alex_l

I wouldn't want to have to work on something in stereo and then not be sure until afterward what it would sound like in mono at the end, so i would either: use the gain plug to mono-ise the individual tracks for everything in the project or select the left or right channel on a per track basis for audio tracks if I was happy to lose one channel. How Logic sums to mono may possibly depend on how you have set the pan law but I don't know enough about the 'under the hood' stuff to be very useful

It sounds like a TB303 to me. It actually sounds remarkably similar to the one used in the Blade soundtrack that Public Domain (and some other people) sampled and may be a sample from that, but it isn't hard to recreate; You can use the ESM in Logic to make something similar in a couple of ways In the synth itself - use a mix of saw and square (more of the square) and with the filter resonance set to full and the cutoff to be modulated by the decay envelope, with the init set to provide the point to glide down from and the cutoff set where you want it to end up, and then a bit of distortion from the overdrive OR, to get (I think) a better 303 sound, don't use the built in filter or distortion (ie cutoff full, resonance zero and distortion off) and open up an autofilter instance, using the envelope in that to modulate the cutoff of the 6 or 12 dB filter and then a hefty chunk of output distortion. Finally, once you have made a patch you like, if you wanted to recreate this sound properly you'd have to resample it and bung it in the exs24 so that the filter tracking wouldn't have to keep up with the speed of retriggering. Also, you could EQ out the low end and distort again to get that over the top hardcore sound. I can put that advice into a channel strip setting and send it to you if you'd like

I agree with Eric - a minimum of 120GB is pretty much a necessity

From the link I posted

They have (unusually for apple) confirmed that a new mac pro will come out this year. Maybe they will be nice and spring a new logic on us at the same time.

I recently had to move out of my studio and resurrected my 2007/8 Macbook (core2duo, slow!) for audio duties. I replaced the slow HDD with a SSD and the improvement in track counts and sampler instruments has been vast. So I can definitely vouch for the benefit of SSD for something like audio where frequent spikes in disk access for streaming or samples are needed. However the drawback of solid state drives is the relative cost compared to traditional drives. One solution is to have your system and logic installs on the SSD and then a second drive (I don't think the interface should matter too much - they all have ample data rates) for your sample library and audio. I would advocate having a third drive as a backup for both of the others. The best possible solution (I think) is to have a 2 disk setup INSIDE your MBP. You achieve this by sacrificing your optical drive (you can put it in an external enclosure) and replacing it with a second drive. That way you can take advantage of the speed of a SSD and the capacity of a traditional hard drive. You can also use your existing HDD as the second drive, saving money, although a 7200RPM drive would be preferable to a 5400RPM - not sure which you would have. The kits can be purchased here - Other World Computing (macsales.com) I can vouch for the company and their products, delivery and service, but be aware you will have to pay tax on the goods coming in to the UK so you may find it cheaper elsewhere. Finally - you may be experiencing the disk spikes if you are running out of RAM and OSX is using virtual memory on the HDD. You may therefore prevent the problems from happening if you max out your RAM, although the speed of data access on the SSD would also help prevent this. Summary - I think the perfect solution may be; max RAM (8GB I think?), SSD system disk, swap the optical for HDD for audio ONLY, external backup via FW or USB. I'd avoid thunderbolt from a cost point of view atm.

There are some really good tips in that article. There are a couple of things that may be useful to mention to get more specific advice. What is your monitoring / studio setup like? Do you have a fully treated room and a good monitoring setup? How big is the room you are mixing in? Are you recording the amp or are you using a DI and plugins? How 'driven' is the bass sound you want - are you aiming for a crunchy, growly tone or a deep rumbling chest thump? How are you mixing the drums - particularly the kick? Are you going for low end energy in the kick or do you want the bass to do all the work? Sorry for all the questions! It may also be quite helpful to pick a track that exemplifies the problems you have been having and post it as an example.

Wave Alchemy - http://www.wavealchemy.co.uk/ - have some excellent libraries. They are well priced and they fit equally well into pop style tunes as more dancefloor oriented stuff. I have some and highly recommend them. There is loads of stuff in the Komplete bundle or Maschine that may suit your needs too (the problem there is usually too much choice!) For 'real' drum sounds I would also suggest looking at AcousticSamples - http://www.acousticsamples.net/ - again, they are not particularly costly

I think trifonic use FM8 a lot too. With soft synths I think the most important thing is not how the individual oscillators sound or what filter type they emulate etc but how the workflow of that synth suits you as the person sitting on the end of the keyboard. All synths can be used for all tasks if you know them well enough. Don't get too hung up on the characteristics of each, just spend time trying to make the sounds you want to make with each type of synth until you are happy with them!

Unfortunately dance music has always had less dynamic range than other music and as a result the loudness war has left very little option for any dynamic range at all. Many commercial releases are limited to the point of clipping and rms is often only -3 to -6dB for large sections of the track. In more aggressive genres, eg drum & bass and dubstep, clipping and massive amounts of distortion are chucked around all over the place during the mix and then again at the end. Sometimes you can squeeze a bit more apparent loudness by using some saturation as you go and a bit more at the end before you limit, and another way to squeeze a bit of headroom is to high pass at 30Hz or even a bit higher (brainworx do a nice free hi/lo pass filter that is transparent) but obviously this comes with a tradeoff of reducing the low end energy for the club. When you are mixing, how hard do you cut the low end from the non-kick or bass elements of the track? It's suprising how much more headroom you can get by constraining things to quite narrow frequency bands (I mainly mean layers of percussion, pads, reverbs etc here).

Is there much difference between these and the Acousticas IRs? I have those and love them but if these are different I will gratefully grab them too EDIT: I just read the info linked in another thread that these have better freq response and SNR.

I don't think it is necessarily user error. I have a similar problem on logic 8 on my macbook from time to time, but only when using the trackpad. I tend to use an external mouse so I have never tried that hard for a solution but I think it could definitely be the software

You could download the free kontakt player and see if there are any suitable sounds in there also, sorry to post a link to another forum but there is a thread with some links in here

Phase issues will be most apparent on lower frequencies so unison on kicks in particular may cause problems. However the 'just do what sounds good' argument is valid too! You may like the effect you get. If I do this I tend to bounce the track and resample it so I have loops of the sections that sound good (just as I do with synths). I would probably not do this with my main drum part though. more on percussion parts

The software mpressor is about $200 I think. I got it on sale so I would need to check. It has a really cool antilog feature, negative ratio and a tilt filter to emphasise the lows or highs more The emulation is done by the brainworx chaps at plugin-alliance.com. They also do the spl software and some of their own stuff. I'm a purely software guy so I can't help much in the hardware realm, but in software the kush audio ubk got a great review in sound on sound and may also be worth a look