When it comes to tracking, editing and mixing audio, I spend most of my time in Pro Tools, but I made this tutorial as a resource for those artists who are producing their own music using Logic Pro and would like to learn more about editing audio in Logic without having to rely on flex audio, which, for a number of reasons, is not ideal for use on live instruments. In the above video I aim to provide a painless and relatively quick workflow for pocketing/tightening instruments like guitar and bass in Logic Pro without using the flex audio feature set. This tutorial might also be of use to anyone use to using Pro Tools who find themselves needing to quickly do some corrective rhythmic audio editing in Logic. WHY IT MATTERSProper, clean (free of artifacts) editing and mix prep will generally help you get the most bang for buck when hiring a mix engineer, because it allows said mix engineer to jump right in and do what you hired them to do with fresh ears, as opposed to having to first go through the session and clean up poor edits and tighten up performances that might need it. This saves your mix engineer time and keeps his or her efforts focused on the task at hand: making your music sound terrific. While flex audio can be very helpful and convenient during the creative process, it is too prone to audible artifacts (in both it's stretching in slicing forms) to be usable on recordings of live instruments used in the final mix. This is not a knock on Logic in particular, as this is the case with most stretching algorithms. A COUPLE NOTESHere are a couple things that I note later in the video that might be better said up front:
- You do not need to edit performances into perfection. In fact, it may benefit a song to leave some variance, timing wise, in various performances. That having been said, it is generally a good idea to always make sure that the bass guitar is either right on with the attack of the drums or just a hair late. A bass note being struck prior to the corresponding drum hit never really sounds right and a great many mix engineers will ask that clients "pocket" the bass part to insure this will not be the case. Guitarists tend to float a bit more timing-wise and you might want to retain some of that, but when there is a particularly rhythmic staccato part, be it a Chic-like funk rhythm, or a driving Metallica-esqe driving, unified rhythm, it's generally a good idea to make sure those areas are particularly tight. - You do not need to have played to a click to use this technique. If your band prefers to follow the ebb and flow of a drummer who is not tied to a click/metronome, you can simply create a tempo map from your drummers performance using the beat mapping features of Logic Pro. This will create a "grid" that follows the drummer and will allow you to use the technique demonstrated to tighten the performances of other instruments in relation to the drummer's performance, but without having to alter the drummer's performance to adhere to a strict grid. The same approach is, of course, possible in Pro Tools, but this tutorial is specifically for Logic users. Anyhow, I hope you enjoy my first tutorial and find it useful! Hit subscribe and like the tutorial on youtube if you'd like to see more! Phil Dubnick | Mix Reel | Private Voice, Guitar, Songwriting and Music Theory Lessons
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I’m not the first to make this observation, but comedians and musicians are, in many ways, kindred spirits. In their work, both comedians and musicians try to create expectations and, subsequently, resolve said expectations in unexpected yet gratifying ways. Both work in an art form that can only be experienced by their audience in a linear fashion. Both work in an art form so visceral yet ephemeral that their audience rarely understands what they do as work; people who go to see a comedy show can’t tell you if the comedian is good, only whether they laughed, just as the average person doesn’t think about how well written a song is, only whether they like it or not. Both have a highly developed respect for the importance of timing. Both seem to have an unfortunate tendency to mistake the therapeutic nature of what they do as a substitute for actual therapy (it is not, btw). I suppose it is because of these parallels to the musical mind that I find comedic minds so fascinating.
