Troubles, need help :)

[JohnParticipant]

Hey all, I hope that you all had a good Christmas and are getting ready for a very musical new year! I don't know about you guys, but Logic has been freezing and crashing on me badly, so badly, I'm really thinking of switching DAW's. I don't want too, I'm just getting around well and this freezing/overload issue is killing me... Maybe it's just me and I'm doing something wrong.?.?. And I need some help with bussing, I'm definitely not doing that right at all. Side chaining is a complete mystery to me, I don't understand the routing or how to properly use my groups and busses to their full, proper uses and potential. Maybe I can lighten the load on my CPU if I made better use of my busses by grouping plugins instead of having a plugin on every track. It's frustrating not being able to even get Logic to playback, Any insights, advice, tutoring, mentoring would be awesome. I'm struggling 🙂

Sorry, totally forgot to mention, I'm using a Mac OSX, latest Logic, 10.3.3

• This topic was modified 6 years ago by John.

[Guido tum SudenKeymaster]

Hi John,

let's tackle this one by one.
What kind of Mac do you have (like Mac mini (Mid 2011) from the About my Mac menu)?
Is Logic really crashing and freezing? It shouldn't do that. What I get often is the Overload message.

Could you maybe attach one or more screen shots of the mixer (at least the left side and the right side), of a song that overloads, so we can see how you use your plugins, which ones you use (important!) and how you use your busses at the moment?

About side chaining:
Unfortunately the term is used in two different ways, sometimes called internal and external side chaining.
Internal just means, that you have some sort of high and low pass filter in the plugin that is used to narrow the sound of the signal the plugin should react to.

Let's use Logic's Noise Gate to explain this:

Let's say you have a kick and want to get rid of the snare bleed, so you'll use a noise gate. Unfortunately the snare bleed is so loud that it triggers the gate even before some of the softer kick hits.
You now use the right side of the plugin (the internal side chain), switch it on and then click on Monitor. You then use the filters, so you mainly hear the kick and not the snare. The gate will listen to that signal to open (or close) but it will open or close the original sound (if you didn't forget to switch of the monitor again ;-).

External side chaining is almost the same except that the gate (in this case) listens to a signal from a different track (or buss) to determine if it's going to open or not.
On the top right of all the plugins that are capable of side chaining you will find "Side Chain" and a menu with all the tracks and busses it can listen to.
We're still on the kick track but now you told it to listen to the snare track. You use the filter (with monitor) so the plugin "hears" mainly the snare sound.
Now the kick track would only be audible when the snare hits. You could then set the Noise Gate to Ducker so it would attenuate the kick track when the snare hits.

A typical side chaining trick is to lower the volume of a bass the moment the kick hits. It's usually done with a compressor on the bass track that listens (via side chaining) to the kick track. After tuning the compressor it will compress the bass every time it hears a kick.

Hope that helped.

About the busses: My Logic template with Logic plugins only is somewhere in the forum (I can't remember where I put it). It will show you how I used busses (although I have a different setup now).

Guido

[JohnParticipant]

Hey Guido, nice to meet you! I'll post some screen shots this afternoon, church this morning 🙂 I have an iMac, with 8gbRAM and a terra of storage. Logic is Overloading on the most basic of my songs. I've been mixing Robert Jon & the Wreck Good Lovin' again and that one is rough. It's been chopped down and still Logic can't keep up. I only have one plugin per track, Waves SSL, sometimes two, like distortion on the bass... I gotta run for now, I'll get screen shots here soon... Thanks for taking some time with me on this, it's killing me... 🙂

[JohnParticipant]

Here are a couple of screen shots of what I'm doing on Good Lovin'. I'm not sure what you are looking for specifically, but here's what I'm looking at...

[Guido tum SudenKeymaster]

Hi John,

as far as I can tell this shouldn't happen.
I tried to replicate some of it since Waves plugins are often very CPU intensive. While testing them a year ago, I could only use one or two instances of H-Reverb or a hand full of Scheps 73 before my CPUs couldn't handle them anymore.

I just put on 32 instances of Channel-E with no problems whatsoever.

