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