New tune get your ears out.

psyfi

psyfi

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I started writting this tune becuse of this thread http://www.psy-forum.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=36417&highlight=delay+bass
I wanted to write a tune with delay on the bass to see if what I was yapping on about was true.
Then half way through this thread comes along. My own fault this one.
http://www.psy-forum.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=37207
So I took all the sparate tracks from logic and mixed the audio in live 5 so the question is has this improved the over all sound? Well thats what you lot are here to tell me.
The tune is called "Transcended innit" and it is at the top of my music page. Please listen and let me know your thorughts.
http://www.psyfi.co.uk/music.htm

:ibiggrin:
 
Damn man! This is some awesome shit and to my ears (and headphones) the production is very good - clear, dynamic and deep :Smile3:

It reminds IM's old stuff at places, which I suppose is a good thing.

It made me download your other tunes :Grin:
 
Cool thanks for that antic. Hope you like the other tunes mate.:ibiggrin:
 
awesome leads mate! what kind of kit/synths do you use?
 
dukas said:
awesome leads mate! what kind of kit/synths do you use?
Click to expand...
Cheers dukas. The main lead in this one is Logic's es2 with two sine waves in FM to make a saw wave. This way when I bend the pitch on one of the osc wierd stuff happens. :ibiggrin: The same lead is later put through Natives guitar rig. Also I used albino 1 and Vanguard in this track.


Ruskin said:
Really enjoyed that, cheers psyfi. :smoke:
Click to expand...
Thanks Ruskin. Glad you enjoyed it mate.
 
hey there :ismile:

would it be possible to hear the version that is mixed in logic, so that a direct comparison can be made between the two mixdowns?

Im an avid fan of Logic, but im constantly trying tom improve the fidelity of my sound.

I totally understand if this is a pain in the arse, so dont worry too much if you cant!

Thanks man

Adam
 
Adam Ephexis said:
hey there :ismile:

would it be possible to hear the version that is mixed in logic, so that a direct comparison can be made between the two mixdowns?

Im an avid fan of Logic, but im constantly trying tom improve the fidelity of my sound.

I totally understand if this is a pain in the arse, so dont worry too much if you cant!

Thanks man

Adam
Click to expand...
Just so happens I put a link to a cut down version of the logic bounce on this thread.
http://www.psy-forum.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?p=427772#post427772
I think getting a mixer is the best option with out a doubt but in the mean time live 5 seems a good idea.
 
wow - the difference is amazing...... Did you EQ in live? or simply bounce the tracks down, and sum them together in live?

A great tune man, I love the leads, and the generl production sounds really tight.

Im in a constant battle with myself about the mixer conundrum..... I do love the sound of a decent analogue desk, but i cant decide if the gain in the warmth and body in the sound is worth the degredation of signal qualty - I find that as soon as a noise has been converted more than once, it really loses it magic...... But this can be recitfied with a bit of musical EQ, but is it better???? Subjective......

I'm a big fan of the Mackie 32:8:2 mixer - it has a great amounth of warmth in the channels when pushed into saturation.

When a mixer is used, its really important that the D/A and A/D converters are high quality. Im using a Creamware A16 ultra, and the results are great. But you really can notice that the track you play back through the mixer, does sound a lot different to when its been recorded. If your really anal about the degredation of sound, I stronlgy recommend the Apogee Mini DAC and Mini Me. It does require selling your soul to be able to afford them, but when used in conjunction with an analogue signal source, the results are second to none.

I'll stop rambling now!

Thanks again for the tune, nice work!!

Adam
 
Adam Ephexis said:
wow - the difference is amazing...... Did you EQ in live? or simply bounce the tracks down, and sum them together in live?
Click to expand...


I EQd a bit of mid out of the kick and took a little low and mid out of the FX sends track which I bounced in logic as one track bar the bass delay. Apart from that the rest is untouched, just at different levels as I found there was more room to move as it were with in Live 5's mixer. I didn't have to push every sound to the front to get it heard and other things could be subtler with out getting lost. That’s what was really getting me hot and bothered with Logic's mixer. One second a sound is there and you move the level just a bit and it's fallen out of the mix.

