In my latest video on Reaktor 5 available in Native Instruments’ Komplete 6 bundle, my voice goes high pitched when I say ‘hi’ and then it settles down to what it’s normally like. I also say “crack it open” rather a lot for some reason.

Anyone can build an Ensemble (synth, FX unit, sequencer etc) in Reaktor just like anyone can build an application for an iPhone. The difference is that Native Instruments don’t police or make money out of the distribution like Apple do for their apps. You can imagine there are a hell of a lot out there. I have uploaded all my synths beginning with the letter S for you to download. I can’t give you my whole library because it’s over 9 gb. I’m giving you a selection of synths because they’re probably more useful to you than sequencers or samplers and I picked the letter S randomly.

When I mention Reaktor, my students on the Logic course at Garnish School of Sound tend to glaze over before I’ve said anything more – they associate it with geeks who want to spend all of their life building synths. It is for geeks who like building synths (I don’t think many make records) but who is going to be playing with these lovely creations after they have been built? The answer is you and me. So in this video, I scratch the surface of Reaktor 5, talk through some of the bizarre terminology, show you how to navigate to your sounds and FX (ensembles) and how to flick through the presets (or snapshots in Reaktor land)

Once I settle on a bass, I show you how easy it is to assign controllers in Reaktor, I send the signal to an aux and pop in a reverb on the insert demonstrating reaktor as an FX unit too. I do dip my toe into the building blocks but just show you how to access them. In my Dance Music Sound Design course, we cover Reaktor in depth and even get synth building!

Watch the video HERE

Download over 100 Reaktor synths HERE

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

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!

I have just returned from an Ableton Live 8 demo for music production courses by a nice chap from Focusrite hooked up by Gavin at Kazbar systems.

I was very impressed by the way you now warp mark the audio transients as opposed to the grid now in Ableton Live 8. Also seeing it work with the Novation lauchpad was awesome. You can buy the Novation lauchpad for £150 and get a cut down version of Ableton thrown in. I will definitely be purchasing and call it a little Xmas present to myself!

I was thinking of rewiring it and using Logic as the master (because Logic will only be the master) doing all the clever audio stuff in Ableton then running it in the background or perhaps print it in Logic when I’m happy. I have an 8 core 2.8 mac pro so I shouldn’t think I’ll have too much trouble with grunt running both DAWs running. I also found out that you can use Live 8 as a master OR slave which would be handy if you wanted to run it as a master and use Reason 5 as a slave. The guy was saying that there is a track limitation in the cut down version and it doesn’t come with all the FX and synths the full version does. That suits me because I can’t see myself using it as my main DAW, and if one day I decided to switch from Logic (yeah right!), I can upgrade it. I’m working with a DJ pal called Toby Tobias and we’re working some some disco house productions. Latest one has just been signed to Flashback. He’s and Ableton Live head and after working with me, he is now learning Logic! I’m not sure if I’m blowing Logic’s trumpet here or mine. Maybe a bit of both but my statement is true! I was thinking of getting the Novation lauchpad because off the back of these productions, I am getting more DJing work again and I’d love to try that system out live. So I guess MY conclusion of Ableton Live 8 is that it’s very creative in session mode, very fast to manipulate audio and get things done quickly but still, a bit of a toy and will no way replace Logic Studio 9. Also, I’m still not convinced the sound is up to scratch. What the hell, toys are fun right? And with Logic Studio 9 still being the meat and potatoes of my system, I get the best of both worlds! I did ask him if I could run Logic Studio 9, Ableton Live 8 AND Reason 5 together but he didn’t know. May download the demo of Live and see. There are some nifty things I like in Reason 5 and it’d be interesting to see.

Last week I went to Putney to see a chap who is fairly new to music production. He needed someone to go to him and set his workstation up, as he had just bought a system but didn’t know how to put it together. Of course it would have been boring for him to come to me for a crash course only to get home and not be able to practice what he had learnt! There’s always a music production tutor floating around in the area so don’t hesitate to get in touch if you would like some one-2-one help.

It was a bit of a shame because he had bought a load of stuff from a branch of a large chain of pro audio suppliers. I would have advised him to buy different equipment and certainly not from this chain. I didn’t rub it in though as I didn’t want to upset him, and what he had was workable, but he could have bought better stuff for his money. I’ve been using Gavin at Kazbar for more years now than I care to remember. I’ll give you an idea of how long. People were not really using email much back then and I was working at Universal publishing as their engineer before they signed me. Universal needed their studio kitted out, well, I insisted they needed a lot more gear than they had at the time! I sent one of these instant email thingys round to around a dozen companies and Gav was one of the only people who came back to me on email! Since then, I have used him and his excellent tech support. You can call him and he knows what he is talking about and doesn’t favor any companies or products because he has a warehouse full of something he needs to get shot of. Another thing is that he’s his own boss and the only sales person so you know that a year down the line, you email or call the same person, you get the same person.

You can get him on gavin@kazbarsystemsinc.com and here’s his webiste.

Enough of my Gav ad; I will let him know he owes me a beer!

Right, I’m off. My boiler has broken down and my fingers are getting a bit nippy and I need to put them in to some gloves. This blogging for Music Production Courses lark is alright isn’t it?

My music production courses and Logic Training are packed with tips and tricks in London can help you with your music production whether you’re a DJ wanting to make your own productions to take you to the next level or a Song Writer looking to make better demos of your songs.

This is what we can look at:-

-Basic Synthesis (ES1, ES2, Juno 106, Korg Monopoly) Sound Design, creating your own unique sound.

-Apple Loops.

-Logic Instrument plug ins

-Programming Beats

-Logic Basics in music produciton

-Reverbs, delays and Dynamics (gates, compression, side chaining, side chain compression)
-Chords and keys the easy way. Melody and lyrics

-Advanced Logic and other plugins

-EXS 24 Sampling, Chopping up loops, hiding your sampled loops, filtering

-Sound Engineering, Recording, Outboard and microphones.

-Mixing

-Arranging

Lots of music production tips and tricks – Beginner to Advanced