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Neil Gilmartin

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  1. Is the Air even preferable to the Pro? I would’ve thought the Pro would be better at handling more demanding tasks. I’m considering an update in a year or two from a 2019 Intel i-9 Pro (which still works very well but not updated to 10.8 or changed from Monterey). I wouldn’t have considered an Air until reading this post…
  2. Do you have sidechain ducking to another track that is only active in certain spots? What is the instrument being affected? If it’s a synth, do you have a volume envelope with a long attack or decay that triggers on each note? Does the volume fader actually move down automatically or is there no change there?
  3. David, I was thinking about what you said about gain-staging a pre-master, and I'm interested to know why you think that having headroom of around -6db for a pre-master is a myth? If you don't turn down the track, won't the mastering engineer turn it down anyway to have sonic space available for doing their thing? Cheers!
  4. Hi all. I'm still running the Monterey operating system on my Mac for fear of upsetting existing Logic projects and plug-in performance. However, with reference to the fidelity of projects specifically, what about updating to newer versions of Logic? Can a Logic update alone also negatively affect existing projects? I'm running 10.7.9 at the moment, and quite keen to have a play with Sample Alchemy and the Mastering Assistant. Cheers!
  5. Hi sunbrother. You're right that I did stop automating the bypasses via the 'Main' option, yes. And this solved the problem of clicks in the audio in the bounce down. But it didn't solve the phasing issue, unfortunately. I think the phasing issue may simply have been bad luck with the timing of the bounce: the CPU, for whatever reason, was underperforming and that led to artifacts. Now there was actually one more thing I did: that project has a snare-attack aux channel, and I changed the Logic Enveloper lookahead time from 2ms to 1ms. After bouncing down, the phasing was gone - so I thought perhaps the lookahead time had been the culprit. However, to check this, I did another bounce and reverted the lookahead back to 2ms, and still I had just as clean a bounce, so I don't think that was it. (And, in any case, lookahead settings might account for phasing on the snare, but not the whole kit - and it was the whole kit that sounded unnaturally thin, not just the snare). The only difference, therefore, was moving the sequencing of channel strips around to conform with all the other projects I'm working on, but this seems very unlikely as the deciding factor. But you never know! Complex software creates all kinds of unforeseen relationships between seemingly unrelated things, so I thought I'd mention it anyway. Cheers for all your input on this issue, sunbrother. I appreciate it. And you have persuaded me to no approach 'bypass' on my plug-ins with caution and instead look for alternatives such as 0% on the mix settings. A great tip (a tip of the hat to SoSpiro here, too) 🙂
  6. I just got a clean bounce! What did I do differently, I hear nobody ask. Nothing! I think my computer is just in a good mood this evening. It's the only plausible explanation. Tell a lie. There was one thing I did differently, and only one: I re-arranged the tracks. This was the only song where I had drums as the last in the sequence, not first, so I rearranged everything. Could this have made a difference? I find it hard to believe...
  7. Liv, thanks for the honesty. I completely feel you! I'm also self-taught. It sounds like you've already gone quite far in with learning Logic, so my advice would probably be websites such as Groove3.com and macprovideo.com. On the former, Larry Holcombe and Eli Krantzberg in particular do a lot of excellent series on producing and mixing in Logic. For example, you could watch Eli Krantzberg's The Mechanics of Mixing in Logic Pro X to see the mixing of an entire indie-rock track or Mixing Electronic Music by Larry Holcombe to see a dance track mixed start to finish. Even if they're not your style, many skills are transferable. On macprovideo.com, Joshua Carney stands out for the areas you're interested in for his series on mixing in Logic Pro. I think one is called Advanced Mixing in Logic Pro, while another is called Mixing and Automation in Logic Pro. He spends a lot of time talking about mixing vocals in those courses, so you may find them very useful. He also has dedicated series on recording vocals and guitars in Logic Pro. If you're looking for free materials, Joshua Carney is also on YouTube, but known as MusicTechHelpGuy. He's got what basically should be a pay-for course given away for free. If you've never checked it out, you are missing out 🙂 There's also Chris Vandeviver, who has a channel called Why Logic Pro Rules, which is also excellent. A more recent addition to the YouTube world is a channel called The Band Guide (it's a guy called Colin Cross), which is also top-notch and very easy to follow along with - just don't give him your email address unless you enjoy being bombarded with sales pitches. More generally, you (and I) should avoid the temptation to compare yourself too much with the mixes of professional mixers. Compare yourself now with yourself a year ago, and hopefully you can notice an improvement. Sorry if that sounds patronising - I don't mean for it to be! But it's worth remembering all the training and access to teachers and what have you that most professional mixers have had - if you're doing it all by yourself, by contrast, you've got to set the bar lower, at least initially.
