Setting Up/Starting Out

SpeakersWhen you turn on the equipment in the studio, you should always turn the Mac and MIDI on first then after this, you should then turn on your speakers. This is because a 'pop' sound can be very damaging to your speakers which may lead to them blowing. Make sure you turn off the speakers before you turn off the Mac and MIDI keyboard. When you are going to record with a microphone, you should always turn off the speakers to stop feedback when you record which can damage your hearing as well as the speakers. You get feedback sound because there is an infinite loop of sound from the microphone going through the speakers and back through the microphone (which will also pick up in the recording itself) This creates a really high pitched sound.

MIDI Keyboards and what is MIDI?

A midi keyboard is a piano-styled interface keyboard that is used for sending Musical Instrument Digital Interface commands over MIDI cable or USB to a PC DAW software, (Digital Audio Workstation software) where the commands are processed. The normal MIDI keyboard usually doesn't produce any type of sounds, but instead the information from the keyboard is sent to an electronic module that produces a varied list of digital samples or sounds that mimic the normal analog musical instruments. The main parts of most MIDI keyboards are transpose button that sets which octave you would like to play in, a pitch bend and modulation wheel, the keyboard notes itself and a volume adjustment knob.button. Other MIDI keyboards also have assignable buttons/knobs and output and input knobs that adjust the amount of outputs or input signal is received or distributed.MIDI is the shortened name given to a Musical Instrument Digital Interface. A MIDI is a device that enables digital musical instruments, PC's and other musical devices to connect with one another. A MIDI instrument gets note events and it allows you to control those events by buttons and knobs. It then changes those signals into digital messages and sends those messages to a PC or other device so you can control the sound and other parts of the signal message.

CablesThere are many types of cables that are used in the studio for Logic. One of these cables that can be used is the XLR cable. The XLR is a circular cable that has between 2-9 pins and they're usually used for balanced audio signals. The XLR cable usually comes with two ends, female end and male end. For the most common style of XLR (Three pin cable) the female end is used to connect the 1st pin before the other pins make contact with the receiving device. The female XLR end is the end with the three holes in and the male XLR is the end with tree pins. The 1st pin is the earth pin,

the 2nd pin is the positive polar for balanced audio and the 3rd pin is the negative polar for balanced circuits. Another type of cable commonly used in the studio is 1/4" jack cable. You can either get balanced or unbalanced 1/4" jack cables and that way you can tell which one it is, is that the balanced cables have two rings around the top of the lack and unbalanced have just one ring. The XLR cables are mainly used in the studio for microphones and for some speakers. The 1/4" jack is mainly used for speaker cables, a cable to connect your MIDI device to your PC or receiving device. The main cable that is used to connect the MIDI device to the PC is a USB 2.0 cable. USB is short for Universal Serial Bus and it transfers the data from the MIDI device to the receiving device.

How to start a project

To start a new project with Logic you must open the programme first. You can do this by going to the right top hand corner of your macbook and selecting the search

button (picture to the right) Once this has been selected, type into the search bar "Logic"

The search will appear in the bar. Select the option of "Logic Express" or which ever version you may have.A window will pop up for a template of which type of track you would like to create

Select "Empty Project"

Enter a number of tracks you would like to start with (More can be added during this process if needed). Audio is for live recording with microphones, miced up drum kits/amps or directly recording in a guitar/bass. Software Instrument is the option of using the instruments (sounds) that are already loaded into logic to create the sound desired sound of which ever instrument you may require. External MIDI is for a plug in device such as an electric drum kit or pad.

Once a selection has been made (In this section we will use "Software Instrument") the new project/page will open and be ready and set up.

