I had a chap called Will Payne from the Sunday Mirror contact me and ask if I could spot any Antares Auto-tune pitch correction software on Susan Boyle’s pre-recorded audition performance of ‘I Dreamed a Dream‘ on Britain’s Got Talent, which is a Simon Cowell show like Xfactor. He gave me two Youtube links to analyse – one of the pre-recorded audition which apparently had been Auto-tuned and one of a performance in the live final which can’t have been as it was live. I did point out at this point that you can run Antares Auto-tune pitch correction software live in real time.

Audition pre-record performance HERE

Live final performance HERE

I listened to both, one after the other trying not to analyse the vocal tuning too much. The first thing I realise is that overall the performance from the live final seemed to be much better than the pre-recorded and allegedly tampered with audition. Because Auto-tune can tune in real time, why the accusations only for the pre-recorded shows? The performance was so much better in the final so there’s more chance they were using it then than the audition anyway! Having said that, Autotune doesn’t cope well with vibrato and this big old bird loves a bit of vib. I put the improvement down to her being more relaxed and used to singing in front of an audience. I’m assuming there are endless rounds where everyone has to sing and each week one gets knocked out each week until just a few are left in the final. Does she sing the same song every single week?

Someone who can’t sing at all asked me if I could make them sound like a great singer using pitch correction software, and my reply was that I could probably make you sound 20% better almost immediately and if I was left with your lead vocal performance for a a few hours with Melodyne or in the old days Auto-tune in graphical mode (how tedious was that?), I could probably make you sound around 40% – 50% better. The point is that you have to be pretty good in the first place to sound great. Over the years I can probably count the amount of times I haven’t used Auto-tune on a vocal on one hand – from the very best in the business to the really bad ones. Of course, no names. The only reason I haven’t used it is when the artist insists that they don’t want it which is rare.

I analyse the pre-recorded audition for signs of Antares Auto-tune pitch correction software and notice that a lot of the longer notes tend to fluctuate in pitch at the tail end of the note when she begins to run out of breath as it’s more difficult to stay in tune, Auto-tune will not let that happen so I’m pretty convinced that no Antares Auto-tune was used at all. I told Mr Payne this and that given the poor quality of compressed audio on Youtube clips, I couldn’t hear any evidence of Melodyne either. I’ve investigated a bit now and find there have been some stories flying around the net that this performance has been tampered with, but how and who could tell, I don’t know. If it had, then it must have been Melodyne and whoever was doing the tampering didn’t do a good job because the tuning was all over the place!

Apparently Mike Stock was also asked by the Sunday Mirror at the same time as me to analyse the two videos too. I bought the Sunday Mirror and was sheepishly reading through it on my way to my gig at Carnival and didn’t spot any Susan Boyle Autotune scandals. I see now that THIS is Mr Payne’s Sunday story so Mike Stock must have came back with the same conclusion as me.

George pointed out, it’s tough that Antares are bragging about all the publicity and fuss this story is generating but the more sophisticated Melodyne can’t because it’s more difficult to spot so no one is talking about it so the general public have never heard of it!

I just thought i’d share with you a Sound Design Courses Scheme of Work I wrote a long time ago for a music production college in London. Each lesson is supposed to be one hour long. At Garnish School of Sound, we’d take a lot more time than just an hour – in some cases maybe a whole day for each of the one hour lessons I wrote!. I think I was ambitious trying to cram this much in initially!

Lesson one:

Warm up/Ice breaker – Introduction to myself, students introduce themselves and the music they have been working on. Introduction to the course and what we will be learning, why it will benefit them by learning it. Run through some ground rules. I wet the learners’ appetite by introducing and demonstrating oscillators, envelopes, filters, LFO, FX and modulation used in some famous records; what they are for and why we use them. We dissect a multi-track and analyse all the elements focusing on the synthesis and not so much the samples or audio. We look at the history of Sound Design and old analogue synthesizers. We cover the differences between analogue VCA’s and digital ones and zeros. I then tell the learners that they will be making their own sounds using the main elements and I will be assessing them at the end of the course.

