Project Organization
Lesson 2 from: Music Production in Logic Pro X: Vocal Mixing EssentialsTomas George
Project Organization
Lesson 2 from: Music Production in Logic Pro X: Vocal Mixing EssentialsTomas George
Lesson Info
2. Project Organization
Lessons
Introduction and Welcome to this Class
00:52 2Project Organization
09:47 3Faders and Panning
11:13 4Flex Pitch - Vocals
05:18 5Flex Time - Vocals
03:05 6Editing Studio Drums
09:29 7Song Mix Deconstruct - Mixing Drum Kit Designer
08:04 8Mixing Files
01:50Tips to Start a Mix
02:11 10Mixing vs Mastering
02:19 11Introduction to Mixing with Logic Pro's Audio Effects
00:47 12Channel Strip and Routing - Part 1
04:39 13Channel Strip - Part 2
07:00 14Bussed Effects
11:25 15Gain Staging Audio Tracks and Pre Fader Metering
11:44 16Gain Staging Software Tracks
03:45 17Mixing with Channel EQ
19:57 18Mixing Vocals with Compressor - Part 1
08:25 19Mixing Vocals with Compressor - Part 2
06:44 20Compressor Circuit Types
13:07 21Compression - Distortion and Limiting
10:47 22Sidechain Compression
06:37 23Compression - Part 5 (Glue)
02:52 24DeEsser
12:03 25Multipressor - Part 1
09:31 26Multipressor - Part 2 (DeEss)
06:11 27Multipressor - Expander
07:33 28Dynamics Wrap up
09:05 29Compression with Flex Pitch
04:49 30Exciter
05:03 31Noise Gate
04:14 32Noise Gate - AHR
07:16 33Noise Gate - Hysteresis
02:07 34Chorus
06:04 35Introduction to Automation
09:44 36Touch Automation
03:46 37Trim-Touch Automation
05:28 38Relative Touch Automation
04:34 39Automation Curve Tool
04:09 40SilverVerb - Part 1
18:11 41SilverVerb Modulation
02:57 42Sample Delay and HAAS Effect
05:29 43Delay - Echo
09:35 44Stereo Delay - Part 1
14:25 45Stereo Delay - Part 2
04:00 46Stereo Delay - Part 3
08:24 47Tape Delay - Part 1
13:29 48Tape Delay - Part 2
05:07 49Thanks and Bye
00:07Lesson Info
Project Organization
Hi and welcome to this lecture where I'm going to talk about organizing your mix project. So the first thing you might notice is that all of these tracks are actually audio tracks. So what I did in previous projects is I exported all of the tracks into audio. So even the audio tracks are exported. This is so I wouldn't have a load of different plugins on this project here and I can just concentrate on the overall mix. This was a huge project with over 50 different instruments and it was getting a little bit overwhelming. So what I like to do for the bigger projects is I like to export the separate instruments into audio and then mix in a new project. I normally call it full audio and this way I can control it all as audio rather than audio and software instruments or audio. And Midi, what I would do now is actually tidy up this project here. It's a little bit messy. You can see there's all these different tracks not really labeled or names and we've got a few tracks here that I'm not e...
