I created 15 instances of sound instruments. Then populated them with various pads and long-scaped synths. Each midi track has different lengths and is looped so this will go on for a while. The actual MIDI information was created randomly by just using the paint tool.

The rest was to set the BPM to 5bpm, maybe the slowest song I’ve ever created. And the total lenght is 600 or more bars.

The final touch is to add a couple of big Space Designers on the output to get that spacey sound.

That’s it. Took me less than ten minutes. I will let it run in the background in case it provides creativity or not. Sometimes this kind of music is so simple to make so it’s not even art, any longer.

It’s about also filtering any reverb and delay output. For example, Logic’s Space Designer has a dedicated EQ section where you could filter out any areas (or boost). In my case, to get that shiny guitar sound so over-used in the eighties, I’m removing the low end for the bus where guitar tracks are beeing fed to the Space Designer dedicated with a plate reverb.

Similarly, Logic’s Tape Delay also has this, some use it for those spacy dub feedback loops with high-end only, but it could also be used for other purposes. Also, Izotope’s Ozone reverb has a similar way, you could even carve out a specific spectrum where the reverb operates — a little bit like doing shoe-polish finish with a high-end reverb in the final mix.

Another feature good to explore is that many of these reverbs also have a pre-delay setting. If you use that one the reverb will not kick in immediately. The benefit is that the original instrument has the attack sound preserved so the initial starting part sounds clear and then the rest could have more or less reverb.

As with anything else, experiment with your ears, but I hope you take a closer look at the EQ options available in reverbs. In my case I’m on a constant battle against rumble frequencies that does not make sense for the final production.

One is the spontaneous creation of music — Miles Davis and his cats (musicians) just showed up at the recording studio to record. There was even this story in the documentary how he fired one player when he found him rehearsing solos in the hotel room.

I’ve fallen so many times into the trap of getting to the studio to write a specific kind of song or track; then feeling miserable when it does not happen (of some reason.) There’s nothing wrong to have a general idea where to go, but then the outcome should be what it should be.

So in honor of Miles Davis I took a one-hour session here and tried to write songs how Miles Davis would do if he had access to something like Logic Pro 8.0 today.

This was an interesting experiment as I first made a very complex drum pattern. This exact same MIDI pattern became the bass line. After that 18 different Zebra synths with different settings use the same MIDI pattern!

To shuffle it up, I took selected MIDI regions in the bass and drum sections and used the Logic MIDI function editor to reverse the MIDI notes or otherwise random shuffle them around.

This is a rough mix, from beginning to end this took one hour, but it shows the general idea of just going with the flow when doing music and not worrying about details. Tomorrow I will worry about those when finishing this up — don’t know where to use it, though, unless I do more jazz-centric music. Maybe jazz musicians should use more DAWs to make interesting music instead of getting stuck with their instruments?

Here’s the song, Made in Japan (Miles Davis-like, Rough Mix): Download audio file (MadeInJapan.mp3)

Anyway, part of the project I do then is to isolate the drums further so each of the drum sounds have their own track. It’s very easy, I just hit the +/file icon next to global tracks to duplicate an existing drum instrument track with all the plug-ins and so forth. Then I go into the piano editor and in one case remove all the kicks and in the second case all the snares. So I now have a separate kick and snare track. Do this with the rest and suddenly you have a nice set of drum controls in case you want to have separate drum sounds for each element. Yes, you could export all the instruments from Ultrabeat as separate tracks but this way I have more control of the instrument selection.

Which leads to the main trick. I had a hard time using the kick from the Ultrabeat’s Studio Tight kick, had some kind of booming sound that I could isolate with the the decay settings of the sample but I was still not happy with the actual kick sound.

Enter Ultrabeat’s Acoustic  Kick Bank patch. It has 25 different kicks mapped across the 25-key midi range. After selecting this patch for the kick track, all I needed to do was to increase the transposition in the top-left pane for the kick instrument track and circulate through all the kicks until I found one I liked in the actual mix — in this case Box Kick. So this is a handy way to key in the specific kick you want, if you don’t like the 25 in this set you could switch to another patch, or even load in another drum SW synth.

Needless to say, Ultravox has other similar collections of the same drum sound in the 02 drum banks sub-selection: snares,  hihats, acoustic, digital and so on. As you could also change the sound with those concerning the ADSR, filtering and so forth, you suddenly have enough options to spend your nights figuring out the perfect drum sound for the track.

This time I installed Massive as I’m looking at more electronic-centric film music as a project. It was indeed fun rediscovering this one. Here’s a quick sample I did as one of the first sounds: Download audio file (massive_pad.mp3)

Still with plenty of RAM and an Intel MacPro, Massive is still a massive CPU-eater, that’s for sure.

