What commercial recordings look like in Logic!

[nikkik]

OT 000==== Way OT..

 

Didn't Steve V. auction his "mother ship" to help children or something?

 

Hmmm...I dont recall that one. I know the Mothership is still in business, so to speak, after being moved. Steve uses it (primarily) for artists who request it that are (primarily) on his "Favored Nations" label (cool label, cool philosophy BTW...IMO ).

 

I know Steve has done several auctions, but the only ones I am aware of were for older guitars he auctioned for fund raising. Maybe a few other pieces of misc. gear as well?

 

Such an inspiration... makes me smile to know Zappa recognized it that early on, and was enough of an inspiration himself, and took Mr Vai under his wing like that. Can you imagine being around for Vai and Bozio? Watching Bozio on "Baby Snakes" just makes me cry from the pure talent, and the obvious level of comfort behind any drum kit. Polyrhythms with both feet and one hand, while wiping his face, grabbing a swig of water, and I thin he even jokes or says something to his tech. Dave Brubeck blew my mind with hs piano work; Bozio made it impossible for what was left of my mind to ever be the same...so much talent in the world... there just is not enough time....

[editbrain]

i can dig.

 

yeah. i remember seeing it on MTV like 16 years ago. a child was sick so he auctioned off his studio to help pay for the surgery and hospital bills.

[SubFunk]

david wrote:

 

• Nobody cares about hitting the red on the channel strip level (which is justified since Logic is 32 bit floating point). A lot of the sessions I have seen have more than half the channel strips way above +6dBFS.

 

this is something i always pray, if it doesn't sound bad or unwanted, why the hell care about meters. the ears should be the only meter ever involved when it comes to music!

[rsandifer]

anybody got more stories or screenshots of some professional sessions? i think the bulk of this discussion has taken place in about 100 other threads.

 

You said professional so I am basing my posting around the following.

It was done for a major label

What you see on the screen will be offered for retail

The time was booked and paid for so I made $$$ on the work

The entire project is being ran as I type

Only 1 NON logic plugin was used.

Mastering was done in logic and the producer approved it

 

I guess that would put it in as a pro session.

I decided to use Logic Pro instead of Protools by choice. The talent wanted PT but after the first tracking on the logic daw they stuck with it.

 

We can also do a screen capture while tracking if anyone is interested. We can turn it into a small quicktime file.

[Darude]

This is a track going to be mastered as soon as I get the last tweaks and the final bounces done. It's a full on club record, driving techy trance with vocals (but I suck with the categories so when/if you hear it you tell me what it is... . Depending on the partner labels in different countries this second single of the up'n'coming album should be getting a release after the promo period in some weeks or months, the full album following soonish after that (and yes, I'm still working on finishing that). The first single was already released a little while ago in Scandinavia and Japan for eg. and the US label is about to follow right now-ish.

[David Nahmani]

Cool! Really cool!

 

To darudevil and rsandifer, please do post a link to the finished tune so we can hear it, when appropriate! Thanks!

[Darude]

Ok, so David, you asked for it, I was not going to advertise here directly...

 

The release of this track is still going to take a while but the arrangement of the earlier single is in a way similar ie. the greens up there are fx bits like booms, sweeps etc with reverbs and delays and sometimes those sidechain ducked, too, the yellow vox, the blues in the middle drums and perc, the browns in general basses, then the rest of the stuff down there melodic bits and usually they're yellow/orange/red part of colour spectrum but this seems to have more the green/blue shades for some reason...

 

The new single 'Tell Me' can be heard (and seen) on DaSpace. Like this newer unreleased one, the 'Tell Me' was done completely in Logic, and in that project the only 3rd party synth used was Atmosphere on one track, though it just happened so, I do often use for eg. FM8, Vanguard and Korg Legacy stuff. I use Logic's Channel EQ and Compressor on pretty much everything and also Waves plugs rock in my projects. 'Tell Me' (as all of my stuff) was mixed in the box and mastered professionally in a mastering house after the 'dry' offline final mix bounce. A room full of people actually saw that final arrangement live when I was one of Apple's artist guests at the Remix Hotel during this year's WMC in Miami.

