Logic Studio

Audio Engineering In Your Own Home

The big box of goodies finally arrived in the post this week. I've spent a day playing with a remix of Pony The Orangutan'. Why this song? I don't know. Maye because it has enough technical challenges to make the learning curve more interesting. So far I note that everything sounds a lot more pristine in Logic than it does in Garageband. There are nuances to things that were totally absent in the playback for Garageband that are suddenly there in Logic. An A/B test shows that I'm not necessarily imagining it.

I used to run a version of Logic on the PC. It took a lot of nursing as it was designed for Win98SE. It meant constant de-frags of discs and forever burning backups on to CDs and so forth. And in the 18months I had it running, I think I managed to record and mix 6 tracks to varying levels of dissatisfaction. They were the first 6 tracks of the 'Escape From Satellite City' set. I also recorded guitar parts for the first Coelacanth project on that platform.
When my PC finally died, I just shrugged and let the whole Logic thing go. It was just too painful. In retrospect, I was asking a Wintel Box to do just too much.

Because I've been working in a rather unorthodox way, it's refreshing to come back to a platform where it's nominally meant to be laid out like a recording studio. This incarnation of Logic is really heavy. Things take a lot longer to mount up and run on Logic than they do with Garageband, and Sound Track Pro. It means there are a lot more details in what you can do, and the fact that the mixing page for a project is laid out like a mixing console is just a joy. Having bus lines to effects! Fancy that!

The day I spent trying to get my head around this current incarnation of Logic was pretty tedious. I guess I hate spending time figuring out new bits of gear when I could be just doing more stuff, but I imagine this is part of modern life. We all have to learn newer and more versions of the same software just to keep current. It all takes time.

Sound Track Pro 2

I've been a big fan of the Sound Track series of applications since they first one came bundled with Final Cut Pro 4.5. What makes Sound Track so appealing is that as a mixing tool, it is just sophisticated enough to give you the kind of options you need regularly, while being a start-and-go kind of application like Garageband. What it has is a simplicity in 'operability' that dwarfs many serious DAWs, but it still does all the little things right.

It's been my work process to record sound and arrange parts in Garageband, then export out each part and then mix in Sound Track Pro. Part of the reason I moved to Logic is because I got sick of this work-flow. Why can't one application let me do it all? As such, I don't know if I'll be doing so much mixing with it as I have done in the past.

This new version comes bundled with the whole Logic Studio package. It's pretty remarkable that Sound Track has grown up into this surround-sound-capable mixing machine. I'm not sure the rendering on Sound Track Pro 2 is better than the previous as of yet; I am sure that they've beefed up this application significantly, what with all the extra things I've had to install for this upgrade.

I can remember the very first DAWs. They were minimalist in design and allowed you to do fairly crude kinds of operation on the audio. The Fairlight MFX2 was a $300k box that gave you 24 channels in 16bit 44.12kHz sampling. It was amazing technology. Well, I've been able to do that and more on my Dual G5 Mac for about 4 years. Heck, now with STP2, I'm able to mix a Surround Sound movie in my own house if I just add a few bits and bobs. It's nuts.