I was excited to read that Intel was showcasing at San Francisco IDF 2009. Light Peak is a new Technology with a speed of 10GB/sec to transfer data between devices. To my mind if this delivers on it's promise it's sure to replace Firewire and USB.



The other rumour circulating is that Light Peak was developed by Intel at the specific request of Apple, so hopefully cross platform compatibility is assured.

Definitely one to keep an eye on.

When I first saw this I assumed it was an April's fool joke, a bent SM57 ?

But it's real and they're commercially available from Granelli Audio the more I thought about, the more convinced I was of it's simple brilliance. I'm a huge fan of the humble 57 and this new twist - pun intended - adds another dimension to their usability, especially for drum kits but anywhere other mics may fail to reach. I own a Shure Beta 56 which is similar in concept but not a mic I particularly treasure the sound of, so a mic that's as easy to position that sounds like a 57 is a god send.

You can of course DIY one of your own 57s by following these instructions. Not quite as elegant but should do the trick for those on a budget.

As the Americans might say "get bent".

James

Imogen Heap has posted some fabulous vocal parts from an unreleased track for aspiring re-mixers to have a crack at. You can find them here. Inspired by this we've added a new tutorial, this shows how to time stretch vocals ( or any audio ) in Logic's arrange window. Even though this screencast focuses on Vocals, the same ideas can be used for any other type of audio track. You can view the video here.

Another free plug-in. This time it's Tapehead from Steven Massey, Tapehead is saturation plug-in inspired by analogue tape machines. In their own words "add a little saturation to your mix. Make your drums fuller & louder. Add some grit to vocals." Not only is Tapehead amazing it's also free, you can download it here. To share the love, we've made an introductory screencast, to show some of the possibilities, you can see it here.

As regular readers will know, we love free stuff or cheap ways of making things sound expensive. To that end we've added a page which will focus on free plug-ins. While we're not suggesting that free plug-ins is always better than paid for, they are a great way to add tools or tones to your armoury. The other bonus is that because they are developed free of financial constraints they are often more innovative, extreme and just downright weird.
We've kicked off with Prosoniq's free filter North Pole. The good news is, it's now available as an AU, so compatible with Garageband, Logic and other hosts that support the AU format. You can download North Pole from Prosoniq.com.

We've also knocked up a quick introductory video, which hopefully you'll find useful.

Browsing round the web this morning I came across a free samples offer. SampleLogic are offering 500meg of samples for Kontak 2 or 3. As free sounds are always welcome, I signed up for the offer, which takes the form of the usual request for address and email details. They're downloading as I type, so I haven't had a chance to try them yet but I thought it was worth sharing.

You can download them here, SampleLogic.

James

After a lengthy lay off in December we're back and our New Year's resolution is to try and post a but more regularly. To that end here's a mini tutorial showing how to reverse audio in Logic Pro. It's a terrible cliche but this video focuses on the backwards cymbal effect. Please bear in mind that you can perform this process on other audio and your not obliged to flip your cymbals round !! You can view the episode here.

It's been a while but to make up for our laziness we've got a couple of new screencasts to post. In this episode we delve a little deeper into the possibilities of Logic's automation system. It's probably worth revisiting our previous automation tutorial here. In this screencast we focus on automating the parameters of plug-ins, both Logic's and third party. You can view the tutorial here.

We've added another Logic tutorial to the site this time we discuss how to install third party Exs24 instruments to Logic Pro. This opens up the possibility of significantly expanding your Exs24 library as there are thousands of free and paid for instruments available. You can watch it here. We hope you find it useful.

Those of you who have been following our screencasts will have come across our series dealing with drums. In this tutorial we explore some of the basic concepts of automation using the same drum session. In this video you'll learn how to automate volume changes and mutes and we discuss a couple of scenarios in which they may be useful for your mixing. Automation is an amazingly useful tool for the modern mixer and as such has a huge number of potential applications, so it's something we'll come back to in future. You can watch the screencast here.

After a bit of editing we've got couple of new video lessons ready to post. The first is a cool little trick which enables you to cut your audio into lots of tiny slices ready for processing, you can see the video here. The second is loosely connected to our earlier video Logic, strip silence and drums. This screencast is titled Logic and sample augmenting or replacing and covers some of the ideas associated with beefing up or altering recorded drum sounds with pre recorded samples. This is a common technique in modern music production and like all these things should be used tastefully.

