Monthly Archives: March 2010

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MixTips #2 – Transferring projects between DAWs: Logic to Pro Tools

Mix engineers (and enthusiasts)….

Hope everyone’s good. One of the projects I’m working on is recording a smooth jazz guitar track for an upcoming smooth jazz CD. When talking to the artist the other night, I opted to send him the my entire Logic Studio project, or just the audio file and reference mp3 of the song that I’d bounce.

He mentioned that his engineers use Pro Tools and they can pretty much take any audio file format I send and make it happen. Knowing that all DAWS principally operate the same way, I know there are some nuances between them. I thought it’d be best to learn how to transfer projects between them (as it would be good to know when dealing with future clients).

After some reading, I found that Pro Tools primairly deals with .wav files in 48 KHz/24-bit resolution, so I thought I’d make my export file ready for his engineers, which Logic will allow bouncing a wav file to that exact format. How about multiple audio tracks? That’s simple too:

1) File > Export > All Tracks As Audio Files.
2) Make sure all files start on 0.
3) Be sure to have all faders at unity, centered and without dynamics/effects (raw files)

Here’s a good video showing the process….

Hope this is helpful (Fave, I know you have both at GnS Studios!)

peace,
F!

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Welcome to MixTips – MixTips #1: Making your mix better.

Welcome to Mix Tips. This series of tips will come from my experience creating better studio recording mixes, tiips that I’ve chosen to share with other engineers along the way. They’ll be given in no particular fashion. I hope you find them helpful.

MixTip #1 – Making your mix better.
Remove bass frequencies below 40 Hz, nothing can really be heard in this sub-audio range so removing these frequencies leaves the energy to be reused elsewhere for a louder and more pronounced mix.

peace.
F!

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The Sunday Soundtrack – 21 Mar 2010 (The Vernal Equinox Edition)


Photo Credit: Kim!

Greetings crew!
Good to be back with another edition of The Sunday Soundtrack. Welcome to the vernal equinox for 2010 (or in layman’s terms…SPRING!). For all the snow we got this past winter, this is a welcome time of the year for me as well.

I hope this blogpost and podcast find you in great spirits. I’ve got a number of new tracks and some previous artists that I hope make for a nice chilled mix. Interestingly enough, I’ve found half of these tracks on YouTube, which is starting to become a treasure trove of tracks for the podcast. For me, at least, it is definitely giving iTunes a run for it’s money…I’ll just leave it at that. That being said, I present to you, the playlist. I’ll leave the blogpost commentary short, and let the music speak for itself.

Shout out to Mizrepresent on Twitter. Hope you enjoy the podcast!


1. Spirit – Monet/The Groove Boutique: Volume One
2. The Time – Soulstance (f/Arthur Miles)/Life Size
3. No Dice – Tipper/Surrounded
4. Good Morning London – Kaya Project/Elixir
5. Of The Roof – Nor Elle/Slapstick
6. Sunset Print – Nor Elle.Slapstick
7. IMG.00.37 – Akotcha/Sound Burger
8. Ready Made -Saulbass Theme/Megasoft Office 97
9. Aztec – Jens Buchert/Sunrider
10. Get Back to Serenity (Beach Mix) – Vargo/Beauty

As always, thanks for joining me here on the Sunday Soundtrack. Yes, you can follow it on Twitter, check out the Facebook group (see the links in the blogroll), and subscribe via iTunes.

Enjoy your moments…keep it chilled!

Peace,
F!

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All about the tone….

Greetings readers, I hope this post finds you well. This year, well starting the end of last year, has brought many opportunities in terms of live performance and music production. Some have materialized, and some haven’t, but either way, they began making me look at my skills as a guitarist AND a recording engineer more closely. Coincidentally, being the YouTube fan that I am, I started watching performance videos, specifically of guitarist doing smooth jazz pieces to backing tracks and loved the tone they were getting. Most either shot their video in studio or just of them playing on camera. This started my such to obtain such tone.

I had three choices, the two most obvious: either mic my amp and record in my DAW (Logic Pro), record direct into Logic, but by way of my Line 6 Pod XT Live, or go record straight into Logic and make use of it’s effects plugins and amp simulators. I decided to search the net for articles and forum activity that would help me understand how to achieve my goal for choice #3. To my surprise, I found many references on how to achieve a certain amp sound (amp sims have been big in software recording apps for the past few years now), or certain rock guitar tones, but nothing for that mellow smooth jazz guitar tone. I turned to magazine articles, still nothing. I like using my Pod XT Live for live performance and have found a few non-stock patches online that have really good clean tone.

Fortunately, I reached out to a great guitarist on YouTube Joe Washington, who kindly gave me insight to the effects chain he uses to achieve his tone. It’s really understanding the building blocks or elements needed to get any tone your are looking to use. Joe gets his town via a combination of different hardware effects, whereas I am trying to do the same via software (at least for now, since I still own my amp and a Roland GP-100. While the GP-100 is old school, this unit has some great user created patches I’d like to try out soon.

Fast forward to the last few weeks… a good friend and superb smooth jazz keyboardist asked me to provide the guitar solo for his upcoming CD’s title track. Needless to say, this has been an awesome opportunity and I’m pretty excited about it. With that, I realized I REALLY needed to get that tone for this track… a need for something not TOO smooth but definitely jazzy. After recording a rough of the solo tonite using my Epiphone Sheraton II, I think I am close to finding what I’ve been imagining for a few months. Looking forward to trying this out with my Emperor II after she gets a good setup.

The image above shows a channel strip in Logic Studio 8 with an amp simulator (Guitar Amp Pro), EQ, compression, reverb, and a dynamic stereo spreader (mix of LPF and HPF), giving me a nice jazzy tone. I’m definitely liking it and once I get it to where I really like it, you may see me record and post a few vids of my own.

In any event, I should have BEEN sleeping, but would love to record some more…THAT…is not a good idea at 12:59am.

’til we meet again…peace!

F!