It is because of this fascination with the comedic mind that I am a regular listener to a podcast you may or may not be familiar with called WTF with Marc Maron. At the heart of the podcast are Mr. Maron’s amazing interviews with fellow comedians as well as the occasional musician or actor. The interviews tend to be so unguarded, personal, and revealing that it can almost feel like you are guiltily eavesdropping on an intimate conversation between two old friends or on some kind of therapy session. (For a great example, check out Marc’s two-part interview with Louis C.K., available here and here.) Really, if you’re a fan of quality radio, from Howard Stern to Fresh Air and This American Life, you should really check out the show, if you haven’t already. At any rate, as I have listened to the show over time, there is one observation about comedian Chris Rock that keeps popping up, made by several of the comedian guests such as Aziz Ansari, as well as Maron himself, that I find particularly interesting and, in my opinion, very applicable to musical artists and songwriters alike. STRIPPING DOWN STAND UP AND THE POWER OF A STRONG FOUNDATION When the biggest comedians in the world—people like Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock—are working on material for a special or for a new set, they will typically pop into a small comedy club like the Comedy Cellar in NYC (famously depicted in the opening of Louis C.K.’s show) on an off night and try some of their new material. The logic, as expressed by Jerry Seinfeld in his fantastic documentary Comedian, is that with a random audience like that, you get five minutes of good will because of who you are, and then the audience members start responding very honestly: if a joke isn’t funny, no one laughs. What is particularly interesting about the way Chris Rock approaches this practice is that he completely eschews any sense of personality or delivery when trying out his new material. Rock, who has, perhaps, the most famously recognizable and highly developed sense of delivery and timing in comedy today, purposely tries out his new material by reading jokes flatly off cards, completely stripped of his world famous electric energy and comedic delivery. The idea? If a joke is stripped of everything but the words on the page and it still gets a laugh, then he is already starting off on solid footing; there is no confusion about whether it is the material or the delivery that is getting the laugh. While much is often made of Rock’s singular voice, delivery, and ability to create a sense of unyielding momentum in his shows, it is clear from his approach to developing new material that he does not rely on the strength of his delivery or the pacing of his sets to get the laughs he’s aiming for. He knows that all the charm, stage presence and set planning in the world means nothing if he doesn’t have funny material to begin with. So what can musical artists and songwriters learn from Chris Rock’s approach to developing new material? While the importance of production, performance, and arrangement should not be diminished, there is ultimately nothing more important than the song itself. If a song works when stripped to down to its basic essence—just a voice and a guitar, or a voice and a piano—it is far more likely to soar once all the other ingredients are added. As an experiment, take the voice memo recorder on your phone or a handheld recorder and play your best song or songs through with nothing but a single harmonic instrument and your voice. Transfer the recording to the portable listening device of your choice, and then forget about it for a few hours, maybe even a day. Once a little bit of time has passed, throw the song on repeat, and go for a walk or do a somewhat mindless task that allows you to lose yourself in the music without overanalyzing it. After a couple listens, do you get the urge to fast forward through a part of the song? Do you start to focus more on the mindless, dull task at hand than you do the song? If so, there is probably some room for improvement in the underlying song and it might well be worth it to revisit and revise till the song stands up when stripped down. Phil Dubnick | Mix Reel | Private Voice, Guitar, Songwriting and Music Theory Lessons The internet is filled with tips on nearly every aspect of music production. Some info is spot on, some, not so much. Still, with the wealth of information on recording available out there, I'm always surprised that certain basic, easily avoidable mistakes continue to be made. On this blog, I hope to offer some practical and, for the most part, inexpensive steps you can take to vastly improve your recordings. My approach will be less gear-lust centric than most, and my hope is that readers will find that both refreshing and helpful.
So, without further ado, let me start with: SIX SIMPLE STEPS TO MAKING A FAR BETTER RECORDING 1) Learn about and use proper gain staging. Educating yourself about proper gain staging might sound like an overwhelming task, so to put it as simply as possible: Leave headroom at every stage of the recording process. What does that mean in layman's terms? It means don't overload the capsule of the mic, don't overload the preamp input, and don't overload the analog-to-digital converter/audio interface. When gauging how hot your level is going into Pro Tools, or the DAW of your choice, make sure you do so without any inserts instantiated and with pre-fader metering engaged. Check your levels by singing or playing the loudest, most aggressive part of the song at the actual volume it will be performed and make sure that while you are doing so, the signal never, ever exceeds -3db on your DAW-of-choice's meters, not even momentarily. In fact, you are generally better off leaving even more headroom -- aiming for around the -12db ballpark would be ideal and pretty much insure you won't spike past -3db at any point. This is one step I can't emphasize enough: always leave headroom. 