Resources: Tutor workstation with Native Instruments’ Absynth 5 installed and internet connection, youtube, tutor chair, individual workstations with Native Instruments’ Absynth 5 installed for students, 8gb flash drive, 37”

Look out for Lesson two coming soon and see if you can spot any similarities to our Sound Design Course at Garnish School of Sound

I heard here that Apple (Logic) are to stop support for Avid’s Digidesign products (Pro Tools). This is a massive kick in the teeth for Avid who I here are struggling a bit at the moment. Neither rumor surprises me; I cashed in my (digital signal processing) chips a long time ago when Apple brought out the G5. The chips I cashed in were a Digidesign HD 3 (before excel) and a 192 interface. I could see the end for the need of processing power on PCI cards.I thought I should get as much money for my Digidesign Pro Tools HD system as I could, I already liked the sound of Apogee interfaces so I bought a Rosetta 800 and made do with a G5 dual 1.8. It was a bit sluggish but I knew bigger beasts were ‘in the post’. And in the post they were beyond my wildest dreams because I had no idea about the intel chips they were going to load them up with. I have to say also that I thought the Rosetta sounded much better than my 192 I had. Engineers often criticise Apogee stuff saying it sounds a bit sheeny. If they do then I like sheeny!

I hated the way Digidesign’s upgrade systems worked. I spent a fortune upgrading my Mix system to HD and it seemed only months later HD Accel came out. It’s part of the reason I sold my HD system when I did; I wasn’t about to fork out all that money AGAIN! Here is a recent letter they sent out to their customers telling them that they are building a website and dropping the Digidesign name if you’re interested. All those brand names were a bit confusing; Pro Tools made by Digidesign and Digidesign is owned by Avid. I don’t think many users even knew about Avid.

I do feel sorry for all those Logic users now lumbered with a HD rigs but soon will be unable to upgrade Logic. I don’t know why Apple are withdrawing support, I know that Avid and Apple have never been the best of friends but this really feels like kicking them when they are down. I wonder how much my Logic using pals will be able to get for their HD rigs now. I’ve been native for a few years now, I’m running 2 x 2.8 quad intel xeon, a load of ram and I can’t even get the beast to break into a sweat. I use an Apogee Ensemble interface now. I swapped my Rosetta 800 for the Ensemble because I wanted the lightpipe i/o when I ran Gigastudio. The stereo sp/diff i/o still comes in handy.

I can see the Mac Pro doesn’t break into a sweat because I use islayer’s iStat: http://www.islayer.com/ It’s a neat app which lets me know what’s going on in my mac; from the temperature of my processors and disk drives to how much processing power I am using and from which processors, handy when you want to see how your individual plugins use your processors. There’s even a handy ethernet bandwidth counter! All the stats appear at the top of the screen and look great; there are drop down menus of everything for more detailed statistics.

My advise to any Logic users with a Pro Tools rig is to come and do a Pro Tools courses with George or get those cards and interfaces on eBay NOW!

I made a video at my studio about zooming for Logic Pro Training.  I don’t know how I managed to talk about zooming for over 6 1/2 minutes but I love it. The first 4 minutes can get a bit tedious if you’re familiar with all the weird and wonderful ways you can zoom in and out in Logic 9 but I have to say that the way I zoom with the zoom tool assigned to the right mouse button is very quick and I haven’t seen anyone else zoom this way before I’ve showed them. And once they get used to it, they don’t go back to their old way. There is another way of zooming in Logic 9 similar to the way you can zoom in Ableton Live 8 but I was unaware of this when I made the video. My way is still quicker so there’s not much point talking about it here.

If you zip forward to 4 minutes and play from there, I touch on how I use loops and why I don’t use the loop tool and also on my preferred way of using the zoom tool these days. I’ve never seen anyone use loops and stop them with blank regions nor have I ever seen anyone set up the right mouse button to use as the zoom tool before either so it’s well worth watching, and I can’t see how anyone would go back after getting used to doing it my way. I really don’t know why anyone would use the loop tool and it’s starting to show that it’s not people who make music who beta-test Logic these days.

Watch the video HERE

I’ve been making some records with Toby Tobias recently which seem be be getting picked up by labels before we’ve even had a chance to mix! I know I can’t complain but he does have this habit of playing very rough demos to labels, then we’re up against it to finish the master because everyone is excited and people want to put the record out. It does say a lot for the A&R guys these days when they can hear the potential from such a rough demo. We are going to be called Badonday, our first tune is called Albondigas and will be out on Flashback after we have mixed the dub and it has been cut!

Toby is THE Ableton man and although I have used Ableton to warp mark mutitrack drums in my time (and very nice it is too), I’ve not made any records using it alone. I have purchased a copy now with a view to rewire it into Logic and use it as a slave. Now it looks like Toby and I are going to be working together a lot, it makes sense to make a system which works for both of us. Next project is immensely exciting btw – same vibe, he’s played it to some labels before we even arranged it – I don’t even think Ableton Live was out of session mode! I previously dismissed Ableton as a bit of a toy, it didn’t sound great and was only good for warp marking drums and fiddling about with loops quickly. But seeing Toby Tobias on the mouse…. no, it’s great, version 8 sounds much better so now i’m going to include it here at Garnish School of Sound!