 

EDIT: I added a screenset that I use for mixing. Upper part is a Track Mixer with all the tracks in the arrangement order, in the middle the mix and fx busses, under there the overview of the the arrangement. And the links activated so picking a channel strip lets me play a synth for eg.

Edited June 26, 2007 by darudevil

[David Nahmani]

Wow... holy crap. That sounds freaking amazing!! Is that you singing?

 

It was good to briefly shake your hand at WMC but unfortunately I was stuck in the martini room the whole time you did your presentation. That's what kinda sucks being in my position: I get to always miss all the guest-star presentations at Apple events, since I'm usually working in another room.

 

I like that track a lot.

 

PS: I definitely encourage you to share any of your Logic tracks in the "Listening Booth" forum!

Edited June 26, 2007 by David Nahmani

[Darude]

Nope, not me singing but my hometown rocker buddy Tonto Nuotio. It's a little Ozzy-ish isn't it? My "assumed" style is trance but this rock-ish vocal on this kinda track has gotten a great reception by the general public except the purist tranceheads are not taking it too well... But hey, can't please everyone... And there are dub mixes and remixes for that, too.

 

Yeah man, it was nice to see you again in Miami. Dude, I know what you're saying about missing out because you're working (I miss quite a lot of my fellow djs spinning myself you see)... But you're doing an important thing there so don't worry!

[David Nahmani]

Yeah well at least I got to experience Uberzone at Area 51, which was a crazy experience. Even the taxi trip from Miami Beach (complete with 2 hour wait to get a cab) to Downtown Miami in itself is quite an experience.

 

Ozzy? Well... I certainly didn't think that... but I guess in a way maybe slightly? So I'm as far as a purist tancehead that you can be, and I personally love that vocal! It's got just the right amount of edge to it!

[Darude]

Yeah, I love the vocal too! Edgy is what I was after and after the normal fixes I tried to leave it alone, to leave it quite rough. It's doubled with actual takes and of course it's treated with eq, comp and fx and even tuned but I decided not to make it roboticly spot-on and lifeless and I hope people approve

 

Well, the Ozzy-comment just because many people have pointed that out and now I hear it myself, too... Actually Tonto can do very Ozzy-like vox deliberately if he wants to but when we recorded those takes it was not his intention. I did listen to Bon Jovi, Twisted Sister and some Ozzy etc when I was a kid and I did write the vox kinda thinking something like that, the good old 80's glam rock or heavy metal and we also talked about that during the session. Trance & rock rulez!

[Zicky]

Hi everyone, I thought I would share some interesting observations I have about how professionals use Logic in the real world.

 

Over the past few months, I have had the privilege of working with high-caliber professional producers (http://www.logicprohelp.com/clients.php), and on top of that, I have had the opportunity to open Logic session files of chart topping hit songs from multi-platinum producers in various genres, ranging from pop to rock to dance to rap to hip-hop, so my comments will be mainly for those genres. Classical, orchestral, jazz or acoustic recordings might follow different rules.

 

After looking at all those sessions, here are 3 points I find interesting:

 

• 99.9% of commercial recordings are recorded and mixed at 44.1KHz or 48KHz and 24 bits. (and after talking with some of the major industry players, it seems that's true of all modern music records, not just the ones produced in Logic)

 

• Nobody cares about hitting the red on the channel strip level (which is justified since Logic is 32 bit floating point). A lot of the sessions I have seen have more than half the channel strips way above +6dBFS.

 

• A lot of producers use pretty much 70 to 80% Logic plug-ins, and just a couple of 3rd party plug-ins. Several highly-successful producers (I wish I could name names) use 100% Logic plug-ins AND instruments !!!