2) Be aware and mindful of the potentially negative effects of proximity effect in terms of adding overbearing low end to signals that do not benefit from it. For example, a male voice recorded at too close a proximity adds a disproportionate amount of bass that leaves the performance sounding as if it were caked in sonic mud. How should you record vocals? If you are using a condenser mic that is fairly directional, have the singer leave some distance (10 to 12 inches from the capsule), but make sure the singer is aiming his or her mouth directly at the capsule and on axis. This is all assuming that you are not recording in an overly reflective space and/or you are using a product like the SE Reflexion Filter, which can help curb the effects of recording in a somewhat reflective space (more on that later). Another example of proximity effect is one that I commonly encounter when mixing: acoustic guitars. It’s not uncommon for self-taught engineers just starting out to mic an acoustic guitar at close proximity, pointing a directional mic directly at the soundhole. This generally results in a very low-end heavy, woof-y sound that is not easily corrected by subtractive eq, due to the disproportionate nature of the weight being added to the low end. If pointing the mic directly at the soundhole of an acoustic guitar is a bad idea, what is a good starting point when recording acoustic guitar? Try aiming the mic directly at the 9th to 12th fret of the fretboard from about 10 to 12 inches away to start, and move the mic accordingly from there (still pointing the capsule at the fretboard, but moving the mic slightly towards or away from the soundhole). Even on instruments that can benefit, however slightly, from proximity effect, be careful not to go overboard. For example, if you are recording electric guitars with a typical SM57/MD421 combo at close proximity, be sure to experiment with the roll-off settings of the 421 to insure that you don't get an inordinate buildup of low-end energy on the guitar. 3) If you are using more than one mic on a source, phase coherence is absolutely crucial. On drums in particular, proper gain staging, making sure every mic is as phase coherent as possible, tracking in a room that is at least somewhat acoustically appropriate for the task at hand, and taking the time to properly tune the instrument(s) will make a much more significant difference than gear alone. 4) As mentioned earlier, when recording vocals, it's best to try to get a decent distance from any hard, reflective surfaces, and to use products like reflection filters and moving blankets to tame unwanted reflections, which will be amplified in the mixing process by compression. If you get a reflection filter, I'd recommend something like the ones made by SE Electronics over most, as a lot of them simply use material that just absorbs the higher frequencies and dulls the sound of the voice. The SE reflection filter works by a combination of both absorption and defusion/dissipation of sound. 5) Do not over-process anything you are recording. Remember: you can't unscramble an egg. Compression, EQ, reverb, etc., cannot be removed if they are committed to at the tracking stage. The best possible approach, IMHO, is to track with the goal of simply capturing the instrument as accurately as possible as you hear it in the room. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT, attempt to capture the instruments you are recording as you think they should sound in the final mix. While you do want to avoid warping the sonic image of the sound being captured at the tracking stage by being careful to avoid proximity effect, etc., absent the all important element of context, there is an equal danger in attempting to "thin" out a signal too much at the recording stage or to squeeze the punch out of a snare drum by over compressing it going in. 6) In my experience being on both sides of the glass (I'm also a singer), giving vocalists the ability to monitor their own performance with compression and, depending on how their voice naturally records, EQ in their headphones (without recording said processing) can make a huuuuuuge difference in their consistency and overall performance. The above is an often undervalued factor, but it makes sense: a singer's ability to sing on key is determined, in large part, by the ability to be very consistent in use of breath support, regardless of the pitch or volume he or she is trying to achieve. When singers can't hear themselves properly and start to strain, the air pressure they are applying to their vocal cords is greater than expected and they, very typically, go sharp. Once they go sharp, they are likely to get overly self-conscious and things start to snowball negatively after that. Applying subtractive eq to the low-mids for singers with a "tubbier" natural tone can help as well, but for a different reason. Without the corrective eq, you might find the singer manipulating his or her own voice in a negative way as a sort of makeshift eq—an attempt to thin the gap between what the singer is hearing in the 'phones and the way the singer wants to be heard in the final mix. Taking the time to get your vocalist set up with the right compression and eq settings for monitoring his or her voice in the headphones will allow them to sing in a very natural, comfortable way, which, in turn, allows them to focus on the most important element of their performance: the emotional connection they feel to the material. The time and effort you put into insuring the singer has a great headphone mix will pay off tenfold; trust me on this one. While PT HD systems make low latency monitoring with compression and eq very easy, even with high track counts, there are many ways to make this possible with any DAW with the help of various interfaces by Presonus, MOTU, and Focusrite that have DSP-assisted cue mixers built in. These DSP-assisted cue mixers allow you to use the DSP power built into the interface to avoid both the CPU spikes that can result from large sessions being recorded at low latency settings and the latency incurred at the lowest settings on your DAW. ---------------------------------- There are certainly more than six steps one can take to improve the outcome of their recording sessions, but I figured I'd start off with those listed above. Hope you find the information useful and be sure and check back for more tips! Phil Dubnick | Mix Reel | Private Voice, Guitar, Songwriting and Music Theory Lessons |
Phil Dubnickis a mix engineer, producer, songwriter, guitarist, vocalist, music educator and lover of mexican food. Archives
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