I’ve persuaded the Tobias to write up some courses with me and I’m aiming to have 6 workshops ready for mid July, and best of all, he has agreed to take at least the first set of workshops!! Amazing Ableton Live news from Garnish School of Sound!

Just a quick note to let you know that you can see some of George’s favorite Pro Tools mixing and mastering key commands here in his blog. Also check out his chilled out band project ‘Sundae Club’ and the fab work he has done for the Haiti appeal!

I was always obsessed with my key commands in Logic, I used to swap key command ideas with my mates and I guess I ended up with a completely different set of key commands that the original Emagic ones. I actually learnt Logic in the early 90′s mainly by changing all the main key commands so they were the same as the old Cubase, which was sequencer of choice back in the day. Obviously when I move to another sequencer, none of the key commands are ‘right’ so I got round this by having my Logic preferences handy. Most recently by having a copy emailed to myself to my Hotmail account.

Last year when I started to teach, I found that my system of having my Logic preferences uploaded somewhere wasn’t convenient enough when I was having to constantly hop from one Logic workstation to another so I had to learn the standard ones all over again! Once exception though; I still HAVE to have my stop as ‘zero’ and play as ‘enter’ on the numeric keypad.

I’ve just got a youtube channel organised and my first video is all about mixing vocals using audio compression in your home recording studio.

I only scratch the surface and I think I need to work on my presenting skills but I played it to a musician friend of mine who said he learnt loads about mixing vocals using audio compression – that’s the important thing I guess. I keep saying that there’s no time and don’t explain why. There was not enough time because youtube only let you upload a maximum of 10 minutes at a time and not because my dinner was on and I didn’t want to ruin it!

In the video I go through the various hardware emulations, talk about the threshold, ratio, attack and release parameters and the gain reduction meter of Logic Studio 9′s built in compressor. How I get my Lead Vocal to sit in the mix. When not to use a spectrum analyser and use your ears!

As I mentioned in the video, we spend 4 hours on audio compression in our mixing and mastering course now here at Garnish School of Sound so if you get the feeling I’m going too fast in the video, I probably am and now you know why!

Watch the video HERE

One object I have in my music production environment click and ports layer is the Chord Memorizer, which can be a great music trick for DJ’s with limited musical skills.

The Chord Memorizer can be a useful music production music theory fix for DJ’s if you just want to quickly put some chords together which will have a good chance of going well with each other. I usually set it up so C plays chord one, D plays chord two, E plays chord three right up to B which will play chord seven. See this if you are unfamiliar with the chord number system. The Roman numerals are along the top.

In a nutshell, you can trigger all the chords in the key of C by using one finger on any white key on the keyboard from C to B which correspond to chord 1 (C) to Chord seven (B dim). All the chords in the same key have a great chance of sounding right with each other.

Chord Memorizer: Musical tips and tricks for DJs

So, first you crack open Chord Memorizer (windows – environment – click and ports – new – chord memorizer) Double click on it to bring up the double keyboard, Choose the note C on the upper keyboard. On the lower keyboard choose the triad of C major by selecting C, E and G like the pic on the left. Double click on the picture to make it bigger.

Next choose D on the upper keyboard and then select notes D, F and A. This will make a D minor triad. Next, choose E on the top and the notes E, G and B on the bottom, this makes an E minor triad. Notice that all the notes are white notes and equal distance in width apart. This applies right up to the B which will be a B dim so repeat until you get there. Now set the key limit on the left to the full range from C-2 to G8. This just tells the environment to use the entire keyboard.

Okay, now you can play all the chords in the key of C. If you up one in the transposition box (under the Key Limit), you’re now playing all the chords in the key of C sharp! If you go up ANOTHER 2 then you’re playing all the chords in the key of Eb. Eb is a hard key to play in – you’re a musical genius!

Here is a handy chart for commonly used chords in the relevant key. And here is a very useful tool you can use to see what notes go into chords and scales in all keys on the keyboard. I used both when I taught Song Writing and Music Theory.

Don’t forget to turn it off by bypassing it using a cable switcher when you have finished; you don’t want to be triggering a kick drum, open hat and snare when you’re trying to find a shaker in your drum kit! See here for more on that. Please don’t think now you know this trick, there’s no need to bother learning an instrument; Chord Memorizer is just a trick for people who quickly need to string a few chords together.

Before I get letters, I am aware that some Dj’s (like myself before I wound down) can play an instrument or two, but if I took a percentage of the DJ’s who have come to me for help, there’s no way we’d be reaching double figures. I would’ve thought we’d get similar stats for musicians who can DJ!