 

It really seems to me that while many spend time arguing, debating, testing, and fighting over the advantages of higher sampling rates, the importance or proper gain structure in a 32 bit floating point mixer, or the necessity of this or that 3rd party plug-in that will change your life, a few couldn't care less and just use their ears, producing incredible sounding results and getting the money they deserve for it.

 

My conclusion? Manufacturers would LOVE for you to believe you need higher sample rates, faster computers, and more 3rd party plug-ins. Meanwhile, in many cases, you don't. The big advantage of Logic over competing DAWs is how Logic is self-contained. It's a package coming with high quality plug-ins, and high quality instruments. In many cases you have more than you need to make a beautiful record. Don't get too caught up in those debates, and spend more time producing music!

 

 

Thank you, so much David for mentioning this. I myself is very obsessed with plug-ins, and my music suffers, cause I would always start something new, as soon as I get a new plug, and I never finish anythink. So thx again for the fyi.....

[Dante310]

wow, darude...i'm a huge fan of yours! i had no idea you were on this board. thanks a lot for posting those screens up, the song is fantastic and its cool to see a pro session even though i do a different genre of music.

[MidiMonk]

Great job darude, was not familiar with your work till now.I Like it a lot and thank you for sharing screenshots.

[Waterboy]

I feel somewhat foolish to say this: but those session pics look awesome! It's almost like looking at a picture of a painting or something from both of you! The more I look at Logic stuff - the better it looks (IMHO) when compared to other DAW's ...... thanks for those pics rsandifier & darudevil!!

[VSOP]

Darude...This might be a stupid question.. But What resolution or Monitor size are you using.. Is that what the 30inch displays look like? I wish I could get that much stuff on the screen at once.. If its a reolution or preference thing please let me know.

 

MH

[David Nahmani]

It's got to be a 30" cinema display with 2,560x1,600 resolution.

[VSOP]

Thats a sick amount of realestate

[Ashermusic]

Nah. 2 17' trumps it vertically, which IMHO is more important for Logic than horizontally, and it is a heck of a lot cheaper. Do the math.

[woodenboy]

Awesome track darudevil!!

 

Once again highlights how much I wish I could get better sounds from synths. I know what kind of sounds I love but I just cannot get my head around all those controls!!! (I'm a pianist and guitarist... quite new to all this synthy stuff).

 

BTW guys, this has nothing to do with plugins or sounds but one thing I've noticed is that you use anything but the default track colours. It makes everything so much easier to see when it's not all brown and blue. Are you going into each track and selecting colours, or is there some way to automatically have each track take on a different colour?

[simonphoenix]

LOL... I must have been sleeping when this thread took place!!

 

I dig discussions like this.

 

It's always been my opinion that resolution, expensive converters and having some sick-ass plugins comes 2nd to talent, ALWAYS.

 

And you'll find that in most cases alot of the greatest things ever recorded all spawned off some basic spontaneous moment that didn't require any of these things. Granted a majority synthesized music my diverse from this.

 

It's nice to have a variation in the tools we choose to use, to add that splash of a different color to our projects, but in the end it's never these things that make or break a good composition.

 

I did Logic's plugins a lot, and they have certainly raised the bar in the past for any DAW to compete. A lot of us get fooled into believing we need to be running at 96KHz or above, using a ProTool system with expensive 3rd plugins. Most of this is just propaganda perpetuated by the ignorant, or plugin developers themselves.

 

And in the end... the public... they are NEVER going to know or care what we used or how we used it as long as it sounds great and suits its purpose.

 

That's the bottom line. And all the pros know this!!!

 

And Logic certainly has the tools to achieve this.

 

I approach music in the way where I pretty much work with the basics, as in I rarely work with FX at all, not even reverb until it comes to mixdown. While there are some exceptions - like building on a rhythm that was generated by a delayed Rhodes, for example -I tend to focus more on the arrangements and the true art of good songwriting without falling back on tricks and effects.

 

So in the end when I do add this stuff back in I can really take my projects beyond the next level, because I paid attention to the ENTIRE process!!

