VIDEO TUTORIAL: GUITAR & BASS EDITING IN LOGIC PRO

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.

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WHY IT MATTERS

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Proper, 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.

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A COUPLE NOTES

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Here 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