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Refining live looping sessions in DAW's (was: Re: Some tracks)



On 17 aug 2006, at 02.00, Neil Goldstein wrote:

> Anybody else putting their loops into the DAW and finding joy with  
> overdubs? :-)


Yes, I'm doing that with Logic. Have produced CD's and surround audio  
movie DVD pieces this way. I rarely sync the loopers to Logic though.  
Did that a little with EDP and Repeater, but today I prefer to loop  
out totally free with Mobius and record the session by the Mobius  
function that simply renders all audio on all tracks as a plain  
stereo file. By not working with multi track technique I cut out a  
lot of options, which in praxis means less tweaking and more time and  
energy left for the the truly creative parts of the production  
process (which of course is "music", as opposed to "sound").

The first, slightly boring, task is to move the stereo file from the  
Mobius lappy into the Logic box (Logic only runs under OSX these  
days, thanks to Steve Jobs and his gang). I use an USB stick to drop  
the Mobius session stereo file on an audio track in Logic and set the  
tempo of Logic to match whatever tempo I had happened to loop in.  
This sometimes takes about three or four minutes to get exactly  
right, may look like "Tempo = 97,42751 BPM" ;-)   For some movie  
soundtracks I have used Logic's way of making the audio  
"elastic" (called "Follow TEmpo") to have the Möbius session follow  
tempo curves I make to match up with the pictures of the movie.

One challenge is to handle a full stereo recording to sound  
dynamically good regarding compressing techniques as well as using  
reverb or delay to create ambience. For example, I love those lush  
plate reverb convulosions (Space Designer) but if I should simply  
send the whole Mobius track signal into one of those there will be  
too much bass in the reverb and the music would loose the firm punch  
of the lower frequencies. Since I sometimes like to also compress the  
reverb side chain ducked from the original track signal, the easy  
solution of using EQ to cut out bass on an effect bus before the  
reverb won't either give me the sound I'm after. My favorite trick to  
solve this is to split the audio track (the complete stereo  
recording) into a bunch of bus/aux channels. First effect on each sub  
channel will be a hi or lo cut filter (or both) to take out all  
frequencies except for the band I want to work on that track. In  
essence this is like building a "multi band submix". Think about it  
as a totally open multi band compressor system. Usually I stay with  
only two bands; the upper being used for sending to reverb (or  
putting the reverb on the track as an "insert", which gives a little  
different sound if followed by a compressor).

One nice part of this mixing concept is when you open up all the  
frequency band sub channels as arrange window tracks and use Logic's  
automation to make them move dynamically in level. Since I usually  
also compress a little on the final master output (where the band sub  
mix channels are being summed) any altering of the frequency band sub  
channel tracks levels will work that mastering section dynamically.

And then there is also the option to use some of Logic's tempo synced  
effects on some frequency band track.

These things are nothing new, and not especially Logic related; it's  
just old audio mix engineering tricks that has been in use for  
decades. I think it's great to now be able to achieve all these  
classic studio tools "in the box", thanks to Logic. It's a great DAW  
IMHO.

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.boysen.se (Swedish)
www.looproom.com (international)
http://tinyurl.com/fauvm (podcast)
http://www.myspace.com/looproom