Waveform Wednesday: Quick Sidechain Compression in Logic

If you’re looking for a nice kick sound in your song  a sidechain compression might help you out! Today lets put a sidechain compression on a pad. Triggered by the Kick. Here’s what you have to do: Write the kick on a MIDI track, like this: Choose a kick that you like, could be electric or acoustic, in this case I’d recommend the Ultrabeat kick drum, because its nice and you can also modify it. Once you’ve selected your plug in, send...

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Waveform Wednesday: Reason Rewire in Digital Performer

Every DAW has its ups and downs.  Have you ever hoped that someone would just combine them into one awesome DAW?  The good news is that you can do this (to an extent).  The better news is that it is really easy to do.  I’m going to show you how to do so in Digital Performer (everyone’s favorite). Essentially what we are doing is making Reason sync to another DAW. This offers the benefits of DP’s great sequencing and...

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Mac Daddy Monday: Dock Spacer using Terminal in OS X

What is Terminal in Mac OS?It is simply a text-based program that lets you send commands manually to the OS and interact with it. You can do pretty much anything, because the Terminal is basically a window into another OS. What is the Dock Spacer?The Dock is very convenient to organize application icons. However, if you have too much items in the Dock, it is easy to get lost visually and also waste time searching the application that you want to...

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Waveform Wednesday: Tidying Up A Logic Session (part 2)

Does the amount of information on your arrange window ever make you feel claustrophobic?  In Logic, we can organize untidy tracks and regions in various ways.  Here is one feature that can sweep regions from an entire take “under the rug,” so to speak.  Here we have three different versions of the same tune, so we can send them off for different applications.   We will be working on each chunk separately, and the extra...

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Fermata Friday: Making Simple Entry Simpler and Faster For Laptop Users

In Finale there are couple different ways to get the notes on the page, Simple Entry, Speedy Entry and Hyperscribe. All of which have their ups and downs relating to which setting you’re using them in. To get the most out of Speedy Entry and Hyperscribe you’re probably going to want to have a keyboard with a numeric pad and midi keyboard handy that you can plunk out the notes on. So, what do you do when you’re stuck using a laptop without all the...

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Waveform Wednesday: Understanding Advanced Quantize in Logic

Logic has a very advanced quantize engine, but yet, there aren’t many who can really appreciate every and each function and get the most out from it. Although each term and function are quite well explained in the manual, here’s a bit more detailed explanation along with its practical usage. Q-strength:  Be aware that no musician will ever play in perfect timing or even if they do, we - as a listener - wouldn’t like it since it will only...

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Fermata Friday: Creating Kicks Over Time in Sibelius

If you have any experience using Finale, you’re probably well aware that creating kicks over time is not exactly an intuitive process. Thankfully, Sibelius has a bit of a different approach to this ever so common notation. To start, select layer 1 on the keypad and enter your “kicks” on the first space above the staff. Next, switch to layer 2 on the keypad and enter four quarter notes on the middle line of the staff. Now, select the...

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Waveform Wednesday: Tidying Up A Logic Session (part 1)

Does the amount of information on your arrange window ever make you feel claustrophobic?   In Logic, we can organize untidy tracks and regions in various ways.  Here is one feature that sweeps tracks “under the rug,” so to speak. In this session there are 14 tracks full of regions.  When we are done editing any of the tracks, we can get them out of our hair using the ‘Hide’ feature. Click on the “H” icon located at the top...

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Waveform Wednesday: Pro Tools Keyboard Focus Mode

Ever wonder what the “az” icon was in Pro Tools? Well, it enables “keyboard focus” mode. Keyboard Focus mode is awesome, because it dramatically improves the speed and efficiency of your Pro Tools workflow. Think of keyboard focus mode as even quicker keyboard shortcuts, which allow you to execute commands in a single keystroke rather than having to use multiple keys. There are three areas inside of Pro Tools in which you can enable...

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Mac Daddy Monday: Take a Screen Shot with the Mouse Cursor Included

As we have been doing these blog posts we take a lot of screen shots. The easiest way to do this is with the keyboard shortcut SHIFT-COMMAND-3 to get the entire screen, and SHIFT-COMMAND-4 to get a crosshair cursor to select the screen shot area. This will put the new image file right on the desktop. The problem with this method however, is that the mouse cursor is not included. In many applications the mouse cursor is contextual, and changes based...

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