  8. Cheers, David. You're a legend. I do know that pre-fader metering checks the level after the plug-ins, but I guess I learned (or misunderstood!) somewhere along the way that it can function like a final red flag / warning to go back and check your signal flow. Speaking of myths, given that we are now living in the age of DAWs, perhaps channel-strip level clipping doesn't really matter much anymore (unless you're using one of those vintage emulations designed with a sweet spot). Sometimes I hear mixing tutors say, 'it's just good practice to keep your signals healthy' in the context of talking about internal clipping when using standard plug-ins, but part of me can't help but think that this way of thinking is partly a hang-up / residue from the analog-only days. I'm not advocating for peaking all your channel strips, but the odd one here or there might not matter...
  9. I guess I just got used to it because it allows me to check that the signal isn't in fact peaking behind-the-scenes, possibly affecting some of the vintage emulation plug-ins I use at times. I still sometimes change settings in plug-ins while mixing, so I like to see whether the signal looks healthy - and I can still easily adjust the volume fader if I think a track is too quiet or too loud. But yeah, I should give post-fader a try. I guess I just got used to using pre-fader metering and never thought to change. You've jolted me out of my dogmatic pre-fader slumber. There's only one David Nahmani 🙂 (Variation on a football chant in case you're familiar with English culture). Cheers for the advice on the mastering, too!
  10. I always use pre-fader metering! Why do you advise against it? If you're mastering yourself rather than sending it off, would you just use a Gain plug-in in the situation above?
  11. If you've got a finished mix ready to send for mastering that is peaking at around -0.5db, but only in the very loudest part, and none of the individual tracks are close to peaking at any point in the song (using pre-fader metering), is it fair enough to just slap a Gain plug-in on the Stereo Out (a completely clean Stereo Out, with no processing on there) and just turn the whole thing down by around -5 / -6db? In other words, if your levels are fine everywhere except the Stereo Out, which is a little too hot in select spots, is the Gain plug-in approach a reasonable way to proceed? Cheers!
  12. Yeah, wonshu, you're probably right. I mean, when I'm at the production phase, I do use bounce-in-place all the time to bake in sounds that I know I want to keep, but with mixing, I hadn't thought I'd be needing it. But now I think I probably do. It's likely the use of these new-fangled AI plug-ins... SoSpiro, my CPU is getting weird consistently - always telling me to go away at the same point in certain songs. Perhaps I need to go back to using Logic stock plug-ins more. I've got FabFilter in the mix, a large dose of SoundToys, some Izotope, a generous serving of NI vintage compressors, a dash of Gulfoss, even a cheeky sprinkling of Valhalla - it's a 3rd-party party. (And some Logic, of course, because the stock plug-ins are pretty awesome, too). Yeah, the CPU is not very happy - and it's not like it's not powerful. Also, SoSpiro, I only get audible clicks when I use the Logic 'bypass' under 'Main' in the automation menu, but not when I instead go to the plug-in controls and bypass there (assuming the plug-in has this option. If not, I instead use the Mix dial and set it to 0% - a tip I got from another user on this forum). David, I didn't make it clear in my initial response to wonshu that hidden MIDI Drummer playing simultaneously is not the problem. I bounced the track offline again and the phasing / thin drum sound is still there. I'll have to investigate further. I've got Logic Drummer on all the bounces, but it's only with one track where, for some reason yet unknown to me, it sounds thin.
  13. So I just tried doing a real-time bounce. When I got to the most processing-heavy section....the dreaded System Overload message 😂 I'll try another offline bounce for now.
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