Tracking drums in Logic making a fool out of me

AdamWathan

AdamWathan

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Apr 12, 2002
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So I finally got to track a session in Logic last night and doing the simplest things takes me forever.

First of all, the playhead. I could set it wherever I wanted but when I hit spacebar, 90% of the time it would jump to an arbitrary location and start playing from there. What is the most logical way to have the play options set (like when you right click the play button in the transport, which options should be selected so that it plays from WHERE YOU PUT THE FUCKING PLAYHEAD)??

Punch recording. Fuck this. I can't get it to work properly to save my life. If a drummer fucks up and stops playing, how do I punch in from where he left off without creating a punch area that goes from where he stopped playing to where I predict the song will end? I know I can just put the playhead there and hit record, but I prefer having the recording count in set to 0 bars and just setting a punch point so that the amount the drummer gets to hear before he punches in can be different depending on what song or where he is in the song because he needs a different amount of cue to play along with depending on different situations. Is there anyway to have a single punch POINT where it starts recording and doesn't stop recording until I hit stop? I don't mind making a punch area, BUT, if I zoom in and use the marquee tool to select from where I want to punch, it takes FOREVER to drag it to the end of the song, since I can't zoom out and extend the marquee selection without redrawing it, and when I'm zoomed out I can't accurately start the marquee from where I want.

This next one pissed me off to no end. Is there any way to fucking SEE THE WAVEFORM MOVING WHEN I AM DRAGGING A REGION?! I import a scratch track played to a click, zoom in on a transient and want to drag the region into place so that transient lines up with my grid so that the scratch track will follow the click in Logic. Except the thing is, I have to guess where to drag it to because when I drag it doesn't show the waveform moving, so I can't see the transient moving along with my mouse and can't line it up with the bar. What I had to do was shorten the region so that it started at wherever this transient was and then line up the edge of the region with the bar, then go back and extend the beginning of the region again.


UGH I was fucking humiliated last night trying to track drums. I seriously almost downloaded Reaper onto my computer just because it at least plays from where the playhead is, weird concept I know. It took me like 10 minutes to figure out how to punch in and since "auto input monitoring" does nothing, it was frustrating that anytime I had Logic set to do it's 2 bar count in before recording (since thats the only way I can get it to have something to play along to before the punch point without spending 30 minutes to drag a marquee selection in zoom view) the drummer couldn't hear his drum tracks before the punch point to play along to since Logic does this weird "pre recording" safety feature in case you need to extend the beginning of the new recording. Sure, record that, that's fine, but don't FUCK UP MY MONITORING because of it, just play it how it's supposed to sound and don't stop playing the previously recorded track until the punch point! UGH. Fucking stupid stupid stupid software.

Someone who actually manages to record anything remotely efficiently in Logic please come to my house and show me how it's done before I shoot myself in the brain. For all the talk people had about Reaper's options being confusing and ridiculous, it blows my mind that anyone can figure out how to use this supposedly intuitive piece of Apple software.

Fucking ridiculous.
 
I had the same issues the first time I tried to use Logic 8. I lost lot of time with all that weird things.
This and the lack of a decent drum quantizing (in Logic 8) are the reasons because now I use ProTools 8.
 
AdamWathan said:
So I finally got to track a session in Logic last night and doing the simplest things takes me forever.

First of all, the playhead. I could set it wherever I wanted but when I hit spacebar, 90% of the time it would jump to an arbitrary location and start playing from there. What is the most logical way to have the play options set (like when you right click the play button in the transport, which options should be selected so that it plays from WHERE YOU PUT THE FUCKING PLAYHEAD)??
Click to expand...

Did you have Cycle record mode on when this happened? There's a shortcut to set the Cycle mode on/off. At least, that's what happens when the playhead suddently jumps somewhere where I used to have a cycle, and I have accidentally pressed a button that activates it.

Now that you said it, this happens to me pretty often too...:erk:

AdamWathan said:
This next one pissed me off to no end. Is there any way to fucking SEE THE WAVEFORM MOVING WHEN I AM DRAGGING A REGION?! I import a scratch track played to a click, zoom in on a transient and want to drag the region into place so that transient lines up with my grid so that the scratch track will follow the click in Logic. Except the thing is, I have to guess where to drag it to because when I drag it doesn't show the waveform moving, so I can't see the transient moving along with my mouse and can't line it up with the bar. What I had to do was shorten the region so that it started at wherever this transient was and then line up the edge of the region with the bar, then go back and extend the beginning of the region again.
Click to expand...

