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Looper's Delight
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On 17 aug 2006, at 02.00, Neil Goldstein wrote: > Anybody else putting their loops into the DAW and finding joy with > overdubs? :-) Yes, I'm doing that with Logic. Have produced CD's and surround audio movie DVD pieces this way. I rarely sync the loopers to Logic though. Did that a little with EDP and Repeater, but today I prefer to loop out totally free with Mobius and record the session by the Mobius function that simply renders all audio on all tracks as a plain stereo file. By not working with multi track technique I cut out a lot of options, which in praxis means less tweaking and more time and energy left for the the truly creative parts of the production process (which of course is "music", as opposed to "sound"). The first, slightly boring, task is to move the stereo file from the Mobius lappy into the Logic box (Logic only runs under OSX these days, thanks to Steve Jobs and his gang). I use an USB stick to drop the Mobius session stereo file on an audio track in Logic and set the tempo of Logic to match whatever tempo I had happened to loop in. This sometimes takes about three or four minutes to get exactly right, may look like "Tempo = 97,42751 BPM" ;-) For some movie soundtracks I have used Logic's way of making the audio "elastic" (called "Follow TEmpo") to have the Möbius session follow tempo curves I make to match up with the pictures of the movie. One challenge is to handle a full stereo recording to sound dynamically good regarding compressing techniques as well as using reverb or delay to create ambience. For example, I love those lush plate reverb convulosions (Space Designer) but if I should simply send the whole Mobius track signal into one of those there will be too much bass in the reverb and the music would loose the firm punch of the lower frequencies. Since I sometimes like to also compress the reverb side chain ducked from the original track signal, the easy solution of using EQ to cut out bass on an effect bus before the reverb won't either give me the sound I'm after. My favorite trick to solve this is to split the audio track (the complete stereo recording) into a bunch of bus/aux channels. First effect on each sub channel will be a hi or lo cut filter (or both) to take out all frequencies except for the band I want to work on that track. In essence this is like building a "multi band submix". Think about it as a totally open multi band compressor system. Usually I stay with only two bands; the upper being used for sending to reverb (or putting the reverb on the track as an "insert", which gives a little different sound if followed by a compressor). One nice part of this mixing concept is when you open up all the frequency band sub channels as arrange window tracks and use Logic's automation to make them move dynamically in level. Since I usually also compress a little on the final master output (where the band sub mix channels are being summed) any altering of the frequency band sub channel tracks levels will work that mastering section dynamically. And then there is also the option to use some of Logic's tempo synced effects on some frequency band track. These things are nothing new, and not especially Logic related; it's just old audio mix engineering tricks that has been in use for decades. I think it's great to now be able to achieve all these classic studio tools "in the box", thanks to Logic. It's a great DAW IMHO. Greetings from Sweden Per Boysen www.boysen.se (Swedish) www.looproom.com (international) http://tinyurl.com/fauvm (podcast) http://www.myspace.com/looproom