Many people are a bit scared of Logic’s environment and it even puts people off using Logic Pro as a DAW altogether. Logic Pro/Studio’s Environment is the foundation that Logic is built on. It’s been around since the birth of Logic in 1993 and remains pretty much the same to this day. Today we’re going to look at Logic Studio 9′s click and ports layer in the environment window which I think can be the most intimidating. Essentially it takes the midi notes you play on the keyboard and processes them using various objects depending on what you want to do. It does the same thing as the script editor in Native instruments’ Kontakt for all you Kontakt heads out there. Here is a pic of my click and ports page (click on it to make it bigger) It’s a bit more complicated than the Environment click and ports page out of the Logic Studio 9 box but still quite similar.

The strip on the far left is your controller keyboard. The pre process box tells you what you’re physically hitting on your keyboard. The post process box is a display of the notes after they have been processed. In this case, the keyboard is just a graphical display of the notes you’re playing on the keyboard but you can have it post processing or even have another post processing – you can set it up how you like. This is one of the reasons I encourage teaching on students’ personal workstations wherever possible on my music production courses

The Midi Click is your metronome so keep that lurking somewhere. The Octavizer just plays the octave up as well as the note you’re playing and comes set up in Logic Studio 9 (not Logic Pro 8) as standard. I deleted it because I know I’ll never use it nor is it interesting enough to include in any course. I have replaced it with the Delay line which is much more useful. The Chord Memorizer is used to trigger chords you set up to be triggered from one key on the keyboard. You can find and add objects by clicking the ‘new’ drop down menu.

You can access Logic’s environment from the ‘windows’ drop down or hit ‘Command 8′ Sometimes when you’re working on it, it slips behind your main window so I sometimes hit ‘alt’ then select it from the drop down and it becomes a floating window which won’t disappear. Try it.

You will see that they’re all cabled together. Nothing would work if there were no cables involved! All you do to cable things together is grap the ‘nipple’ usually to the right of the device, drag the cable to which ever device or object you choose. The key to my useful set up are the cable switchers, they are not the easiest to find so follow this path: new – fader – specials – cable switcher. I think you can guess the function of a cable switcher. To switch from one cable to the other, just click on the cable switcher itself. You will notice that I have a second cable switcher post the Chord Memorizer; one output feeds the sequencer directly and one makes a stop at the arpeggiator so all those lovely chords you are (not) playing get arpeggiated too. You’re a musical genius!

You can watch the video HERE

Before the turn of this decade and I got my hands on a Magic Mouse, I used the Mighty Mouse and I got used to and enjoyed the scroll ball/sphere/nipple on the front. It was wonderful to be able to scroll up and down in the the arrangement and Piano Roll windows. About time too given how long scroll wheels had been available on other mice at the time. With the Mighty Mouse, not only could you scroll up and down but with the ball you could from side to side or even 360 degrees – again very useful in Logic’s windows when you want to quickly scroll from one section of a song to another without having to mess around zooming or fiddling with the bars at the bottom of the window. IT WAS JUST SUCH A SHAME THAT THE THING ONLY LASTED 6 MONTHS BEFORE THE BALL BROKE OR GOT CLOGGED UP AND YOU NEEDED TO BUY A NEW ONE OR FIGURE OUT A WAY OF GETTING THE GUNK OUT!!!

Apple haven’t exactly had a great record with mice. Remember that awful circular thing that came out with the first generation imacs? You never knew where you were about to track before you moved the mouse! Then the buttonless generation, buttonless because Steve Jobs doesn’t like the look of buttons! We coped at the time but now I can’t imagine life now without a right click!

Now we have the Magic Mouse. I had one popped into my Xmas stocking so I’ve had it a while now and between you and I, it was the toy I was most excited to get out and play with.

It doesn’t fill the hand like a Mighty Mouse; I know this is an issue for some but after a few hours, I got used to it. Tracking is supposed to be more accurate; it probably is but I never had a problem with the Mighty Mouse for tracking. Scrolling is much the same except you don’t have the much troubled physical ball anymore which can only be good. It’s nice the way you can pretty much scroll from anywhere in the top half of the area of the mouse as opposed to having to place your finger in exactly the same spot like before. Two finger swiping in Safari is great; no more tracking back up to that back button to view the main page after you read an article. Scrolling in Snow Leopard is joyful; I think they call it momentum. In a nutshell, the mouse knows how fast your finger moves and when you take it off, the page keeps scrolling and comes to a gradual stop depending on how fast your finger moved. SLICK! Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen in Leopard unless I’ve missed something.

