One of the many excellent new features of Logic Pro 9 is Varispeed. Varispeed gives you the ability to speed up and slow down your projects — not just a single instrument, but the entire project can be instantly tempo-shifted. Let’s look at how it’s done.

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When I was thirteen years old, I decided to teach myself guitar because I loved the way that modern-day guitar heroes (by which I do not mean your chubby ten year old playing with a fake guitar and an Xbox) improvised what seemed like complicated lead pieces on the spot. After hearing the guitar solo Slash played in Sweet Child O’ Mine, I all but forgot to practice chords in search of the ability to play like that.

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Logic Pro 9 introduced the “Flex Time” feature which is a set of tools for manipulating audio rhythm and timing data the way you would edit MIDI. I’m going to be covering Flex Time in detail and how you can use it in detail, but in this tutorial we’ll get our feet wet with some basic audio quantization.

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Drum replacement is a tool that comes in handy when recorded drums just won’t work with the rest of the track. Whether that’s because of a badly placed mic or the wrong kit was recorded, technology has made it easy to swap in some more appropriate samples while retaining the dynamic characteristics of the original recording. I’ve long wished that Logic would adopt drum replacement abilities like those Pro Tools has, and with Logic Pro 9 it did — and it does it much better, too.

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Dealing with sessions that are fairly track-heavy can be a difficult process — even a song with as few as ten tracks gets a little tough to manage. Grouping is a feature of Pro Tools 8 that makes it easier to deal with sections of your project in bulk, saving you time and yielding more accurate results.

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Automation is an important tool for creating polished mixes. You can use it to fix problems, introduce and enhance effects, and to vary the mix levels throughout different sections of a song. If you haven’t learned to use automation in Pro Tools 8, you’re missing out on a lot of functionality.

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Managing your Pro Tools projects is just as important as knowing how to mix them. Without taking the time to learn these skills, you’ll end up with folders that are gigabytes larger than they need to be, confusing sessions that look foreign when you come back to them months later, and you’ll spend ten times as long working on your mixes. Let’s avoid these problems with some techniques I’ve learned during my time with Pro Tools.

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Last week we looked at how microphones work and covered everything you need to know to decipher how a microphone works from its name. This week, we’re looking at vocal microphone technique: how you might select a microphone for various vocal situations, and how to work with the microphone to get the best results.

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We’ve published a few lists of microphones for those in the market before, but we’ve never given you a proper introduction to microphones before today. Microphones are generally not well understood and one of those key elements that gives away a home recording is the wrong microphone used for the job. It’s actually quite easy to make microphone decisions if you know the basics, whether you need to pick one out or place it properly.

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The equalizer is an important piece of audio technology. As one of my Conservatorium tutors once said, when you’re setting up a session, adding an EQ as the first insert is almost as essential as creating the tracks themselves. Studio audio isn’t about capturing every frequency of every sound: it’s about creating a polished track that highlights the best of each instrument. Let’s take a look at this basic yet widely misunderstood tool, the parametric EQ plug-in.

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