radio advert write up

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Radio advert write up In this write up, I will be detailing how to make a radio advert through the use of logic, an interesting program used to create music, I will also be detailing how to use logic for a first time user, such as yourself. Hopefully this guide will be of some help to you. The history of logic First of all, before I actually explain how to use logic, you should probably be told what it actually is and how it came about. Logic, simply put, is software used to create music, edit music, copy music and do various things relating to music. The technical term for this is a DAW or digital audio workstation. However, it wasn’t even logic in its infant stage, it was actually a program called Notator, a program bought into the USA from Germany in 1988 at version 1.12. This was a large change for those who were trying to do electronic music on computers at the time as other programs were not as developed. A company named C-LAB, which later became known as Emagic, developed notator. Digidesign was their early US distributor. There was also a version called Creator, that came out a year or so earlier, that was the same as Notator without the notation editor, a part that made notator what it is. Creator got rave reviews in the trade magazines and when Notator arrived it quickly became the program to have according to the growing ranks of serious midiphiles. Notator ran exclusively on an Atari ST (1 meg), which had its debut in 1985, and the new more powerful Mega ST (2 meg). Later on, the company Emagic that I mentioned earlier was only starting up. In these early years, they wanted to make a cross-platform solution following Logic’s general idea that was labelled Notator Logic. Later on, Notator was dropped from the title and it was only called Logic.

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Page 1: Radio Advert Write Up

Radio advert write up

In this write up, I will be detailing how to make a radio advert through the use of logic, an interesting program used to create music, I will also be detailing how to use logic for a first time user, such as yourself. Hopefully this guide will be of some help to you.

The history of logic

First of all, before I actually explain how to use logic, you should probably be told what it actually is and how it came about. Logic, simply put, is software used to create music, edit music, copy music and do various things relating to music. The technical term for this is a DAW or digital audio workstation. However, it wasn’t even logic in its infant stage, it was actually a program called Notator, a program bought into the USA from Germany in 1988 at version 1.12. This was a large change for those who were trying to do electronic music on computers at the time as other programs were not as developed. A company named C-LAB, which later became known as Emagic, developed notator. Digidesign was their early US distributor. There was also a version called Creator, that came out a year or so earlier, that was the same as Notator without the notation editor, a part that made notator what it is. Creator got rave reviews in the trade magazines and when Notator arrived it quickly became the program to have according to the growing ranks of serious midiphiles. Notator ran exclusively on an Atari ST (1 meg), which had its debut in 1985, and the new more powerful Mega ST (2 meg). Later on, the company Emagic that I mentioned earlier was only starting up. In these early years, they wanted to make a cross-platform solution following Logic’s general idea that was labelled Notator Logic. Later on, Notator was dropped from the title and it was only called Logic.

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Due to the rise of personal computers in more households, the Atari platform showed signs of slowing down and being unable to compete with the competition so it quickly closed up, this made Emagic realize they had to pick someone else and they decided to choose Apple Macs. Logic released version 1.6 around 1993 and finally bought audio to logic, this was a groundbreaking event.

Audio was bought into Logic through DAE and that stands for Digidesign audio engine and the developers of sound tools, who had just changed their name to pro tools before this event, made that. The major audio cards for Logic were the AudioMedia I and II, SoundTools 2, and the new Session 8 all by Digidesign.  Depending on what you had installed, you could expect 4 to 16 tracks of audio.As soon as 1995 came around, the pc version of Logic also did which started up a battle of Mac v PC. PC quickly lost. The Mac versions were just so much more advanced and therefore PC couldn’t contend, it didn’t have as many features as the Mac. July 2002 saw the windows version of Logic (The PC version) drop it’s support and slow to a halt and Mac only progressed even more, releasing Logic 6 shortly after.

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Version 7 of logic came in 2004, consolidating over 20 different Emagic products which included all instrument packages and Pro Tools TDM support to name a few. This was all put into a single package. Apple also released a scaled down version of Logic called Logic Express, replacing two previous versions that filled that position called Logic Silver and Logic Gold. Apple began promoting Logic Pro as one of its flagship software ‘Pro’ applications for the Macintosh platform. Logic was also used as the basis for a modified application titled GarageBand, included as a part of OS X iLife.

