Music • Sound • Video • Art

This may be old news for many, but it was a bit of a revelation for me so let me share it.

Logic’s channel strip pan is a bit of a funny beast. Instead of actually panning the signal from one side to the other, it lowers the volume of one side to create the impression of panning. The problem with this is that you start to lose the imaging information of the channel you are panning away from. So at full pan left for instance, you lose any info from the right side. For example, if you are working with an orchestral recording of a string section of 14 players, the players may be distributed 5R, 1C, 8L. So with the default LOGIC panner at full pan left, you are actually only hearing part of the one player in the center (1C), and the eight players on the left (8L). All of the players on the right (5R) have disappeared. Your 14 piece string section is now reduced to 8.5 instruments in effect.

This obviously isn’t what happens in real life. If those 14 players were to get up and move to the left side of the stage, you would still hear 14 string players. And even though they are all sitting on the left, it is likely not the EXTREME left and you’d still have some right channel info.

In other DAWs, the default behavior is to increasingly fold the channel information from one side into the other as you pan from one side to the other. That way you still have both channels of information, but the pan setting better represents the positioning in space. (I imagine at extremes these two signals sum to a true mono so if you have phase problems, you’ll find out pretty quickly.)

Fortunately in LOGIC there is an answer. It’s a plug-in called the “Direction Mixer”. You can use this plugin to decode middle and side audio recordings or to spread the stereo base of a left/right recording and set the pan position.

I've been burned by Seagate for the last time...

I just bought a 2 TB Hitachi Deskstar drive at MicroCenter for $149. I did this after my fourth (or fifth) Seagate drive failed on me in the last year. “Hilariously” at least 2 of the seagate failed drives were back up drives. This all happened in a staggered fashion, the drives were from different lots, housed in different well ventilated seagate and non-seagate enclosures and they were not all from the “problem” drives Seagate put out a while back. Totally weird, but enough to put me in the ABS (Anything But Seagate) Camp….

Anyway, so far so good with the Hitachi, but given experiences above I only mount it once a week for backing up my samples and soundware.

Well I finished Eli’s Logic 9 Explained tutorial. Highly recommended for those coming to the program. Great overview of LOGIC and it’s “zeitgeist”. It will save you a lot of time.

I’m really enjoying this book. I own about a bazillion harmony and music theory books. This one is really practical in its approach and accessible. Highly recomend it. You can find it here.

That same author (Mike Hewitt) also wrote this book. Again, practical and accessible. (Find it here.) I’m working under the assumption that once I’ve grokked these, the more traditional academic tomes I own will be more decipherable…

During my daily commute to and from work, I have been listening to the VSL Podcasts of Hetoreyn. As stated on Hetoreyn’s website:

The VSL (Vienna Symphonic Library) Podcast is a show for composers with Hetoreyn as the host. There are currently 52 episodes with many special interviews with hollywood class composers and interviews with the staff from the VSL company as well…Each show contains original music from composers and usually many technical tips and interesting thoughts on ways to use one’s studio or virtual libraries very effectively.

These are simply super. The focus is on the VSL library, but there’s also stuff discussed that is useful whatever sample library you own. If you are interested in learning about composing and orchestration, hearing orchestral (mostly) music by other budding composers, picking up production tips, etc., this podcast is a great resource. It helps that the host (Hetoreyn) seems like a genuinely nice guy. I plan to write more about this in the future (perhaps with a little input from Hetoreyn himself).