Just a quick note about MagicPrefs: it’s where you can set up all sorts of deeper functions for your Magic Mouse. For example, I set up two finger CLICK to get me straight to spaces, three finger TAP to expose all windows etc etc. Unfortunately when I’m zipping around my mac and my applications at the pace it do, I tend to put fingers on the mouse without noticing so I’m going into spaces, exposing desktop, viewing all app windows etc when I don’t want to and THAT is very annoying. Perhaps I could train myself to use the Magic Mouse more delicately. For now I have to turn all these funky functions off as it’s more important it works as a useful mouse than do tricks I can live without for now.

So the question is will the Magic Mouse make life easier for you in Logic Studio. And the answer is that it will do what the Mighty Mouse did and a load of extra funky stuff outside of Logic Studio but it should last a lot longer than 6 months!

Celemony Melodyne DNA pitch correction music studio software. But what’s it for? 10 years ago the standard way to correct pitch in vocals was Autotune. To correct bits manually, you’d have to use graphical mode. It was very fiddly, you’d have to load in a few seconds of vocal and then nip in to an inch square box and move the audio up or down to correct the pitch then bounce down. It didn’t sound great either. Then came Celemony’s Melodyne; the quality of its central pitch/time manipulation engine generated a real sense of excitement amongst Producers and Engineers on account of the new possibilities and user friendliness. It was not only easy to use but sounded pretty good too.

Then in 2009 came Melodyne DNA (Direct Note Access). It promised what some called impossible: the selective manipulation of individual notes within a polyphonic audio file? I was certainly skeptical, but seeing a few videos on youtube last year blew me away so I couldn’t wait to crack it open myself.

When I did, I loaded in a stereo mix of All Saints’ ‘Never Ever’. The reason I chose this record is because I knew the arrangement inside out and wanted to compare the intro with just the vocal and piano, and the middle of the song when all the ‘bells and whistles’ are in. Although the mix feels full throughout, there’re not too many musical elements going on at any one time.

I found it easy to nip in and change the individual notes in the piano chords throughout the song. Impressively, change the pitch of all the instruments without effecting anything else playing at the same point. Even instruments which were relatively close to each other in pitch. Unfortunately, I struggled to ‘lift’ the lead vocal in any part of the song. Even the intro where it’s only the LV (lead vocal) and piano in the mix. The method here would obviously be deleting everything you see which isn’t the LV part. It just didn’t sound good enough. Not even with a bit of ‘splosh’ (reverb and delay)

Q: What use is this groundbreaking software to me? A: Unfortunately, I can’t think of any.

• The old Melodyne is fine for me to tune monophonic vocal tracks. (To be honest, I don’t know if DNA sounds any better using it monophonically)
• Acapella’s ‘lifted’ off of mixes are unusable.
• I don’t need to nick other people’s musical elements or chords in the form of MIDI *
• I will never spend money on session musicians or orchestras before knowing 100% how the chords and melody are going to go.

So, it is undoubtedly the most incredible software I’ve every come across and great fun to play with. But, I can’t for the life of me think where it would be useful to me!

*I did this with my Songwriting students: if you like a chord progression and would like to know what the chords are, you figure out the root note for each chord and write it down. You can easily do with my ear but it may take some longer than others to do. In a nutshell, the note that sounds most like the chord should be the root note. Now figure out if it’s major or minor by listening to it and experimenting; now (specially if it’s jazzy or bluesy) roughly figure out any extensions. Write all this down and play through again and again tweaking until it sounds good. I think you’ll find that (particularly if you’re playing a guitar and recorded instrument is keyboard based) you are already playing different inversions before you teak some more to make those chords ‘your own’.

Music Production Tips and Tricks.

Logic 9 courses. Another thing the chap from Focusrite told me is that now Novation Automap software works now with all Logic Studio 9 plug ins. Weird because it was only this year Novation told me that Logic Studio 9 plugsins were written in a completely different way than ALL 3rd party plug ins and Automap would never work!

Automap is very useful; if you have a Novation Remote or Remote SL, the software assigns all the parameters of the plugins to the midi controllers of the Novation Remote or Novation Remote SL so you don’t have to figure out or assign a midi controller for the filter cut off or what ever parameter of your plugin. The Automap software is programmed so it knows which parameter is on what midi controller and displays it on the display making things much easier. Newly supported software plugins include exs24, es1, es2, Sculpture, es m, evb3, evd6, efm1, es e, es p, evoc 20 ps, evp88, Ultrabeat and even the test oscillator!

I personally have a Remote 25 SL, and it is available to use and I can demonstrate Novations Automapping software in my Logic Pro Courses and Music production courses.