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.

I wanted to write a song about Boltzmann brains – an odd topic — and needed odd sounds. It’s been a while since I last used Absynth, and the natural inclination when making strange sounds is indeed to first use this remarkable software synth.

And yes indeed, it’s not just odd spectral sounds you get, also odd sounding bass lines, as well as even rhytmic patterns that are not from your standard drum machine setup.

The thing I’m usually struggling with Absynth sounds is that they are so right in the high end, so many harmonics — even with taking down some of the track levels, it still cuts through.

As for the track, it didn’t take long to compose and finalize. This was one of those cases where I did the composition in Logic, and exported 24-bit AIFF files out to Ableton Live, and then reassembled it in a mix-like environment in about one hour. I still need to do a proper mastering and final check-down.

The other technique worth mentioning when exporting from Logic to Live is that I then use the re-pitch mode if I key in the exact same BPM as in Logic. This means that the quality is very much the same, no warping artifacts. I also do this with the drum loops exported.

As for the release, I doubt this could be released as an underground dance track, it’s 120bpm, and has too much oddities happening. Anyway, another reason I have the podcast channel in place to release material that can’t be released through normal channels, anyway. Meanwhile, check out about Boltzmann brains and see what the cosmologists are struggling with just now…

Logic’s channel strips are a really nice feature. A channel strip is a super-preset of various plug ins and other settings that you could define to a specific channel via the Inserts popup menu. Logic Pro is shipping with hundreds of channel strips, including already define bass lines, pads, and so on. It’s very common for me to start a project by keying in a channel strip for a kick drum or a bass sound, and then change the actual software synth preset or switch to another software synth, while keeping in place the channel strip effects. This way I could for example have a nice compression setting in place and go from that forward.

Now, a couple of days ago I was working on drum loops, and I had the default Apple loops installed on my MacBookPro. So I wanted to make the default loops sound more interesting and unique. I was hunting around and noticed that the 08 Effects channel strip grouping had lots of really cool effect setup with multiple plugins working together. So I took a default drum loop, and then run it through various effect channel strip presets, each one creating a very unique and interesting new drum loop.

This is where a podcast would make sense — I will make a sample setup in a future podcast showing what happens with a plain vanilla drum loop, and how it sounds when applying various effect channel strips to this one.

I just watched this really nice instructional video with Vincent Di Pasquale, showing how to use Logic Pro in remixing projects. You need to have an account to watch these instructional videos from Apple, but it’s free and easy to create one.

There were many good techniques shown in this video, how to figure out the BPM from a capellas, how to easily create stutter effects, reverse reverbs for voices, how to layer multiple bass lines with combiational effects, and much more.

The other nice thing, shown at the end, was that all this, tons and tons of audio tracks, plugins and software synths, could be easily handled with a MacBook Pro. Another reason why laptops today are serious contenders concerning main tools for audio work.

Anyway, if you are a Logic user and especially doing remixes, I really recommend watching this 22 minute video, as well as the other Logic Pro videos at this site.

Ok, I was watching this youtube movie set from Taxi about how easy it is to make music for TV and films (and make lots of money). I don’t know, don’t like to directly criticize someone directly, but I do think it’s good to have a uniqueness when making film or TV music, instead of just doing like anyone else.

So, as Taxi promised to make a 40 second snippet in 30 minutes, I did this in 20 minutes, composing/mixing/mastering, with me brushing my teeth during the same time, too. Here’s Taxi of the Third (right mouse on the Mac to download). Feel free to use it for any film/TV projects you have out there. It should loop fine, too.

Note I might go in and fix and make it longer, or maybe not, I’m drowning in half-made material just now…

For those who like details, this is a 16-bar song with three themes, 80 bpm, done in Logic (hence why it was so fast to put together). The Pad is an ES2 patch, the drums done with various Ultrabeat sounds, with the intention to hit the oddest syncopes you could do in a minute or two. The bass is from a Zebra 2 patch, and there are some other odd sounds from a Zebra patch, and an EXS24 effect pad. All mixed within a minute using Ozone 3. On we go.

I’ve been using 24-bit 44.1kHz for any audio material since the first MacOSX computer running audio applications (a 2 x 867MHz PowerMac). I never had any performance problems, and it’s really good I didn’t go down the road of creating and using 16-bit samples. The additional 8 bits give far more dynamics range.

The upper end, whether 44.1kHz or 48kHz, or even higher, is a big topic of discussion, especially in the mastering side. Some think it’s good to have more higher end for especially software synths so that any filtering will happen far beyond the hearing range. Others think it’s overkill. I could live with 44.1KHz, it maps nicely down to CD and MP3/AAC release versions, so there’s one less sampling I need to need or worry about.

Anyway, with most of the material as 24-bit or MIDI instruments, the output needs to at some point be rendered down to 16-bit for CD, MP3/AAC and so on products. This is where you really need to do dithering of the 24-bit material down to 16-bit in the the final rendering. Logic Pro has excellent dithering algorithms you could select. Of some reason Ableton Live still does not have any. I’m using Izotope Ozone for the final dithering from Ableton Live, myself.

So what is dithering, really? The Dithering with Ozone Guide over at the Izotope web site has excellent explanations what is happening. But shortly, if you take down 24-bit to 16-bit, the software needs to approximate values, so it doe something like average, and it makes the transition points very digital and harsh — believe it or not, adding noise up there will make the digital curves smoother, so the ear hears the final result more pleasing.

While you are at that web page, download and read the Mastering with Ozone Guide as well — even if it’s using Ozone as the example, it has tons of excellent advise about mastering, I try to re-read this document every three months or so to keep my mind fresh about mastering issues.

OK, enough mastering posts — marketing next!

This is something that I found a couple of months ago, and wish I knew about it long time ago. The nice thing with looping in Logic is that you just drag in the upper right corner of the MIDI track to extend a region so it loops multiple times. The bad thing is that you usually want to turn the loop into a real midi track segment at some point, as you want to edit individual MIDI notes to make things more variated.

Well, Logic always had the menu option in the Region-Parameters called Turn Loops into Real Copies. And the default command shortcut is comand-option-control-L. So now it’s a breeze for me to just let it loop, and when I want to go in and start making a different kind of MIDI segment, use this to get me a copy of real MIDI notes. Bye-bye copy/paste of midi segments. Duh.

It’s actually good modern DAWs have a lot of functionality — never a dull moment. Anyway, I’m usually falling into the trap of reading the manuals inside out, and trying to learn it all in one big session. It seldom works.

It’s better to learn one thing at a time, one feature a day or so. For example, you could go through Logic’s feature set, for example the key bindings, and use control-P for a day until your brain is programmed to realize that: “Hey it’s nice that I could switch on the left side between control strip mode and normal mode.”.

Or with Ableton Live, use command-option-B for a while until your brain gets the message that this is for opening and closing the browser view.

It is true that you need to start from somewhere, but just get things up and running with simple projects, and then learn the complexity one thing at a time.