 

If you want to improve something, instead of spending more money on plugins, learn, evolve develop your skills. Reinvent things, try new ideas, use your old plugins in new ways, improve your writing abilities. These things will take you so much further than any new plugin will.

 

In those immortal words -"Don't believe the hype!!"

 

Nice going Darude... I don't suppose I can have your sick-ass monitor!?!?..LOL

[Darude]

Yeah, I should've know... Should've taken the screengrab with smaller resolution so my (extension of you know what) 30" CHD wouldn't have caught the attention. The CHD by the way is an amazing screen and works like a charm with Logic, pretty much everything you need to see at once fits on one page. I'm doing way less jumping between screensets these days.

 

I'm so with David and everyone else with the "just make music" thinking... I definitely have had problems, and still do sometimes, with all the plugin instrus, fx and processors, all that can be sooo distracting and overwhelming. The v2.0 or the other brand is always supposedly cooler and nicer than what you're using right now... What load of money and time wasting advertising crap! It's true, Logic is great, Waves is great, Sonalksis is great, NI is great, Korg is great, almost every brand is great but you don't need them all. My first album was made with an Atari and Cubase on a black & white 14" (or was it 12") screen with an ASR-10, JP8080 and Nordlead2 and a Mackie 24/8. I still am very proud of what my then producer and I achieved but if you listen to those track these days next to the present production the sound quality is just sooo much tighter and better today. Stlll, It's ALL about the track, the composition & lyrics really though. There has always been hits and great records with or without Dolby noise reduction and mixed in the box digitally or with a crappy 60's analog mixer. If it's a great record a little hum and hiss doesn't matter. The technology of today is just there to help us make cleaner and technically advanced stuff to begin with (and of course it's faster with total recall etc) but like someone there pointed out it's still about the writing, the ideas, the "hook".

 

What I've noticed now that I've been working with Logic for several years is that my arrangements have kinda gotten simpler. Yes, there can be 70 or more tracks but not all of them are on at the same time and also my melodic and rhythmic content has gotten "smarter" or different bits are supporting each other instead of just trying to fill everything trying to make the sound bigger. And this is not compared to my earlier releases which some of them are very straightforward but to my first year or two of working with Logic with all the possibilities. Many of those tracks will never see the light of day because I was just all over the place adding this synth and that reverb and this compressor and then another one with "different character"... Just because I could. Blaah. A mess.

 

I've made an agreement with myself (yeah, laugh away) that I can upgrade to the next version of a plugin but I won't buy new plugins for now and that 'for now' has now been going on for almost two years. I have a lot of things to choose from already but not getting anything totally new has made me concentrate more on what I already have and to use what I've gotten to know well. And I still have probably thousands of presets that I haven't even listened to yet.

 

About the track colours: You can make certain tracks certain colour by default and then the new regions are that colour too. After a project gets bigger the different track colours gets messed up for me so I usually end up colouring the regions manually. I just use (alt + c) which for me is the key command to the colour picker window and change the colours as I go.

[qtruck]

Hey Darudevil, I noticed on many of the channel strips you have 3 and 4 instances of the channel eq, sometimes inserted one right after the other. Do you need more eq bands? Higher boosts/cuts than one insert will allow? Is this some kind of special technique?

 

Thanks for posting.

[simonphoenix]

Yeah that's something I noticed too... you went absolutely sick with some of your EQ'ing.

[Darude]

Haha, I'm sure some people would not agree with my eq decisions...

 

But yeah, I do run out of bands as I tend to do a lot of narrow dips (Q 6-10) of say 2-6dBs to get rid of unwanted "squealing" of a ringing frequency of a cymbal or hi freq digital distortion caused by bitcrusher for instance. And I tend to do the pinpointed dipping as I go and then when I'm preparing and doing the final mixdown there's always something that I want to fix, usually "bigger lines" so I open another instance and do, say 1-2dB, Q 0,9, 800Hz dip to get the something not needed taken gently down and bumping up similarly around 2-4kHz to bring a synth up a touch. I do the heavy accurate tweaking both soloed and not soloed and I tend to take out about everything that doesn't contribute to the overall sound ie. that I don't hear supporting the whole mix.