The world saw Logic 8 on September 12, 2007. Well, they saw it in the Logic Studio Suite but this was a good thing as it had a new design and many new features, some were even considered revolutionary at the time. Changes were made for Logic 8, these changes included a new processing plug-n called the delay designer, quick-swipe comping and multi-take management. It wasn’t just features they made changes to either, it was also ease of use for people who had never used Logic before. Mainly, the interface became much more streamlined and more directions and labeling were used in the program. This helped a lot as Logic is not a single window interface as each plug-in opens up another window with all it’s uses inside, this does save space in the actual logic window as you can move the plug in windows about and resize them.

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Currently we are now on Logic Pro X and this is the one we will be taking a look at in this guide, I will explain each aspect of it then when the aspects are explained, there will be a walkthrough on how to make a radio advert using Logic Pro X.

The Radio Advert

Now that you know how to use Logic, we’re going to make a radio advert on it (To make the radio advert, I will be using Logic 9 to create it, there isn’t much difference apart from a slight difference in the layout.)

Making the song For us to pass, we had to make 3 different adverts, same product, 3 different lengths that consisted of a full minute, 30 seconds and 10 seconds so obviously, we used the same track on each one, shortening it when needed and adding a bit of glamour to the full length minute one and the 10 second one, leaving the 30 second one as the original beat.

For the full-length minute one we added a harry potter theme when we say about how the stick (which is our product by the way) can “double as a wand” and then for some reason we put a car crash sound in. I don’t get it either.

I guess it could be for making sure our audience is still listening to our advert, I wasn’t the one who put it in anyway. In the full-length version, we added a different synth to the main melody to jazz up our track; this would add something different for the audience to listen to.

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In the 30 second one, again, we kept it very close and true to the original song, not only did this save time, but it was a valid option for the middle advert as people usually remember the longest and shortest of something, very rarely is the bland and boring middle section even bought up so we thought it would be a safe option to keep the 30 second one as loyal to the original piece as we can.

The 10 second one, being the shortest and quickest of the bunch, had to make a little more of an impact on our audience’s minds so we thought it would be best to put another instrument in, a slightly more aggressive sounding one which is why we chose a bass but a mute bass, we didn’t want anything to crazy. This adds that hard-hitting tone we were going for, some more fleshing out of the track and something to make the short 10-second variant a little more memorable.

Obviously since we have no kind of visual aspect to the adverts, we needed someone to talk in them to explain what the product actually was, that person was I.

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I recorded 3 different versions, one for each advert. The first one I did was the full-length minute one, this introduced the product, told of its uses and “capabilities” as a wizard wand.

Our 30-second one told much of the same, just no wand part and more a persuasive way of getting the public to buy “Stick” by saying it would give them a use for sticks and they would no longer be considered clutter on the ground.

The 10-second one gave the base outline of what our product was, how much it costs and why you should buy it.

Of course, this wasn’t made in a single day and we had to use a program called logic express, a very easy to use system that allows the general public and students, really anyone for that matter, to make music.

How you can make your own

I shall now guide you through the steps needed to make one of our adverts, the 10-second one.

Step 1 is to first get a clean track open, one with no music or sound on it at all, to do this you must open logic express, go to file and click new and this will in turn open up a new, clean track for you to use on this program.

You will also need to click on the plus sign; it should be in the top left of the screen.

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Now, a grey box shall appear, this gives you the ability to choose the number of tracks needed for the song, lets go with 6. Now, you may have seen other boxes saying software instrument, external midi, ECT. Don’t worry, we only want software instrument and we want 5 of these tracks, the last 6th one will become an audio track.

This box here.

Right, now you have 6 tracks but you need to decide what’s to be put on each one, lets get a drumbeat going, we are going to be making the drumbeat simple, so it’s easy to follow, not using 3 different one’s in one like I did. First, open the library, the pull out holder icon on the far right. There’s a lot of kits here, too many to cycle through quick, lets just choose “Rock Kit” and with that, you now have a drum kit ready for making music.

