Read this thread over at LogicPro Help in case you want to move your Logic setup between disks and you don’t want to reinstall and lose your settings.

I usually bookmark such threads using Delicious. If the title has something meaningful, it’s easy for me to find the bookmark later. Using Delicious is easier than having bookmarks on local browsers. You could sync bookmarks via MobileMe and Safari, but this is another approach.

By the way, here are my Logic marked bookmarks over at Delicious, in case anyone wants to check them out — another nice thing with Delicious is the option to export the bookmarks.

Also, if you are a serious Logic user, I can’t stop recommending reading LogicProHelp the forum from time to time.

Here’s a good YouTube tutorial concerning how to use Logic’s Vocoder with a bus sidechain.

There are so many non-traditional uses for Vocoder, not just the simple voice-animation, sometimes I feel one could spend days exploring vocoders for something totally new audio experiences.

Using a vocoder is also one way to break out from the current style of electronic music with no vocals and lyrics — sometimes I think it’s a shame that we don’t introduce human voices or elements into electronic music, just instrumentals. Vocoder use is one option. Also, if your voice is not that good, it does not matter, just sing, process it and otherwise make it sound interesting and different.

Usually when you work with creating and saving your presets, there are two paths. One is to save the presets using the plug-in’s own preset system, and save them to a known location. This is the cross-platform way, as the plug-in systems are designed to work with both MaOSX and Windows, and their internal presets are saved in a specific format.

However, Logic also has an aupreset format, you save this from the plug-in window itself? When is this useful? Well, in the new Logic Pro 8, when you select specific plug-ins, you could actually see their saved aupresets in the library browser to the right, and you could select them from there! Pretty neat, or what.

But it means that you need to save your presets in this format. Usually the location where the presets go, or in case you get .aupreset files from the net, is in the ~/Library/Audio/Presets/<name of company and plugin>/ directory. where ~ means your home directory. Just select this option from the downward icon next to thee Copy button when you save your own presets. You could also build your own sub-directories in this location.

There’s even a group-effort to export as many presets as possible in .aupreset formats — see this forum entry over at LogicProHelp with a listing of which third party plug-in presets have been exported so far, and how to download them (most likely you need an account on this forum to see this thread).

This is a feature in Logic that I start to rely on more and more. Basically, when you have saved a project setup with all the synth and plug-in settings, start tweaking on the existing settings. Immediately the compare button is hi-lighted. If you feel you went too far with the tweaks, hit on compare and you get back to the originally saved settings.

If you like the new value, save the project, and you could start again tweaking, if you wish

With this there’s no need to restore a project, or mentally keep in your mind: do not save, do not save, argh I did it….

Demand that every DAW should have this feature by default.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think you read by now everywhere that the new Logic Pro, or Logic Studio kit is out. I ordered my upgrade five minutes after reading the web site info.

I’m especially interested in the user-friendly time-stretching capabilities, that will make it really easy to integrate audio and midi material left and right. Anyway, when I get my kit I will post more updates about my findings. I will switch over all my music production from Logic Pro 7 to this one — if I find bugs I just file them.

Anyway, the price is just amazing, you get a lot for the bucks.

By the way, here’s the link to all the Logic Pro 8 manuals available from Apple as PDF files.

Is that it takes so much time when something is wrong, and I need to switch to engineering mode to fix it, rather than spending the few hours I have writing music.

Like today, I have this nice Tranzport device for controlling various DAWs, Logic and Pro. And of course it stopped working for Pro Logic, after all the upgrades and OS upgrades. Just nothing worked properly wit Logic Pro, while Live and iTunes worked just fine with Tranzport.

So I went hunting around on the web, and finally found this posting. So that explained it all, I remove Tranzport from the current control surface settings, rescanned, and got it finally working.

Well, next time it’s best to do something similar if a control surface is not working, in other words remove it, and rescan to get it back to pristine settings. Otherwise, this is not fun. We are talking about singularity and multiple world cosmologies, but still we have a hard time making musician-friendly hardware-software combinations… Maybe we really need singularity after all to get to a point where the studio just works.

Ok, I guess I’m bored, or just pushing ahead important work to be done. Anyway, drag an Apple Loop into Logic Pro and an instrument track — a green one so it has MIDI info.

Then, have fun with the Audio object settings, especially the transposition and velocity settings.

After that, switch the drum set to something unexpected, let’s say Ultrabeat’s Berlin Techno set.

You should have by now something really radical and interesting sounding, or not…

This should work with any other MIDI DAW environment. Take original material, transform the MIDI to something unexpected, and see what happens.

Sorry for the late posting, I’ve been away on a mini vacation to San Luis Obispo, one of our favorite cities in California, all kinds of micro climates, fun downtown (has even a record store, wow), lots of things to see. This time we climbed two peaks, Bishop’s Peak and Valencia Peak at the Montana De Oro State park.

Anyway, over at SLO (as the locals call the place) I picked up the latest Future Music magazine, or latest as we get it here in USA, the August #190 edition. The magazine was OK, but the video material on the DVD was outstanding!

There was this 120+ minute reportage of D. Ramirez working on a remix in his studio, using Logic Pro and various tools, and he showed a lot of really interesting techniques that I want now to try out, like using various Reactor plugins to take tracks and make various really odd variations of them, and then re-introduce those parts in breaks, and much more. I also liked his idea of always routing all the drums to a specific bus with compression, so the drum sounds were kind of ‘merged together’ with one compress to make the drum part more uniform.

Anyone interested in arranging electro house tracks should see the videos, as he shows inside out how it’s done.

There were also ten videos with various really cool Logic Pro tricks, such as how to side-chain the ES1 synthesizer, and how to do more interesting tricks with the EVOC vocoder, and much more.

I ended with reading the magazine in about 30 minutes or less, and watching the videos for hours!

I used to purchase every Future Music magazine for years, until I just felt that they started to repeat the articles, and there was little new. And I was never that keen on using their samples, were nothing special, and most producers make our own samples, right?

Anyway, the new DVD video sections are really the main reason I will get more FM magazines in future. It’s pretty expensive to get a monthly subscription from US, $140 when I looked at the exchange rate minutes ago — but one could always make a tax deduction of this magazine, as it contains a lot of information music producers would like to know about.

PS: Yes I do think D. Ramirez is one of the really cool electro house producers, he’s very original.

PSS: I started to look through DJ material I have here, and actually I had many D. Ramirez tracks, hehehe.