I'm doing 25 things
This week's learnings ...
1 week ago
Starting out from square one with software as complex as this – I’m both amazed at some of the things it will allow me to do and also perplexed at how difficult little things can be. So, I spend plenty of time searching on Google for answers. Here are some things I’ve learned this week:
- to reverse phase on a track you have to insert the gain plugin on that channel and then open it up to reveal a “phase invert” check box … I nearly pulled my hair out for 2 days searching for this on the mixer screen and inspector strip (click an empty insert box on the channel strip > Utility > Gain > Mono … now you’ll see the Gain plugin and a “Phase Invert” check box)
- external firewire devices don’t work well with Mac OS 10.5.5 – you are not nuts! I hooked up a Mackie Onyx 1200F. I use this to plug all my mics into for recording drums and guitar live. It’s got 12 channels and preamps and it’s all digital. The future! But nyooooooo … there’s some kind of Apple firewire driver bug whereby external audio firewire devices no workie. In my case the playback of audio was so stuttered that it was unlistenable. The fix: you have to find an older firewire driver and install it. Not a perfect fix, either, but the Onyx thing is working pretty well at this point
- rendering preview – basically when you record audio into Logic it draws a picture of what that audio looks like as you record. Well, when I stopped recording the strip of chunky audio would turn into a smooth strip, meaning I couldn’t see where I hit the drum or played the guitar note. Apparently some obscure preference was turned off. Two solutions: either manually get the preview to render (select Options > Audio > Refresh Overview) or do this once and it should work (select Logic Express > Preferences > Initialize All Except Key Commands …). I have no idea what that last thing means, but it seems to turn that preview rendering on.
- overdub latency – when you overdub tracks with a firewire device, there is a lot of latency. In my case I’d lay down some live drums and guitar, then would go back and overdub another guitar or keyboard. It would sound like I was playing in time – but when I replayed what I’d just overdubbed it was way out of time by something like a quarter or half second. So, I’ve learned it takes a long time for the overdubbed audio to make it through the firewire device (probably processing time and getting converted from analog to digital, and through the firewire cable into the computer with Logic) and that latency sounds not-so-pretty. I’m going to work on adjusting this thing called “Recording Delay” (select Logic Express > Preferences > Audio … then you’ll see a Recording Delay slider). This turns out to be a pretty complicated calculation that you want to get right to avoid potential phase issues, which I’m beginning to understand is a sneaky culprit in the whole recording process.
- click track – if you’re into playing to a click, I found out that’s easy enough to enable. You just turn the metronome on, set your speed and select the preferences for playing the metronome back during recording, playback, both or not at all (select File > Project Settings > Metronome … you’ll see all the checkbox preference therein)
There are plenty of shortcuts to all these things, but I find it useful to have the full description of how to get to these things as that is often lost when people are describing these features online. Okay, another week of finishing off the studio and learning this software and I’ll probably know a ton more.
