Logic Pro X - paid assistance?

octatonic · September 2016

tedmanzie said:

I agree with a lot of that, but what you are describing is a detailed course in how to engineer and produce, which is perfect for someone who wants to learn to that level but that is a LOT to learn straight off the bat! Especially if you're sitting in a room by yourself. Logic, Cubase etc are very complicated because they are extremely capable bits of professional software. What the OP wants to do is learn 'the basics', and in the same way that using a 4 track cuts out a lot of the technicalities of recording, then Garageband (or Cubase Lite if that still exists, etc) would similarly cut out a lot of the technicalities and probably make the introduction to DAW recording a bit easier and therefore fun (which is the main thing).

Getting from nothing to knowing all (or at least a lot) of it, yeah it is.
But there is an approach to it that gives you the basics of recording that you can apply to the DAW software.
I've always thought that doing it the other way (using the application to inform your knowledge of recording) is insufficient.

A practical example- panning.
Logic's pan pot works differently to other DAW's like Protools.
In Protools you can have dual mono panning, so you could have the L channel all the way left and the right channel at 2 o'clock.
You can't do this in Logic because dual mono is not possible without a pretty tricky work around.

In Logic the stereo channel pan pot works as a stereo balancer- when you turn the pan knob left or right you are changing the relative levels of each channel, rather than panning them independently in space.

(There are also a difference of pan laws between Logic and Protools.)

Would you ever need to know this when you are recording- maybe, maybe not, but I can think of a couple of situations
where failing to understand how Logic's panning works could be frustrating for a novice user because they might be operating under a false belief of what a stereo pan control actually does. They might not be able to get the software to do what they want and either blame the software for not working properly (when actually it works differently) or blame themselves for not doing it properly.
Having someone break down panning into a small 2 minute conversation of how it works, how different applications deal with panning can make all the difference down the line.

I've responded to Placidcasual in PM to give him an idea of what sorts of things he could start looking at, either here with me, or with someone else.
Doing it alone is also possible- but it is a much longer path.
I'm mostly a self-taught- but it was a long time to being able to produce anything that sounded like a proper record- maybe 10 years of me doing it.
I reckon that half a dozen tutorials would give you enough of the basics to be able to go off and get working on it.

There are a wealth of resources on the web- Gearslutz, various forums, places like http://logic-pro-expert.com as well.

You could spend a long time trying to work it out yourself and end up disappearing down rabbit holes that you then struggle to find a use for.
This is why I think one-on-one tuition is vastly superior to trying to figure it out yourself- having someone say 'X is the next thing to tackle and this is the method....' is what you need.
It isn't necessarily the only way to do it- but it is the most efficient, with the right tutor.