This morning we've added another video tutorial to our Logic Pro basics series. This time we feature Logic's arpeggiator and show you how to wire it to Logic's bundled synths. This works exactly the same way with third party AUs. You can view the screencast tutorial here.

We managed to record a few new screencasts this morning, the first of these is in response to a question I've seen on various web forums. Most commercial plug-ins come neatly wrapped in an installer package that automatically puts the file in the correct location. Unfortunately a lot of the cool and quirky freebies don't have this luxury. So in this tutorial we discuss the correct path to drag the .component file to.
Hopefully this will save a lot of typing in future. You can watch the free video here.

There's many ironies in the music business but one of my favourites is while struggling musicians and producers have to pay for their equipment, the superstars get it for free. Unfortunately I haven't found a way round this for hardware but in the world of software there's some great freebies. To highlight this fact we've started a new page dedicated to plug-ins that although low or no cost, add functionality or variety to Logic Pro. Some of these come from big companies who are using " a little sugar " to lure you in and some are from one man bands, whatever the motivation they are a great resource, so please reciprocate and support these developers. We'll be updating the page as we come across groovy new toys and you can follow our journey of discovery here.

In these videos we explore Logic's split silence feature using a multitrack drum session as test bed. This is two part episode showing how to deal with mic bleed on drum recordings. The issue of how much tidying up you should perform on drum recordings will obviously provoke debate. Broadly this falls in two camps. Those who believe that you shouldn't mess and those who are happy to quantise, sample replace and generally pummel the audio into submission. I'm happiest with the idea that if you have all the tools at your disposal, you can cope with what ever is thrown at you.
These screencasts will be the first of a loosely connected set on mixing techniques for drums. You can find them here Logic, split silence and drums.

Less a tutorial more a tip that I find useful. As I'm getting older my eyesight is inevitably getting worse, so I need nice big visual cues in my DAW.

In this screencast I'll show you how to make really big markers in Logic. I use these to mark out the verse, bridge, chorus and the like.

These can be really useful if your working on a song you don't know well or if your a self recorder sitting across the other side of the room.

Make More Noise

Back in April I organised a, just for fun, gear shootout. We got Five small diaphragm condenser microphones, AKG 451, AKG 460, Mercenary Audio KM69, Nuemann KM184, Sennheiser 416 ( all cardioid ) and recorded a Takamine acoustic guitar.

You can find the audio files here and you'll also the .Pdf , as it reveals which microphone was which.

It was an interesting experience for all involved and really went to show that preconceptions can be unfounded.

Tonight we've added a screencast tutorial featuring Logic's Evoc20. The Evoc20 is primarily a vocoder but can also be used a Synthesizer.

In this video we trigger the Evoc20 with a drumloop to give our sound a rhythmic pulsing feel. It is also an introduction to sidechains which is essentially using the audio of one track to control a processor on another.

You can find the video here

" Get three coffins ready " says the man with no name to the undertaker.

I love shootouts, not only movie shootouts, but also the audio variety. They're also a bit less dangerous.

This week we grabbed a few spare minutes in amongst our real work and our good friend Lyn Goddard demoed some mics.

Three large diaphragm condenser mics were used to record a female vocal. A Neumann U87, a SE Gemini and a Telefunken AK47 were recorded using a Chandler TG2 pre amp and Lucid AD conversion to Logic Pro. The gains were matched more accurately using Sonalksis's FreeG plug-in. Two mics were recorded simultaneously so you can here the same take on two mics. This was repeated three times in a round robin format to allow accurate comparison.

You can find the shootout here and a little more information on our shootout philosophy here.

Thanks to Lyn for supplying the talent and the song.

I hope that this is the start of beautiful friendship.

We're kicking off with a series of Screencasts showing you how to build a drum kit with Logic's Exs24 sampler. Although the Exs24 comes with thousands of preset instruments more is always better. There's a vast number of free and commercial samples available. You can find them by searching the net but what do you do when you've got them ? In this four part tutorial we show you how to assemble your own drum kit from raw samples.

You can find them here building a drumkit with Logic's Exs24.

We've also got a simple tutorial showing how to customise Logic's arrange page to suit your workflow.

Hopefully these are the first of many. We hope you find them useful.

Make More Noise.