However, in most cases either freezing or bouncing is quite fine to do. I use bouncing quite a lot nowadays to render down material that could be played back later with less manipulations. It forces me to make production decisions on the fly so that I don’t get stuck in endless tinkering. I even re-configured the default key bindings so that Command-E in Logic is now exporting regions, not exporting whole tracks, as that’s the more common operations.

Another option is to save it as an AppleLoop and drag the green AppleLoop into an audio track. This way the saved 24-bit audio file is used rather than the midi file with the plug-in. And if you ever want to change the MIDI you could drag it into an instrument track and re-tweak. So there’s plenty of flexibility in the Logic environment. I tend to avoid freezing tracks as it takes a while to freeze a whole song track, but that’s always an option, too.

It was an interesting experiment. I loaded a home made guitar loop that was clean and created a Fender amp simulation with Line6 PodFarm. The drums were done with Superior Drummer 2.0 which I just love. And the bass I recorded quickly in and run it also through a Line6 PodFarm bass amp simulation.

I eq:ued each track heavily, the guitar track I took out the bottom end and made the mid-range somewhat more present. The bass I used the 100Hz as the main range to be heard. The drums were very much Superior Drummer with more ambient reverb added.

As for the actual mastering. First I boosted the mid-range with VintageWarmer. After that I loaded in Izotope’s Ozone — been reading those manuals a lot recently as Ozone has so many interesting gems here and there. I went through some of the presets, including the nice ones other Ozone users have uploaded to the Ozone site and found one that had nice exciter settings for the pop-feeling as well as the multi-band compressor worked fine for the low end. So it always makes sense to go through presets and figure out new avenues.

I also used reverb quite a lot, the plate versions. For guitars I used Logic’s Space Designer with plate impulse reverb settings. Both guitars had a common bus for this. The guitars are the same but with two tracks, pan:ed out in stereo and a -7/+7 delay so they are somewhat out of sync. 7 is a nice number, but you could try out any millisecond delay differences. I also added Ozone’s Plate reverb to the final mix to get more ’shimmer’ to the total sum of all the audio. Not much, one could easily get overboard with reverb.

Finally, to get the matching FM sound, I took Bourgeois Taggs’ Waiting For The Worm to Turn, loaded it into a separate audio track, took the matching EQ values from this using Ozone’s Matching EQ feature — Logic also has a similar EQ plug-in. The Ozone and Logic documentation has all the details so it’s not worth repeating it here.

I keyed in about 40% matching from the original, you can’t go 100% as the eq curves are very fine granular and it will just make it all sound metallic so you need to slowly get towards the original EQ setting. You could even fine-tune it more to your liking.

Here is the result: Download audio file (FM_Guitar_Shimmer.mp3)
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I spent 2.5 hours on this and I’m sure it could be done better but now I have the recipe if I ever need to produce similar guitar-centric power-pop in future.

Still, there’s a lot of usage of loops in unexpected situations I realized recently. One is songwriting. If you have a big set of private loops that you have saved for a while, Apple Loops or in case Ableton Live, any kind of audio material, you could quickly put together new songs from pre-existing material.

If it sounds good, then you could just re-record all kinds of parts and remove the loops after a while. The green AppleLoops are especially handy as they contain MIDI information so you could go in and edit each loop so they are unique across the section.

Next I will talk more about AppleLoops and my current vacation strategy to once-and-for all solve my workflow and organization concerning saving and keeping track of looped material.

After this I imported back the guitar riff into another track in Logic and now exported it as an Apple Loop so I could use it as an Apple Loop in Logic projects.

The idea is to have a huge set of guitar riffs and simple guitar melodies and then put together song structures using these riffs. The clean guitar signal is then processed with PodFarm entries so I could make the simple guitar sound to nearly anything. It’s a little bit like having MIDI files and use different software synths with the same MIDI file.

It actually works really well. The quick test showed that I could make a 3 minute arena-rock like track by taking three of the guitar stems, use heavy-distortion PodFarm patches, pan two guitars left and right and have something useful within minutes.

So, basically, having a set of private guitar riff parts makes it possible to quickly make songs and as they are tight  and as AppleLoops useful in all kind of places. It does not hurt to play real guitar tracks now and then but for exploration and making new songs this is a very interesting workflow I recommend. If you have 100+ riffs you could do nearly anything.

I ended up doing multiple tracks for both guitar and bass work — started to actualize the songs I did in a hotel room in Napa Valley. So I just recorded guitar and bass tracks with Create Take Folders, to save time.

Then I tried out selecting various parts from each take for the final comp. There are two benefits: If one take had a small mistake, I could quickly fix it by taking something from another take.

The other benefit I didn’t realize was that I could mutate the the recorded region; I copied the verses and choruses to final positions, did some quick swipe comp changes so that they sounded somewhat different — and job was done. So it’s a big time saver as there’s so much I need to record for the next month or so. Needless to say this is perfect for doing multiple solo takes and select the best parts — no need  for razor blades!