 

Somehow it helps me to have the "cleaning up" and the "big picture" done with separate instances, so not all those eqs have all bands active. Go figure! Also sometimes having an eq before or after a bitcrusher for eg. makes all the difference to the sound, so I'll have one before to get the sound in general I'm after and one or more after to clean up stuff etc... Some of my colleagues have told me that I go overboard with the eqing but I don't know, I don't care, it works for me but in no way I'm saying what I do is what others should do. What I love about electronic music is that I can break the non-existing rules all over and over again as the final result is all that matters.

[simonphoenix]

I think most of us who heard your recording would agree that your approach works, it does sound great. And it's little peculiarities like that which gives you music it's own identity... as with everyone else who would have adopted their own approach.

 

I, for example, have been known to ADD some of those not so nice sounding frequencies back into a sampled instrument, because they are often processed. I do this so the sampled instrument sounds a little more authentic. I don't do too much mind you.

 

I also rely a lot on my MIDI gear, my keyboard in particular because it injects my OWN sound individual in amongst the stock-standard Logic sounds.

 

I compress during recording.

 

And I almost always tweak a sound for it's purpose, like those found in Channel Strip Settings. I sometimes even replace their instrument, for a MIDI alternative using the External Instrument plugin. This also helps me dial back on the DSP in my ageing Mac.

 

So it these little thing in the end, together that make ALL the difference in how we sound.

[uncleinabucket]

It's always been my opinion that resolution, expensive converters and having some sick-ass plugins comes 2nd to talent, ALWAYS

 

I was content to lurk in this sometimes off-topic (but good) thread until I read this. I agree that the person makes a bigger difference than the equipment. Also, effort means more than talent.

 

I want to iterate that "talent" is a misleading word. There is no such thing as someone who is born good at anything. At best there are people who learn certain skills faster. The word "talent" implies an innate ability and the very fact that ability can be practiced makes it not innate. The only thing that talent can apply to IMO is learning. Not that anyone here has said it, but It is wrong to think that having talent or not is what determines how far someone will go. To put it simply, talent does not reflect potential.

 

I'm not saying that everyone learns at the same pace but I am saying that EVERYONE can learn. It does not take talent to be good at something. It takes effort.

 

If you are new to music or at least the technology of it don't be discouraged. You'll get it. The more you work with it the better you will get.

[simonphoenix]

I follow by the understanding of this principal.

 

Talent is something that can be learned.

 

A Gift is something that comes very naturally and without much effort, if any at all.

 

It's all in how you interpret the word talent.

 

in the end someone can put very little effort into something and it may sound brilliant, others may put a lot and it may not even sound as good. So effort is pretty inaccurate as a gauge.

 

What you can gauge is the end product and talent, effort or effortless will make itself apparent.

 

I encourage newcomers, but consider this - Even the best of the best doesn't know it all or can do it all. And indeed, the best of us never stop learning entirely. It will always be a life-long pursuit.

[uncleinabucket]

Even the best of the best doesn't know it all or can do it all. And indeed, the best of us never stop learning entirely.

 

Thanks. A much better said version of the idea i was trying to express. I would extend it by saying that the best remain the best by learning constantly.

 

Refocusing on the topic, seeing a commercial file set-up and working is nice. Thanks for sharing it! My frustration with third party plug-ins has persuaded me to work almost exclusively with the logic bundle.

[JayGee]

OK... I was content to be passive on this one, but...

 

Darude - GREAT TRACK! Sounds like a mix of Yes-type keyboard stylings peppered with rock over trance. Who cares to pigeon-hole it?! It sounds awesome.

 

I was pleasantly surprised by the very limited use of 3rd party plugs. I've always stood by the idea that Logic can operate without ANY, but sometimes 3rd party plugs are just easier in a certain situation.

 

Hearing/seeing work like this is inspirational.

 

Keep up the good work/tunes!!

JG