Still jet lagged from LA (how is that?) I couldn’t get to sleep last night so i ended up researching replacements for my Frontier Tranzport DAW remote. It seems there isn’t one. No hardware – all Pad and iPod apps. I do a little research and find this – http://www.neyrinck.com/v-control-pro. I download the free version and it looks encouraging, but I’ve left my dongles (the USB authorizer things) at the Establishment, so I can’t run Logic – very annoying…
I did, eventually, get some sleep so I’m late getting started. First thing is the iPad app –
I don’t have one but my wife lends me her inherited iPad V.1. The Free V-Control syncs and seems to work fine.
I then spend an hour, maybe more, researching alternatives to find that i think this one looks best for me. I fork out $50 of the executive producers’ money and buy the ‘pro’ version. More testing. I like it, for now… All software crashes from time to time…
Then back to Logic. I remedy the level problems between the Mackie and the DAW – the Mackie Tape IN and Control Room OUT need to be fine tuned.
Next I get to grips with the LA sessions – I start with Blue Like Mars – Because we were recording take after take after take it turns out that our preferred version is at bar 440, tempo 107 BPM. That makes no sense to work with from here on in. For all tracks I will need to move the tracks so all songs start around the same place (Bar 9 if there is no instrumental intro planned).
So I drag the files back to bar 9, or thereabouts and I play the track. The click track is out of time with the band. Shit. How can this be so? Undo. Revert to saved. I look at the tempo – 107. But at bar 1 it’s 104… we must have decided to increase the tempo at some point… Instead of moving the files back in time, I delete the time (in Logic – horizontal space), and all the global (including Tempo) tracks. This works – Fred now starts with the count in at (after a little fine tuning) bar 8 and the song starts at bar 9.
Now I need to take all of the files and extend them to bar 1 so that the can be exported and re-imported and they will still all line up together. This takes a while. I thought this could be done by dragging regions in Logic, but no, it seems I have to use the old method of inserting a bar of silence at bar 1 and then merging the silence and the main track to generate a file which begins at bar 1. Tedious but I understand it.
I am very RUSTY in Logic, and I am new to Logic 9. It will take me a while to get comfortable…
So the next hurdle is the bass regions are not regions at all but folders – containing files – and these cannot be edited like regions… so I open Logic Help for the Nth time and read some more and I ‘merge and flatten’…
Just when I’m ready (around 5.15 PM) to think about importing Matthew’s vocals I look in the Audio Files folder and think maybe now, as the regions are all in order and start at zero (1) then I should delete all the old take files to save space and avoid confusion… That’s when i see that some files are AIFFs and some are WAVs. We agreed to record everything as 44.1, 14 bit WAV files, and even though I have opened the Bad Robot file, it’s MY preferences that are working and my set up (unbeknownst to me) was set up to create AIFFs…
I make a note in the workbook – Delete Blue Like Mars folder and Start Again.
At least I’ll have a half of an idea of what I’ll be doing tomorrow.