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Now, play your beat in, this is going to serve as our introduction of the advert jingle. Oops, I didn’t tell you to press the record button, press the record button, which is a circle icon, and play your jingle in again for the drumbeat. Now we have the intro, you need to make the main drum beat, play another drum beat in to fill the 10 second time slot and make sure you pressed record. There we go. Drum beat out the way.

Now, just before you do anything, you better make sure it’s in the time with the song, click on where your beat is recorded, yes the box with white lines in. It should open up another box down below, showing your beat zoomed in, select piano roll if it isn’t already.

Highlight all of the little lines, AKA your drumbeat so they go a slightly different color, these notes are now ready to be quantized. Now look around the left of the box and you should see a little Q symbol, push it, this makes the entire amount of notes selected fit nicely in time with the BPM (Beats Per Minute) of the track.

Now, you have 10 seconds of an introduction and a beat, yes the only instrument is a basic drum kit but we can remedy that pretty quickly. Now, we need to add the nest instrument, don’t we? Lets choose a nice classical acoustic guitar, he reasoning for this is it’s a very nice sounding instrument, also a very well known one, it also sounds happy and we want people to associate our product with being happy so it fits. Play in a melody, one that roughly matches the beat you made earlier and quantize the rack after playing it in, as always.

Next, I decided to put a bass on, nothing dramatic but again, it needed to make the 10-second version more hard hitting for when the audience listens to it. This beat was very much the same as the classical acoustic guitar but

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with a slight variation added, there were less notes than the guitar one. Try to play something like that in and remember to quantize it; this should lead to the instrumental being complete apart from your vocals (if you are putting vocals in, if not you are now done).

I wrote down a few quick words about my product after, telling my viewer why it was the best thing ever, by the way, the audio track of me doing so is not a software instrument; it is an “audio track”. After learning the small amount of lines, I had to get a mic so I could record it, this mic had to be plugged into the midi keyboard to actually function however.

After the vocals were recorded, I quantized everything once again to give it a final check and low and behold, my track had been made, it sounded perfect when played back and I couldn’t be any happier with the finished product.

Guide to Logic Pro X

Firstly, the version of Mac we will be using is an OS X Yosemite version 10.10.5 Mac mini from late 2014. It has a 2.6 GHz Intel Core i5 processor, 8 GB of memory, the graphics card is an Intel Iris 1536 MB and this is the Mac we will be using today.

It looks something like this, as seen in this block diagram

This should be your setup.

Once you have that all setup and own a copy of Logic Pro X, we need to make sure you know how to get it open. First off, if it’s on your desktop, simply click it, if not then you need to use Finder on your Mac. Click on finder and up will pop basically a screen of documents, look in the left panel, there should be some buttons and one is called applications. Push it. Then all you need to do it press it and up opens Logic Pro X.

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Logic

There’s a lot to look at here, thankfully the explanations will be very streamlined. First of all, lets have a look at the layout. The layout of logic can be quite hectic to look at right off the bat. If we look at the top bar you will see a lot of stuff, I will cover the more important buttons here. The 1st button is the library, this is where all of your available instruments reside, click on this and 16 sections of instruments will come down, you can then click on a category and you will get many different kinds of that instrument, for example, if you press guitar, you will get many different kinds of guitar like classical and hard rock.

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The next icon along is the inspector, this allows you to put plug-ins, different effects and other mixes into your song and they affect your instruments. The parameters displayed depend on what item you have selected, which working are has key focus and what you have clicked at the time.

Apart from the other parts, which we will get to later, the other main part you should be looking at is the workspace, this is where your music will actually be recorded and placed, your tracks will be shown here and this is the primary area for recording, editing and arranging audio, midi and drummer regions, divided into different track types.

Midi/Midi Keyboard

The midi keyboard is basically what you play in all of your music with if you don’t draw it in that is but we will touch on that later, yes we will. This is a photo of what one looks like.

It comes equipped with 2 sets of C to B keys, layer button, octave button, an output node, input nude and many more features. Using the push to enter button you can select how you want each keyboard to sound. This is what you use to play in single notes, chords, black keys and white keys to make your song. The one I use is an Alesis make. Now midi in the actual program is quite different from a midi keyboard, usually your main use with midi is the midi note event; this represents a midi note or command, which you can edit the same way as regions. Next, we have a midi effect slot; essentially this is what you use to add an effect to a part of the music. To do so, click the midi effect slot, and then choose a plug-in from the pop-up menu.

