Those Who Can, Do…

Those who can’t, watch (endless!) tutorials.

Apple’s Logic has within its virtual walls everything my old, “physical” studio ever had. When I consider the recent Old Days of multiple sync’d-up harddisk recorders, taking twenty-minutes to boot-up everything, longer if one wasn’t talking to the others that day, I’m instantly ashamed I didn’t make this leap into the 21st Century earlier.

Exactly NINE years ago, I was mastering my second (and still latest) album, designing the sleeve and beginning my US radio campaign. Nine years on, a beautifully empty summer ahead and only music (and a bit of tree-pruning) to fill it and now, mid-September, I feel I’ve turned a corner.

But if you’d have asked in July what I’d got planned, “sinking up to my neck in software” wouldn’t have been in my top ten answers.

The shift from recording to mixing has given me the feeling that, like “The Matrix” film, the Logic-world I’d lived in until now was merely a pleasant-looking sham, designed to keep me passively content, whereas the grimy, real business was going on deep beneath the surface.

I found myself lost and adrift, aware of the power of my new setup but overwhelmed by options and unable to get an exciting-sounding rough mix going, quickly, the way I once would. 

So, against the best advice of Jason Timothy in his splendid book “The Mental Game Of Electronic Music Production”, I typed “Logic Pro X” and any combination of “mix/edit/EQ/compression/bass/drums/vocals/plugins” into Google and promptly disappeared, for days, into a swamp of tutorials, YouTube channels and adverts.

As I read and watched countless well-meaning “youngsters” tell me how THEY do it, I became aware of the tail-wagging-the-dog, Emperor’s-New-Clothes-nature of some of these new technologies and saw the disproportionate effort put into attempting to add interest, clarity or excitement to a dull melody or uninspired performance which didn’t deserve it. Back in the day, no doubt suffering from Gear Lust, we’d say the answer was a new piece of pro kit, (which we’d never be able to afford). Today, it’s “a cheap new plugin”!

Ohh the plugins. What a wonderful bundle of joy they are. Scratching itches you never knew you had. There’s a sale, you say? I’ll take the lot!

Eventually when my own “logic” prevailed, I did what I always do: I simplified, I limited my choices and put a small, finite, definite frame around my otherwise infinite options.

Specifically, I recreated my old studio, “in-the-box”. I want THAT compressor and THIS delay and so on. If you want your drums to go through an Abbey Road desk channel strip, great! But don’t go putting an SSL on the vocals and a Neve on the bass, JUST because you can…

I created a template, with compressors, EQs, sends, reverbs and delays all in place, drums bussed, instruments sorted. This “mix” template will of course become my new “recording” template too. In my old studio I’d make mixing decisions from the start of recording and now, as then, I’ll stop worrying, see sense and start using my ears.