I’m creating a series of very short Logic tutorials, partly to help me out with a student I’m currently teaching but also as Logic’s manual buries this information deep within hundreds of pages of explanation and I’ve not yet seen other sites cover this in the simplicity and succinctness it requires.
Since its inception in the early eighties, MIDI has cemented its presence as the standard communication method between electronic instruments. It’s well known for its studio applications for electronically composed and sequenced music, but what has MIDI ever done for the guitar?
Reverb is by far one of the most useful and interesting effects in modern production. From a mixing point of view it can be necessary to place dry recordings in an imagined space, from drum mics, lead vocals, guitars, percussion etc.
Most DAWs now come bundled with a plethora of really useable effects plugins. Apple’s Logic in particular has numerous great options for modulation, spatial effects, distortions and dynamic control and with the latest 10.2.1 plugin re-skin they all look pretty darn sexy. Ableton
Something that regularly crops up is questions about demystifying mastering, and whilst I’m not the person to go into detail about exactly how to master your own music, there is a case for shining some light on the subject.
Equalisation, more commonly refereed to as EQ, is the process of balancing frequencies to give a more pleasing overall sound to an individual track, group of tracks or master.
There was a time when studios were only comprised of hardware. Whether that be sequencers, drum machines, synths, reel-to-reel tape recorders, mixers, effect units, patch-bays, compressors, EQs and such – these were the mandatory tools in order to take your music from concept to something physical.
Since the switch to 64-bit, I’ve had my plugin library halved and had to re-evaluate what I can and can’t use on a daily basis when producing.
Sampling is such a given in modern music that we probably don’t give it much thought these days – lifting a musical loop, breakbeat or even spoken word sample from someone else’s record is almost second nature to producers and has been commonplace since the explosion of sampling in the early 1980s.
Parallel processing is a technique for mixing an effected version of a track with a dry version. This is particularly helpful when you want to process a sound but the plug-in doesn’t have a dry/wet knob or you want to be able to control the effected signal with additional effects, such as EQ, reverb etc.