot sound is just now, and I can’t complain when the guest mixes have been from Nathan Fake, John Holden, Richie Hawtin and others that I really like.

The DJ, Dennis Ruyer, usually ends the podcast with a historical dance track, so those are also fun to follow.

This is the RSS feed link in case you want to subscribe to it, or check out an episode or two.

OK, having 1600+ pages to learn Logic Pro 8 is daunting, and it is one approach. Another approach is to learn the details by testing things out, via key commands. Most important features are mapped via key commands, so when you learn those you also learn the application. In addition, you get very proficient with all the commands, and fast, too, as it’s always faster to hit key commands rather than hunting down menu entries with a mouse.

Anyone used with Logic Pro 7 commands, the defaults have changed, so we all need to go through them anyway, or import the old ones and make sure we didn’t break any existing ones. I tend to stick to default settings, as I could then jump from one installation to another, and know my way around (this also assumes that the original owner has not customized the settings inside out…).

So. Go to Preferences-Key Commands, and in the Options section select Copy Key Commands to Clipboard. Then in your text editor or word processor, hit paste, and you have the full listing.

I used Pages, with a three-column layout, and 8pt fonts, and the listing was still seven pages, but it was manageable. Then I used a marker and marked out what I think were the most important key strokes, such as start, stop, record, and so on. After I knew those, I just continued on the next setup of important commands, and so on. After a week or so, with personal use, the key commands and features should be part of your brain.

There are so many cool new bindings. Something I really need, from Ableton Live use, is to move the selection the same amount backwards and forwards in time, and this is mapped to Shift-Control-Right Arrow for forward, and Shift-Control-Left Arrow for going backwards.

As for the funny symbols used for shift, control and so on, you need to look through the manual, the beginning has more info about the symbols used.

Ok, here’s a feature I really wanted, and it’s now well executed in Logic Pro 8. I really needed to see not just the bar values, but also the time line along the tracks. The reason is that with dance music we need to look at placing breakdowns at certain locations, usually one minute into the song, or four minutes, and so on. And also we would like to keep tracks nowdays below seven minutes in length.

I could now enable the upper line info so it contains both bar values and the current time. In the main window, top right side, just below the note icon, there’s a small drop down icon, when selecting this one I could specify that the time line indeed has both values.

In addition, it’s much easier now to make marker areas, I just place the locator position where I want, and hit control-K, and a new mark region is created. With Command-Return and the selected marker  I could also name it. So now I could mark out the song with what’s the intro sections, main parts, choruses, break-downs, and so on, making the pre-planning for mixes and remixes much easier.

I was looking at the free MacProVideo Logic Pro 8 video tutorials, including the brand new one just uploaded, about Ultrabeat, my favorite drum machine, even better now.

Anyway, they also have a really good free tutorial about Ableton Live clips, so if you ever want to know inside out about clips looking at a video tutorial, get this one.

The tutorial talks about the basics about launching clips, velocities, saving, and so on, but includes clip envelope handling, clip scrubbing, nudging, clip grooves and much more.

I think instructional videos are the best way to learn complex products such as Live or Logic. Books are also nice, but there’s something about hearing a human explaining something, and you could see how he or she does it, and hear the results, as well.

As part of getting my studio Mac in shape for the Logic Pro 8 installation, I’m just now going through and cleaning up a lot of disk space for the needed installations.

After a while of use, the disks, especially the boot disks, tend to collect stuff that’s no longer needed. And it’s important to have at least 10Gb or so available for virtual memory to work without having performance issues.

A really valuable tool for this is Omni’s Omnidisksweeper. There’s a free version, and a paid version. Basically what it does is to sweep through the disk and find all the biggest directories and sub-directories. Then I could go in and look what to delete. The paid version has a ‘delete’ button, but you could get by with just using the Finder and deleting the directories this way.

I found a lot of unnecessary material: usually you find these in the Library, Application Support and Application libraries, and also inside the user directories.

The other thing was to just remove all the Garageband Apple Loops and instruments, and the old Logic preferences. As part of the new install I will just install them again, and I don’t want to have duplicate versions floating around for many reasons.

I also noticed that I have two partitions on my main drive, which is good, as I could install Leopard later when it’s available, and keep Tiger around until I’m happy with the stability and the drivers. So if you have a brand new disk, make it at least a dual partition for this purpose.

Here’s what I did tonight.

I watched the MacProVideo free 25 minute series of videos about Logic Pro 8. They were actually very good. You can’t go into detail in 25 minutes, but you get a nice taste of what’s new in the interface, and what you could do, so I really recommend watching those instructional video snippets. You need to register, but that’s all. I expect them to release more paid instruction videos later this year.

Then I started reading the online manuals for Logic Studio, they are available here as PDF files. The main Logic Pro 8 manual is over 1000 pages long, so I just read parts here and there, and saved the PDF file on my laptop, so next time I have spare time, I could read a line here and there.

The massive package will have all the documentation in book format, as well, but there’s something about doing a find across the manuals for let’s see checking out if the folder handling is different from Logic 7 or not. All I could say so far is that there are so, so many refinements in the UI so I’m more than positively astounding. This will be a very good UI to work with — stated even if I have not touched the application myself yet.

The Fedex web tracking site said that the Logic Studio delivery would happen tomorrow, and of course FedEx stopped by our house today 1pm when nobody was home. Then to try to get them to reschedule the shipment, that didn’t work, even after multiple phone calls to FedEx. And they can’t call the driver who is working until 8pm, of some bizarre reason I can’t understand, in this age of cell phones.

It’s not the first time FedEx has done this to us — it seems they think that Silicon Valley is a ma-and-pa household, with the mother sitting home and cooking all day long, waiting for FedEx to show up. And you can’t even drive to their place and pick up a package, just wait until they arrive again, most likely tomorrow 1pm and nobody is home again. So I need to put out a slip and hope that the package will not disappear while it’s delivered, or hurry home when I could see on the web site that our friend FedEx the delivery man shows up.

Anyway, I hope to get the new Logic package for the weekend, as then I have plenty of time to install it and go through the paces. I think there will be a lot of new Logic users out there, so I will post more Logic postings on this blog, not intro material, rather articles so anyone gets into the ‘Logic philosophy’ when using this amazing package.

As long as FedEx is delivering, of course.