Adam Ephexis said:
When a mixer is used, its really important that the D/A and A/D converters are high quality. Im using a Creamware A16 ultra, and the results are great. But you really can notice that the track you play back through the mixer, does sound a lot different to when its been recorded. If your really anal about the degredation of sound, I stronlgy recommend the Apogee Mini DAC and Mini Me. It does require selling your soul to be able to afford them, but when used in conjunction with an analogue signal source, the results are second to none.
Click to expand...


Thanks for the tips their Adam. As far as what’s lost and what is gained with a mixer I think it's up to thinking out what you want to end up with sound wise and knowing what parts of a tune can take more degradation than other parts that need as good a clarity as possible. I'm using a Gina 20 soundcard which sounds great and I'm crossing my fingers that with a few more of these top cards and a mixer I'll move closer to where I want to go sound wise.
Glad you liked the tune to mate, after all thats what it's for.:ibiggrin:
 
My setup is in pieces at the moment because I'm upgrading my main computer but what I'm thinking about now is how to record the final mixdown! If I dusted off my olf Spirit sx and set it up for the benefits that have been talked about, I could feed the final mix back into the computer and use Logic or Peak maybe to record the final mix. If I'm using Layla, or the Apogee at super 192k, then does the software matter at all as long as its compatible with the sample rate? Or maybe a hard disk recorder or DAt is still best to use. The converters on the Apogee do sound like the best option in terms of quality and I guess if I could afford it I would fork out for apogee converters each end of the anologue process to get the minimum loss of quality.
 
dukas said:
My setup is in pieces at the moment because I'm upgrading my main computer but what I'm thinking about now is how to record the final mixdown! If I dusted off my olf Spirit sx and set it up for the benefits that have been talked about, I could feed the final mix back into the computer and use Logic or Peak maybe to record the final mix. If I'm using Layla, or the Apogee at super 192k, then does the software matter at all as long as its compatible with the sample rate? Or maybe a hard disk recorder or DAt is still best to use. The converters on the Apogee do sound like the best option in terms of quality and I guess if I could afford it I would fork out for apogee converters each end of the anologue process to get the minimum loss of quality.
Click to expand...
Well for me thats a head scratcher beyond my knolage. Don't know if Adam has any advise on this one but it could be worth asking it on the mixing in or out thread
http://www.psy-forum.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=37207
Would be interested to know my self.
 
The software that you use to record shouldnt make a lot of difference to the sound - the important thing is that the ins and the outs are in sync. The best way to achieve this without forking out for an expensive clocking device is to use an SPDIF or ADAT signal as the master clock. Set the outs of your soundcard to be on the same clock as this signal, and also set the input of your recording device to be set as a slave to this signal. This will ensure that the wave is being recorded without any aliasing.

If the recording, and the playback devidce are slightly out of sync, the recorded signal will be out of time with the sample rate that you are using.... Causing gaps in the sound that you can hardly notice, but do cause serious degredation.

Recording at a high sample rate to the playback rate can help get around this a little, but, as the sample rates are totally different, there will still be a slight difference in the sound.

Also, when reccording at a high sample rate, bear in mind that its going to have to be dithered back down to 44.1khz/16bit to go onto an audio CD...... I've found that the best dithering results can be found with the Apogee 22 dithering algorithm - Its built straight into the outputs of cubase, and is extremely useful.... Most dithering utilites use noise in the low frequncies of the sound to make up for the sound loss when converting the bit depth of a signal, but the apogee dithering
places the noise at 22khz, which is slightly out of the range of most converters, and leaves the signal sounding really nice.

Hope this helps in some way - any questions, just ask!!