The mutation part makes the regions sound somewhat different so they don’t sound like a typical copy/paste operation with exactly same guitar lines playing, same tonality and so on.

I was originally just planning on using it for song tracks but this will be handy for all kinds of incoming recorded tracks. I don’t mind doing a region wiht create take folders, four-five different takes in a row and then puzzle together the final version. Wow.

Even if you are no computer geek, with some logic you could isolate what’s happening. For example, try to find the so called stack trace that crashed, that one is indicated in the dump. Then look at the output, this shows what was calling what. In most cases there’s symbolic information in this stack trace. For example, I do think that a majority of crashes inside Logic and Live are related to a faulty plugin. If you see that a certain plug-in is involved, disable it (either using Logic’s AU panel) or then just remove it from the plug-in directory (if not sure, use Spotlight to find the instance). If things work fine, then file a support request to that specific plug-ins manufacturer asking what’s going on. Most likely they know the problem; if not they are happy to know what is not working.

You could also read this somewhat technical Tech Note that talks more about crash reporter tool output.

I use AAC 192kpbs as there’s no need to dump a whole uncompressed WAV or AIFF file. Also remember that if you do in Logic a range selection, that will be honored when you do the bounce. So it’s all very quick: I select a representation of the song as a selection, open the bounce menu, select AAC with my default values, bounce, job done.

Here’s an example of a quick bounce I did:  Download audio file (guitar_stuff.mp3)
— anyway this is an MP3 file as I wanted to export samples of one of my odd/new directions, doing four-chord guitar music. Line6 PodFarm is fun fun fun.

I’m fond of tape delays, this after using a friend’s Roland Space Echo for a very long time as a guitar player. This was my attempt to sound like Edge (from U2.) There’s something organic about the fluttering of tape used in combination with delays, making the delay sound less exact as with digital delays that tend to easily sound very clinical.

There’s one tape effect I’ve been talking to other producers, trying to emulate, and that’s the fast speed tape run that sounds very tape-like, including the sound when the end of the tape starts to flap the rolls. If anyone knows how to get this sound, please let me know, as it would be fun using sparingly, to get a early-seventies experimental sound to the production.

PS: Boss actually has a Space Echo emulation pedal.

UltraSleep Sample Download audio file (Ultrasleep_Sample.mp3)

In addition I used Logic’s Space Designer with an aux bus where I routed the drums, the electrical piano and the guitar (not the bass) to make it sound like a live recording.

I don’t know if this will be a permanent fixture of my compositions, but it was fun just trying to do an improvisational session; first drums, then electric piano, then bass and the guitar part at the end. All done with single-takes, this is a live recording, after all!

If nothing else it will end up on my internet radio playlist, stay tuned when that’s around.

PS: This also shows that I have an overdose of Zappa in my mind just now.

Well, I found one way to program this in a nice way, not close,but close enough for my needs. I was working on a quick trio-like track tonight, project name “Zoo”, basically having a drummer and bass play in the background while a guitar track is doing Zappa like improvisations over it all.

What I did with the drums was to actually use Ultrabeat’s drum programming view to set a default pattern, then improvise within this pattern back and forth using cymbals and snare rolls, and so forth. I set the swing factor quite high. Next I just copied the patterns over to Logic’s track view where this Ultrabeat drum plug-in was enabled.

The next thing I started doing was to now and then copy existing small loops I’ve done later in the track. After doing about 30 smaller sections it was OK to drag over older ones here and there, as there was enough variations.

The other nice thing with Ultrabeat is that it’s easy to configure the drums, the layout in the stereo spectrum, the volumes and so forth.

What I will do next is to make sure the swing factor in the Logic track is big enough, as well as add ambient reverb so the sound is more muddled — limiting the robot-like drumming that happens when working with drum pattern systems.

All together, Ultrabeat is a very flexible drum system. If you don’t like Ultrabeat’s sounds, you could still use the pattern system generating drum patterns and use any other drum plug-in for the final sounds.

Here’s a quick dump of a song I started tonight, it’s only 30 minutes of work but you get the idea from the sample:

Transporter Bluez Download audio file (Transporter_Bluez_snippet.mp3)

The EBow was played on my oldest Ibanez guitar, via a Line6 PodXT. Then I added both a pitch shifter in Logic with a 12 semitone increase, as well as added a Delay Designer with a fun preset.

In addition I fed the signal with some other instruments to a bus with Space Designer and a large hall Inpulse Response setting.

This is of course work in progress, but it’s kind of cool to hear the idea I had in my mind a day before, i.e. use an EBow to make an symphony-like drone sound filling up the spectrum.

This is by the way one direction I’m going towards just now. No synths, just using guitars with very interesting processed sounds. I call it nu-psychedelic rock. No drugs used, just a clean mind that has fun. As for the transporter name, well I watched Star Trek NG tonight with my son…