Setting up for recording - Logic Pro Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this movie we'll cover how to get going recording live audio into logic. First we'll need to go over some initial setup options to get the most out of your recordings. Once these are in place, you'll be busy recording tracks in no time. Here we have a new project we just started. Notice the name which is untitled because I haven't saved it yet. Now here's a really crucial tip. Save your session before recording anything. This will automatically set your audio recording path so you don't have to do it manually and you don't just start recording audio files in random places on your computer. So let's go to file save as and we'll call this my recording. And I'll just go ahead and place this on the desktop but I'm going to organize my project as a folder and I'm going to include audio files. And that way anything I record will end up in the project folder. So click save and that'll set our recording path. Now, assuming our audio interface is properly set up as we discussed in the connecting audio interfaces movie, we'll need to decide on three options for the audio files to record. We're going to decide on file type, sample rate and bit depth. Let's first choose file type. So let's go up to preferences under recording. Now these are global preferences under recording and here we can choose one of three file types, AIFF, wave or CAF. Now the industry standard is wave. These are all uncompressed file types. They don't have any differences, sonically. They're just the way the file is written. I'm going to go ahead and choose wave. Now notice underneath that we have the option to make a 24 bit recording. Let's keep that on. I recommend it. It's really the best audio quality and it has the most dynamic range. If you were to uncheck this you'd be recording at 16 bits, which sounds okay. But you might as well record at the higher bit depth. And the only downside to that is 24 bit recording will take up a little bit more room on your hard drive. To look at sample rate that's actually in a different setup page, it's in the setup page that's attached to your project. So it's in the project settings. And you could go to the project settings from the file menu, file project settings or they make it easy to pop over to the project settings from the general setting. So you can click here to get to the same spot. And here under audio is where we can choose the sample rate. So the project sample rate currently is 48 kilohertz which is a good high quality place to begin with. Now some people like to record at higher sample rates like 88.2 or 96. I think 48 kilohertz is a good baseline and it's a high sample rate to record that, a lot of people are working at 24 bits, 48 these days. So I'm going to recommend 48 for now. So now that we have file type that depth and separate set we can go ahead and see if we get input onto our track. So notice I made a guitar track. I loaded this up. It's a pre designed patch from the audio library. So I chose clean guitar, brit and clean and this guitar track... I've got again, close the library. This is guitar track notice it's set to input one. Now my guitar that I'm holding in my hand is actually connected to input one of an Apogee Duet. That's the interface I'm using. And the cool thing about Apogee Duet and logic is that they actually talk to each other. And you notice I have these options at the top of the channel strip. This lets me decide what input type I'm using. So right now it's set to instrument or they have the opportunity to change it to mic or line levels, which are these two, minus 10 and plus four. Because I'm on instrument, I actually can plug my guitar directly into the Apogee Duet. Now keep in mind if you're using a different interface you may not see these options here at the top. And to set my input level I can actually use this trim button here. Again, may not be available if you're not using an Apogee. I can also set the input level on the Apogee Duet itself. So I spin this knob, and notice my level is turning up on the input level. Now this is something to keep in mind. If you're new to this changing the track volume will make the output of the track louder but it has no bearing on your input level. So you want to go ahead and play your guitar as I'm about to do. (guitar beats) Notice I have the eye button check that's allowing input into the track And as I'm strumming the cord, I can set input level that way. Now I notice it's a little bit loud 'cause if I hit It hard, (guitar beats) it's almost clipping, right? So I want to go ahead and maybe back off the volume, the input volume, which I can do on the interface itself or in this case, because I have these options I can turn the input gain down a little bit. That's a little bit better level there. It's not endanger of clipping the input. Again, output meter, that's only the sound going out. So you're going to want to set your input level on your interface. Or if you have an Apogee Duet you can set it here in the top of the track. Now, when I was playing that E cord, I'm actually hearing the level (guitar beats) come back a little bit later than when I'm playing it. This is called latency. It's sort of the dirty word of digital audio. So anytime you send audio through your computer latency is caused by the roundtrip time it takes to go from your guitar or whatever your input device is, maybe it's a microphone, into the computer system then back through the computer system, back to your monitors or headphones. So computers have to use a memory buffer to stay ahead of what's coming in. And this is our buffer size. And this can cause latency if it's not set right. So let's go ahead and take a look at our buffer settings. So if I go up to Logic Pro once again, preferences, and here I'm going to go to audio. And notice the IO buffer size is set to 1024 samples. Now that's the highest buffer size. So that's going to give us the biggest buffer which can allow for more software instruments and plugins but the downside of this is my resulting latency as you read below, is a whole 45.3 seconds. And that's why when I strum the cord I'm hearing it come back to my headphones a little bit after. So what you want to do here when you record is do a lower buffer size. So if I go down to, for example, 128, notice the resulting latency goes way down in size. And now when I strung my cord I don't hear as much of a echo or late signal coming back. There's also another place we can deal with low latency. And that's the low latency button in the transport window. Let's open the transport float window from the windows pull down Now here, as long as I'm showing the full transport float, So I'm going to go ahead and choose customs where I see everything. And I'm still not seeing it. So I'm going to say customized control bar. And here I want to show low latency mode. And when I say, okay, I've got this little button here that showed up. Now let me just review that because when I opened the transport, it wasn't showing that and if yours isn't showing it, there's a way to get it. You just right click on it and then you say customize control bar and display. And you want to make sure that low latency mode is checked. Now that I have that I can also click here. In addition to going into the settings and changing my buffer size, I can click here. And that turns logic into a mode where it's going to selectively bypass, plugins and other processing to lower the latency so that when you record, you get the least amount of latency. So you hear the audio pretty much directly without any echo or time delay. And remember when you get back to mixing and editing you may want to turn this off. But I wanted to show you that that's there in addition to changing your buffer size here in the preferences. So now that we've got all that good stuff set up, I can go ahead and start recording. We're almost there. Now one last thing. What will the recording files be called when we record? You can control this by naming your track before you hit record. So instead of something generic like guitar one, I can call it Scott's guitar take or whatever I want to say. And that'll then name each of the regions I create, Scott's guitar one, Scott's guitar two, et cetera. So that's just a way to control what the files will be named before you start recording. Okay, we should be ready. Notice I added a drummer track because I prefer recording to that instead of the old generic click track our metronome. It's a little more groovy. It's a little more fun to play too. So I put the Brit pop drummer on here, I'm going to try to play something out of Manchester circuit 1992. Here we go. Now I type the R button on my keyboard and that'll get us rolling. It'll give me a pre-roll and then I'm often running (upbeat music) And when I hit stop, you can see the region was named after the track name, Scott's guitar 01. Congratulations, we've now made our first audio recording and now you know all the required steps to set up logic to record audio. You're going to want to check these settings each time you record to ensure you got the right sample rate and bit depth and that your audio is going to the correct place.