Could you please do the following (I'm translating back from German to English, so things might be called slightly different):
- Click on the Apple Icon and on About my Mac and tell me what kind of Mac you have. Mine's saying Mac Pro (early 2009), 2,93 GHz Intel Quad-Core Xeon
- In Logic click on the little arrow right of the beats-display and set it to "own" (or something). Double-click on the CPU/HD part of the display. You will get a floating windows which can tell you when your systems overloads (CPU or HD usage). Let Logic run and see what it shows.
- Did you put the I/O-Buffersize back to 1024 while mixing?
- Please run the activity monitor of your Mac and see if there are programs running that use a lot of your CPU's power. It would be good to only have Logic running.

Now something different:
If I saw correctly on your images you are using the busses in parallel only, just like you would when you create a buss for parallel drum compression.
This means all your channels go directly to the output and are doubled through the busses. I don't know if that was your intention.
You also seem to create a direct feedback by feeding the output of each buss directly back to its input. I recreated that and it seems the feedback will only occur when the Send is almost pulled up all the way.

Guido

[JohnParticipant]

Hey Guido, thanks for taking the time to go over this stuff with me, I really appreciate it. And of course, Happy New Year! I'm glad to make a new friend all the way over in Germany! I live in California, not too far from Lake Tahoe. I'm grateful for your help.

My computer, iMacOS High Sierra, 10.13.2 I double checked that my buffer was set to 1024, only one overload freeze this morning, after that it's been running fine. That's another weird thing about it, it's intermittent, that makes it hard to pinpoint what I'm doing to overload it.

You are correct with regard to my busses at the moment. Is there a way to not run them parallel? I'm totally new to this and I'm a little lost. I can tell what they are doing, you're right, if you push the bus fader up past 0, a feedback loop starts and can be quite attention getting for the unsupervised student 🙂 Logic will automatically add a bus if you pick certain stuff, I have added them too, just to see them sit there doing nothing really but taking up space. Not really taking advantage of them or using them to their full/proper use.
I did try to do a few things, adding reverb to the snare for instance, and that seemed to work well for me. But there is a lot I don't understand or really get the gist of yet... I'm learning 🙂

[Guido tum SudenKeymaster]

Hi John,
I just wrote a very long answer but somehow it wasn't sent. 🙁
So here's another idea, because I won't write it all again:

MusicTechHelpGuy has just release his new series Logic 101 with Logic 10.3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMlbRv8dnuE&list=PLXmi76euGSyzQrJJnG8_q6WCl2z9VVG_c

And here about Auxes, Busses …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-S1Cy_hXKc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EaG2MmlutU

Guido

[JohnParticipant]

Thanks Guido, I have watched a ton of his vids, and it won't hurt to review them as I'm still a bit confused with bussing. Thanks for your help., hey, Arthur and I are going to work together on this song (Robert Jon & the wreck, Good Loving') if you wanted to join in, I'll add you to the drop box. Truly, thank you for taking this time with me. I'm just at this a year now and some things are still a mystery, I've learned a ton, and I have miles yet to go. I'll rewatch these vids, maybe this time around, more things will stick! 🙂

[JohnParticipant]

Just an update... I was still having issues with overloads, called Apple, actually spoke with the Logic guys. One thing to look out for is the "Auto-punch", it's always recording if a track is selected, if that is turned on., adds to the usage requirements. Also for just mixing, in preferences under audio, under multithreading, select "Playback Tracks", as opposed to "Playback and Live Tracks" which I had selected, of course. This on top of resetting the I/O buffer to 1024...

So, any recommendations for a Thunderbolt II SSD external hard drives, and an additional storage drive?

Thanks for all your input on here. I did rewatch 'ol Logic guy, still fuzzy on the bussing, I'll learn, one day the light will shine and the fog will lift... Thanks again for your input! 🙂

[Neil SpeersParticipant]

Old thread - but just wanted to say thanks John for that info about "Playback and live tracks" - I have a MacBook Pro i7 QuadCore and always expect better performance than I've sometimes gotten, this should help.

[Steven FoxParticipant]

Booting up from an external (or internal) ssd will certainly increase performance. Especially if it is Thunderbolt. Although large capacity ssd are expensive, it is a cheaper route to increase computer performance than buying a new computer and you can get more mileage out of your old Mac.

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