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Place the pointer above or below an occupied midi effect slot, click the green line that appears, and then choose a plug-in from the pop-up menu. Then as you choose one, a new window will open containing the plug-in where you can use it to edit the part of music to your hearts content.

Software Instrument/Audio Channels

Software instruments and audio channels are the way you put tracks in, either your track is going to be an audio channel which involves either singing or playing your instrument into a mic and recording it yourself or your software instrument which is one of the instruments from the library.

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You see that picture I posted up there, yeah? Well that is accessed by pressing the little plus icon located in the workspace underneath the top icons, you should find it soon enough. Click this and up pops that screen, you add tracks to hold your recordings. As soon as you add a track, you choose the track type, the format of it, input source (if it’s an audio track) and of course the output, you can use this to create multiple tracks all at once! As soon as you make a new track, a new channel strip opens up as well.

If you want to make an audio track, you need to choose the input channel or channels. As soon as this is done, you need to make sure you have a microphone attached to the midi keyboard, as this is what enables you to record the melody you play in.

For software instrument, it’s a bit simpler. As soon as you select software instrument, you very easily select the instrument plug in you want and just use it to play the song.

The Transport Bar

Now, the transport bar is a little bit more segmented than anything else in logic so I will be covering everything in it using sub-categories.

The Play Button

The play button is in the shape of an arrow pointing to the right. You press the play button and it plays your song from the start or it will play from where you have selected in the timeline if you have done so.

Stop

The stop button is on the transport bar to, it is in the shape of a square and it stops the song when pressed. It will stop the song at the point it is in at the timeline.

BPM

BPM or beats per minute is the beat you follow in a song, there is usually 4 beats in a bar. You can change the bpm however on logic using the bpm modifier. You drag a dial up and down to change it.

Metronome

You use the metronome button to enable a small clicking beat that plays throughout the song, this is a beat that follows the bpm and is used to keep an instrument in time.

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The Inspector

Again, the inspector is very much in categories that I will explain individually to ease your learning process.

Pan

The pan button is used to move the source of the sound over to one speaker or one headphone, the left or right one. This is usually used to create an audio effect or have some emphasis on dynamics.

Fader

The fader on logic is used for fading in and out a sound, to bring the beat back in or let it slowly fade out, this is used to usually transfer to different sections of the songs.

Inserts

Logic uses inserts. An insert is used to edit an effect plugin or change and insert an effect plug in. You can also use them to edit synthesizers and many other parts of a song.

The Tool Box

Last but not least, this is the final section is which I will be detailing each individual aspect of the logic feature, this time, the toolbox.

Pencil

The pencil in logic is located in the toolbox, as are the scissors and the eraser but we will get to them after the pencil. The pencil is used to draw in notes on the piano roll instead of playing them in which some people find easier.

Scissors

The scissors is used to cut a part of a song out, split it or chop a note in half, basically doing the job or removing things or separating them completely.

Eraser

The eraser tool does exactly what it says on the tin, it erases things, be it a note, full section of music or effect, the eraser will get rid of it for you, it’s basically backspace now that I think about it.

Quantizing

Quantizing is essentially putting the notes of a song in order, it helps if you couldn’t play them in yourself and saves you a lot of time instead of having to reorder them, and you wonder how to quantize? Easy. Basically, next to the piano roll there is a little Q icon, if you highlight all of your notes together and then press the Q, which will put them in line with the beats per minute.

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Automation

Automation is useful to advanced users of Logic. To open up the automation menu, you press a on the keyboard, this will extend the sections of music in the workspace and lines will pop up, these lines can either be used to edit and add effects or control the volume at exact points of the musical section and not just the whole section, sort of like for fading in and out at a more exact point.

The Piano Roll

The piano roll is one of the most important parts of logic, this is used to look at your notes under a magnifying glass essentially, and this allows you to move notes, edit them, add effects and remove them completely. This is also where you draw in notes and can use the scissor tool on them to cut them in half; this is why it’s a very important workstation in logic.

Conclusion

This is my guide to Logic. I hoped this helped you on making whatever song you wanted to create or just to learn the basics of Logic.