Ad
 
Cheers for that Adam. My head is feeling very heavy now with all this new info knocking around in there.:silly:
 
Yes very helpful thanks! I dont have an external CD-r but I was using Logic 6 before and I think the problems I was having was because I was using samples at different bit rates, which was causing loss of quality when bouncing tracks or in the final mixdown. I've just had a bit of a read on other forums and the POW-r dither that comes with Logic 7 that compares with Apogee on Cubase and is meant to be pretty top notch. I have a love hate relationship with Logic so after I read your reply I thought about switching to Cubase. But now I understand POW-r is present on Logic 7 I think it should be ok to upgrade to 7 as I planned. Do you know much about Logic 7? There's always an ongoing logic/cubase debate but I think this should help logic on this point.
 
dukas said:
Yes very helpful thanks! I dont have an external CD-r but I was using Logic 6 before and I think the problems I was having was because I was using samples at different bit rates, which was causing loss of quality when bouncing tracks or in the final mixdown. I've just had a bit of a read on other forums and the POW-r dither that comes with Logic 7 that compares with Apogee on Cubase and is meant to be pretty top notch. I have a love hate relationship with Logic so after I read your reply I thought about switching to Cubase. But now I understand POW-r is present on Logic 7 I think it should be ok to upgrade to 7 as I planned. Do you know much about Logic 7? There's always an ongoing logic/cubase debate but I think this should help logic on this point.
Click to expand...
The thing is that dithering as far as I know has nothing to do with the summing down of the audio tracks in to one track. Dithering is just to help out in the bit rate conversion of audio. Then again I have no experience with Logic above 5.5. I'm not about to get a Mac to find out if it handles audio any batter than the PC versions. Any one know?
 
I used Cubase for about 6 years, and then I moved on to Logic 5.5 on the PC - I think its amazing, and would never move back. We use logic 7 in one of the Ephexis studios, I have a love/hate relationship with it......

Good bits :

It does sound amazing, and the Space Designer reverb is quite unbelievebly good.... So are the other new effects. The ring shifter is a great rind modulator with many good features, and the little FM synth is also very cool......

The addition of an offline bounce is a great thing to see, no longer do u have to worry about whether or not you have enough CPU time to bounce down that wikid sound that keeps making the machine go wierd.

Bad Bits:

The interface has been 'Apple-e-fied', normally I love the interface that appears in all of the Apple 'Pro' range of software, but logic, somehow, they got wrong...... No longer can you hold control (or alt) and use the wheel to zoom in on the arranger window, instead you have to hold alt, and do the thing where u draw a square on the screen, which it zooms in on, and then alt+dble click to zoom out again - a small thing i know, but i love the wheel zoom in logic 5!

We've also found some very strange things going on with the EXS24, sometimes the samples are randomly transposed up a semitone or two, and then, after a couple of sessions working like that, they go back to normal again! really, really annoying, espcially with your working with a lot of percussion, or arppegios.

The 'External Synth' instrument at first, seems very cool - it allows you to run an external synth stright into an audio instrument object channel, and use the inserts on it in real time. Its great, until yopu have to bounce it down, make another channel for it, and replicate the FX once its recorded - so we now just create a standard audio object, and simply use the old fashioned record enable to enable VST FX, and adjust the delay on the track accordingly.

Also, we've found that stability is a bit of an issue. We're running a 2 x 2.5Ghz G5 machine, and i would say that it crahses at least twice a day, and, logic 7 still has no autosave feature! Shocking.

Another blow is the the Expose feature hasnt been propperly implemented - I was really looking forward to being able to see all of the FX settings, and instruments zoomed out and on one screen, but alas, all but the arrange and the mixer dissapear when you hit F9/F10 - shame!

I think in total it takes us about 30% more time to finish a project in logic 7 than it does in logic 5 - Which, with the increase in CPU power, I really wasnt expecting to happen.

Hopefully logic 7.2 will fix a few of these annoying things, and apple will have built up the guts to change the interface to make it feel a little less like a freeware app! Dont get me wrong, I love the logic 5 interface, but, it is a bit old!!

All in all, the projects that we make in logic 7 do sound a lot fuller than logic 5, mainly due to the reverb i think - but, Im quite happy with my Logic 5 / creamware scope combination - It sounds very analogue, and is reliable, and totaly adaptabel to the needs of any user.

Im sure i've got a lot more to say about the issue, but cant for the life of me remember any more points (chronic)!

I hope this helps!

Adam
 
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