Wednesday, May 6, 2009

the haunted walkman, part 1

I've been using Logic audio to lay down sick jams since spring of 2004. When I started out, I was running 5.5 on a PC, with an loaned Emagic 2|6 external sound card to handle my samplers. I decommissioned my extremely awesome PC and moved to the Apple platform in early 07, and by extension cross graded to the new version of Logic and dropped the 2|6. Sometime between 5.5 for PC and version 7, they stripped away VST support and added all of these channel strip presets (you know, to make the tracks sound instantly overproduced) and fucked something up in the rendering engine. Post logic express 7 everything I output was both too quiet and clipped unless I spent a long time tweaking the tracks before output. This on top of the fact that everything sounded great in the live playback. It was upsetting because I was comfy with 5.5's seemingly wysiwyg output and suddenly had to start doing things the technically right way every time. Flash forward to a couple months ago: I was closing up the mixing on the EP, but wasn't quite satisfied with the way the tracks sounded. The individual segments were so top-heavy that it caused my computer to go into fits whenever I introduced new note sequences. I eventually got it to not clip, but it was at the expense of being wayyyy too quiet. Like, itunes be bouncing around the library, make it to my stuff and it sounds like someone just nudged the volume down. A little. Just enough to be aggravating. Bullshit! Something had to be done. 

Tune in tomorrow or the next day for the excessively technical conclusion to this awesome story. In the meantime, here's a demo for ya. The song is entitled, "bad hair day."
 

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