Not entirely sure if I know exactly what you mean, but you could open the audio editor window and move it inside that. And you can set an anchor point to the attack of the first transient.
 
I solved the first problem at least, it behaves more like how I expect when you set "Stop" to "Stop and Go To Last Locate Position" and enable "Jump Between..." for marquee, cycle and last locate, and then for "Play" I have everything disabled. So play is always play/pause and continues to play from wherever I left off if I just hit space bar, but if I hit space bar to pause and then enter, it goes back to where I started playing from, and if I hit enter twice it goes back the beginning of the song.

The waveform thing I did what you said sopulurn and changed the anchor point, seems to be a decent solution. Would be better if I didn't have to drag the anchor from it's old location and could just double click in the anchor lane or something for where I wanted it to be.

Punching in, if I set it to Record/Record Toggle and always have Punch on the Fly enabled, I can just hit R to punch in during playback where I want the new section to start. That'll work for me I think.

Hopefully tonight's guitar tracking session goes smoother.
 
I almost had the same problem today. I spent the whole afternoon trying to figure out how to do some things i am used to do in Nuendo in logic 9, but 15min before tracking i gave up because i didnt want to look like a fool in front of my clients. I will edit the drums inside logic, tho', and i hope i learn it this way.

Btw, the PLAY function is really stupid. Play from the last place the playhead was located is a much more intelligent option (and maybe an option on the preferences to change how play is executed) - that goes very far from Apple's simplifyng usual approach.
 
XGabrielX said:
It will take some time, but you will LOVE logic!!!!Promissed

I had the same problems commin from cubase 4 to logic 8......

But now I´m totaly happy with it
Click to expand...

i second that - just give logic a chance - you cant expect to get accustomed to a DAW in a few hours, its a very powerful piece of software - i was a huge fan of adobe audition and i swore i would never budge, even after trying cubase & protools i loved it, but i gave logic a chance and over 2 years later now i love it and i'd never swap back.

i really want to see if i can get working on some logic nodes because of the support between my macbook and my hackintosh - get some extra juice pumping around in my DAW and offload some of my channels processing to the hackintosh
 
jangoux said:
Btw, the PLAY function is really stupid. Play from the last place the playhead was located is a much more intelligent option (and maybe an option on the preferences to change how play is executed) - that goes very far from Apple's simplifyng usual approach.
Click to expand...

You can do that, right click the play button on the transport and select "Play from last locate position"

I wouldn't recommend it though. If you have that set and hit stop so the playhead returns to the beginning of the song, when you hit play again the playhead will automatically jump to wherever you last manually clicked to put the playhead. Drove me fucking nuts. Leave play alone and change the "Stop" options to do what you want, that's the only way I got it to work for me.
 
Yeah I've got it mostly sorted. Still hate the fact that I can't see where I'm moving things to when I drag a region and that I have to guess where it's going to end up. Also can't figure out how to install the stillwell au plugs, they aren't passing Apple's verification test or something. Quantizing in flex mode is quirky too, with this one bass track I am trying to quantize, setting it to eighth notes does NOTHING, but sixteenths moves stuff and so does quarter notes. Annoying since I want it quantized to eighths. Overall experience is that it is a LOT buggies than reaper was, and that makes me nervous because Reaper was updated with bug fixes like every two days.

One other new problem, is it possible to apply a fade to multiple regions without using the inspector? You would think my fades would be automatically applied to all tracks in the same edit group at least but not the case. I want to draw my fades with the mouse :/ ugh.
 
Sounds like logic is giving you a rather nasty pain in the ass Adam! :( It's a shame you moved away from REAPER, you were totally awesome at it and now that I've started getting comfortable with REAPER, it feels as if I've lost a REAPER-buddy! Haha =) There are just a few things that need fixing in REAPER and it's gonna be an awesome DAW, seriously... fucking Cockos, if they could only get their priorities right.
 
are you in snow leopard?

stillwell plugs dont run on SL yet, but if you go on their website, there are beta versions which should work for now. the fact there isnt a SL version of Schwa's CMX is holding me back from updating for now.

with quantizing, have you checked the parameters? theres some exclusion stuff that you want to keep an eye out for (I just do it by hand anyway, i dont trust any software with detecting and moving how i want it). I have heard logic 9.02 is a bit buggy on SL, I'm having no problems now on 10.5.8.
 
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