On the left hand side of the page, the "Channel strip" will appear with an instrument (Usually a Piano) and this is where you select which channel to record through

On this channel, buttons will appear underneath "M, S, R" this stands for Mute, Solo, Record. When recording, selecting Mute will silence out the selected instrument. Solo will mute all the other instruments on the project and only play the selected one. Record will make the selected instrument record. The bar with the slider is to drag the volume of selected instrument up or down. The "L.R" button is to select how far you want the instrument to pan to the left speaker or right speaker (Best heard when using headphones)

To select or change an instrument, the media button needs to be selected, this can be done by going to the top right had corner of the bar and selecting Media

Once Media has been selected, the list of instruments will open and a whole big

selection will open up

When a recording has been made, a bar will come up and can be seen on next to the channel strip

This shows the recording, and it can be opened by double clicking on it so it will open the Piano Roll or go to the bottom of the page and it will come up with "Mixer, Sample Editor, Piano roll, Score, Hyper Editor" selecting Piano roll will open up the notes recorded into Logic.

One the Piano Roll is opened, the notes recording in can be seen and can be edited in many ways.

The notes recorded will come up on a digital keyboard and can be edited by pressing escape or going to the top right of the channel page (next to where the bars counting

are) and select the arrow and opening up the selection screen

Here all the different editing tools. The main basic tools are: Pointer Tool-select and click on different itemsPencil Tool-Draw in notes onto the Piano RollEraser Tool-Erases the whole recording strip or individual notes on the Piano RollScissor Tool-Cuts up recordings so chunks can be deleted or moved.

The playback button is an important part of recording, listening and moving around. It is located at the bottom of the page

It has the go back button, forward button, stop, play, pause and record.

Recording Audio

When recording audio, it is important that when you start a new project, you select the "Audio" selection otherwise Logic automatically loads with the "Software Instrument" selected. You can record in many ways wether it is from a microphone, guitar or drums and with many different equipment selections. In this section, it will guide you through recoding through a MIDI keyboard. In the back of the keyboard is a guitar input (A picture of a guitar can be seen above the port) Plug in a jack to jack cable, one end into the MIDI keyboard and the other to the guitar. Open a new track on the 'Audio' section and selected the R button.

To get the sound to play, you will need to change the system preferences to the correct settings. To do so, you will need to go to the bottom of the page and open the dock and select "System Preferences"

Once it is opened, in the bottom right hand side shall be an icon for "Line 6 Audio-

MIDI Device" Open this and a number of options will open. Select the middle option "Inputs & Recording" Then go to where it has "Input Source" and an drop bar of selections will open, the one you need is "Instrument". It will show you the option on Record Sends: of 1-2 or 3-4 and depending on which port you have plugged into, you can select. I always used 1-2.

You then have to click record so you can record your audio.

Mixing

When mixing on logic there are a couple ways that you can do it. The on-screen mixer is one of the ways you could mix your track. This is found at the bottom of the arrange page on the editor buttons. Using this on-screen mixer you are able to get a better mix and a more accurate mix as you can have all the channels up on one screen rather than having to use each individual channel mixer on the side.

When mixing you can also use the channel mixer on the inspector. On this mixer you can change the level of the individual channel that you have selected and you can change the level of the output. You can then also add effects on the audio on that track, change the panning for the channel and then EQ the selected channel and the output channel.

Automation and EQ

Automation is where you can change the level of an audio file through dragging the yellow line down or up depending on whether you want to make it louder or quieter. To be able to automate something you have to first press the 'A' key and then that brings up the screen that you can see above. Then you find the audio track you want to edit and you click on the yellow line. If you want to make a section of the track either quieter or louder you have to make two dots just before the part you want to edit and then two dots just after the part you want to edit. This creates the section you want to edit and it will only change the volume for that section. If you drag the yellow line upwards then you make the audio track louder but if you drag it downwards then you make the audio track quieter.

Using EQ when mastering and recording is essential as when you have recorded instruments or vocals usually they are not perfect and equalisation of the frequencies is normally always needed. When mastering tracks the sound engineer will always listen to each individual channel and hear whether the audio needs either low, mid or high ends cut or he will hear what needs to be boosted or leveled out.

After using both Logic Express 9 and Logic Pro X, I would recommend using Logic Express 9 as the lay out to it is much simpler as I find with Pro X the options are too hidden. If you would like to use Pro X I would suggest learning it with Express 9 as it is much simpler so you can find your way around the software then upgrade to Pro X as going straight into Pro X can be very complicated and harder than it needs to be.