Had a fun experience tonight “debugging” something that turned out to be a simpler problem… I mounted the mic wrong! Cardioid microphones, as most folks know, pick up sound from most angles except directly behind them. Thus, if you mount your mic 180 degrees away from where your noise source is, most of what you are hearing then is the room reflections. I figured something was wrong when I found myself cranking up the preamplifier to get a decent line level. So, next time your mic seems “boxy” or too quiet for the preamplifier settings… Check the positioning first!
Blog Post, Tips and Tricks
Sure, I know what you’re thinking… “when would I have to do that!?!”
Well, that’s what I would have said until lately when this became an issue!
Right now, in the studio I am running a “samples only” slave machine without a monitor or keyboard, relying simply on Apple’s built-in screen sharing feature to help me manage Kontakt on that machine. All is going well until I decide to load another sample library onto the slave computer from some DVD-ROM’s I have and I run into this issue! Using the eject key on my main computer’s keyboard does NOT translate “through” screen sharing to mean “eject the SLAVE MACHINE’s optical drive”. Instead, it only ejects the master machine. Oops!
After some searching around, I found that a feature DOES exist to create what is shown in the screen shot above – a way to eject the optical drive tray from the menu bar!
To set this up, simply navigate on your system to:
/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/
There will be a file in there called “Eject.menu”
Simply double-click this and presto! You will have the option to click and eject! Enjoy!
Blog Post, Logic Pro, Tips and Tricks
I’m a definite believer in cleaning house in order to be more creative. For a composer, this means lots and lots of computer work. Perhaps its setting up backups, cleaning out files, installing a new PCIe card or hard drive, updating (all!) your software programs and sample libraries. Maybe calibrating your monitors. Whatever it is, eliminating the clutter is a great move towards improving focus during some downtime. Read more…
Blog Post, Logic Pro, Tips and Tricks
As many folks know, in the MIDI protocol, there is actually a particular control number for volume which is CC#11. However, in MIDI-speak this is called expression so as not to confuse anyone with the volume of a fader in a sequence. However, in order to add life to your arrangements, it is often very practical to embed this expression information within the recording in real-time and then use the volume faders of your sequence to “balance” things later on in mix-down.
For a lot of folks, this is a mind-numbing process of drawing various shapes in some sort of editor. For the luckier among us, our controller keyboard may have a port to plug in a continuous pedal of some kind. Or, our keyboard may have some moveable faders that are hard-coded to transmit certain MIDI signals. The question is: are any of these CC#11? And if not, how can you “re-purpose” one to do this?
Read more…
Blog Post, Logic Pro, Tips and Tricks
Anyone who is using the new version of WordPress might appreciate this! There is some issues with the new “captions” feature for images. I found a great fix here which I am simply reposting below.
Paste this to the bottom of your style.css. Worked like a charm for me!
/* Captions */
.aligncenter,
div.aligncenter {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}
.wp-caption {
border: 1px solid #ddd;
text-align: center;
background-color: #f3f3f3;
padding-top: 4px;
margin: 10px;
-moz-border-radius: 3px;
-khtml-border-radius: 3px;
-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
border-radius: 3px;
}
.wp-caption img {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0 none;
}
.wp-caption p.wp-caption-text {
font-size: 11px;
line-height: 17px;
padding: 0 4px 5px;
margin: 0;
}
/* End captions */
Tips and Tricks