ven going to use. So what I would do is find the tracks that aren't even used at all and just delete them. And then I would go through and hide some of these muted tracks. I would keep these just in case I want to go back to this information. But for now I'm just going to hide them. So the way you do this is right, click one of the tracks and then go to hide tracks. And when you hit this little orange h it will turn to green and this just allows you to click through and hide the ones. So when you press this green hide button, it will hide these tracks. OK? And next, what I'm going to do is actually name these tracks at the moment. It's quite difficult to tell what's what. So I'm just going to go through and name some of these. So this one here, if we just solo, it is a African percussion. So I'm just going to rename this African percussion and this one below is called instrument one. I'm not actually sure what instrument one is. This can be very confusing if I mix and I instantly want to know what this is. So this is a pan flute and I'm just going to fast forward now because I'm sure you don't want to see me label every single track. So now we're just going to go through and the tracks will all be labeled, OK? So I've labeled all of these tracks here. You can actually rename the tracks as well if you just change the right click tool to the text tool. I do however like to keep these as they are when I import them. So now I know if I go back to the finder, I can find these tracks easily just by doing your search. If I rename them, it just makes it a little harder to find these tracks in the process of going through and labeling some of these tracks. There were a few other tracks that I actually decided to hide. For some reason, there were some empty audio tracks. So it's a good idea just to hide these or delete these as well. And the next thing I'm going to do is actually put these in order the way I like to do is start off with the drums and then have the bass and then have keyboard sounds and then have synthesizer sounds and then have vocal sounds. And I also like to color each section as well. Just so I quickly know, for example, a certain color would be a bass, a certain color would be a keyboard sound, et cetera. OK. So what I've done is I've actually gone through and I've organized this project now. So I've got the drums at the bottom. Then we've got the percussion, then we've got the synths, then we've got the strings and then we've got the vocals. This just makes it a little bit easier to work with because the same types of instruments are together. And now what we're going to do is actually create a track stack. So we're going to use a summing stack. So it allows to combine the different tracks into one track stack. This way, the sum of all the signals will have its own bus. So if you want to add any effects to this bus, it will affect the sum signal of all of these instruments in the track stack to do this. Just select the instruments you want to put in your track stack because I've ordered these. Now, I just go to vocals at the top and then go to vocal harmony at the bottom. So I'm going to sum all six of these tracks to a track stack. So I'm just going to hold down shift and then go to track and then go to create track stack. So we have two different types here. We have folder stack and summing stack. We're going to use summing stack, folder stack will basically create a folder we need to open. But for this, let's use summing stack. There's more information below in the details if you extend this arrow button here, but let's select summing stack and hit create. And here you can see we have someone and we also have our tracks here which are still highlighted. You'll notice as well. We have this little arrow here and if we click on this, it will show all of our tracks in the track stack. And if we click it again, it will hide the tracks in the track stack. We can also rename this track stack. So just double click, going to call this vocals. And also if we hit option and c we can actually color this as well. So I'm just going to choose pink for the vocals and I'm going to do the same for the strings. So I'm going to select the violas here and go all the way down to the cello two, hold down, shift, go to track, go to create track stack, select summing stack, hit crate, hit this little arrow button here and here we have the track stack for the strings. So I'm going to rename this. So double click on some two right strings and then I'm going to color this as well. Let's choose yellow. And you'll notice now when I hit this little arrow button here, all the tracks are in yellow as well. So I'm going to do the same for the SIMS. So click on pad all the way down to s brass track, great track stack, swimming stack and there we go as well. So I'm gonna just type it in Sims and then hit alt and c choose a different color. I'm going to choose red and now we have the track stacks for the vocals, strings and synths just going to pause this now and do the rest for the bass, the percussion and also the drums. Another thing to mention is coloring the track header of the bus. This is useful for the arrangement view, but the mix so it's not actually going to color these buses here. So to do that, what we need to do is right click or control, click on the track stack and then go down to assigned track color. I'm just going to choose the same color or similar one to these tracks here as well. You'll notice the number on the side of the track has actually changed to a different color because we've assigned a track color. This way in the arrangement view, we have the different colors when we extend the tracks and also we have the different colors in the mixer. So I'm just going to assign a track color for each one of these track stacks as well. So in the mixer, we do have a different color for each one. So we can quickly identify the different buses in the mixer. OK. So let's now open up the mixer. I'm just going to hit the mixer button here and you can see that we have the different colors for these different track stack buses. I'm just going to solo each one and you should be able to hear the collection of these different instruments in these separate track stacks. This bass one here, there is only one bass track. So for now, I'm just going to leave it on its own separate track. But I might later on want to add this to a track stack. OK. So let's select the drums and I'm just going to select a part where there should be some drums and I'm going to solo this. You can hear it's not just a kick, it's not just a stare. We have the different drum parts as well. And if I uns solo this, I can then solo the percussion and then the base sore which is Sim just going to rename the Sims the strengths and the vocals. So if you want to add an audio effect, for example, a compressor onto the sum of all these tracks in the track stack, we can do it on the bus here. And if we want to go through and say change the volume of one of these tracks, we can always hit one of these triangles and go in and edit them separately here and you'll notice on the mixer as well, you can see all the tracks in the track stack when we extend them with this arrow. And if we hit them again, you'll notice they will disappear. We can also do this in the mixer with this little arrow as well. So let's just extend the mixer and here we can go through it and it just makes stuff a lot easier. So now we really have 123456 different tracks to work with in the mixer rather than before where I believe we had 52 which is a little bit too difficult to work with. In my opinion, 52 tracks can get a little bit too crazy. But when it's stacked like this, it makes stuff a lot easier. So that's how I organized my projects in Logic Pro 10. I hope you found this lecture useful and I'll see you in the next lecture.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials