Creating lush, expansive back drops can be a key part of a successful chill-out track or a great breakdown. Producing something truly original in this area requires a bit of creativity.

There’s always the temptation to use an impressive pad sound from the latest super plug-in, but to really stand out from the crowd you need to dip your toes into the world of sound design.

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The Environment is the core of Logic. It can be the cause of a lot of confusion (and even fear!) for new and even more experienced Logic users. In the first of three tutorials that focus on the Environment I’m going to explain exactly what the Environment is and why it makes Logic the most flexible and advanced MIDI sequencing package on the market.

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Whatever genre you are working in and whatever DAW you use to produce your music, it is likely you have suffered from latency issues at some point. Whether you are aware of it or not latency can be a real problem in the modern digital studio and can really effect your workflow.

To help you tackle this tricky subject I’ll break it down into easy segments, starting with what latency actually is and following onto subjects such as optimizing your system and how to tackle latency throughout your workflow.

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After touching on the critical subject of acoustics and room treatment in a few recent tutorials, I felt it was fitting to create a basic guide to acoustically treating your work space. I get asked about this subject a lot so I’m hoping a run down of the essential technique and kit needed will be of some help to readers.

Of course this is an extremely technical subject and this tutorial in no way claims to be the definitive guide to acoustic treatment, but these tips and guidelines should get beginners up and running and generally help to clarify the whole subject of room acoustics.

I’ll run through the basics of choosing the right space, positioning your kit and then look at different types of treatment techniques and materials.

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The upgrade to Pro Tools 8 includes many exciting enhancements, new features and plug-ins that add up to make music production easier than ever. Let’s take a look at the power behind some of the best new features. Continue Reading

In this article, we’re going to look at ten things you can do to help maximize the performance of Reason, fix various annoying issues, and avoid CPU strain during heaving automation and interaction with other DAWs.

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Impedance is something that everyone who records or plays music should know about. It comes in to play every time we plug in an instrument, microphone, device, or speaker. Yet, most people who record know little or nothing about it. This tutorial covers what we all need to know about impedance to get good recordings.

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Sometimes when you are recording a new track it is good to turn off the metronome and auto-quantize using your software, just hit record, and play from the heart. A spontaneity and more human quality can be captured in the performance. This works particularly well with solo guitar or piano.

Or maybe you want to use some audio from a live recording or a studio session where no click track was used. When it comes to adding other sequenced parts to audio that has been recorded in this way it can be difficult to get the timing of the midi notes right. The metronome and auto-quantize will be out of sync with the audio.

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Recording drums is a bit of a lost art. Engineers used to spend a year experimenting with mics before they were allowed near a Fairlight or a Synclavia (old school samplers for the young among you).

There was no Logic Pro, plug-ins or even very good effects, so it was all down to clever mic techniques and improvisation. Here’s a few tricks I picked up over the years—tips and tricks which come in handy time and time again.

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In the last EXS tutorial, we looked at the basic steps needed to build a unique sampled instrument using Logic’s EXS Sampler. This tutorial will take it to the next level as we learn how to build a more complex instrument using multiple samples.

Several months back my friend and colleague Michael Teoli and I were sitting around the kitchen when we started to tap on empty glass bottles. As I’m sure all of you have done at some point, we started to “play” the bottles and see what tunes we could come up with.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we could sample these bottles and make them into an instrument?” we wondered, and on went the lightbulb above our heads. Enter EXS.

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