The violin in the picture is the same one I’ve had since 11.
My parents snapped it up for £40 back in the seventies – and quite right too. It doesn’t have a big aggressive tone – it has a mellow, rich and warm sound. I’ve never come across anything quite like it (take a listen below). Somehow it managed to survive boarding school and being tied to the back of a 100cc motorbike each day for my trip to college.

The person who showed me how to make my violin sing was the great violinist and teacher Colin Sauer. It was like someone taking the wool out of your ears and saying “there you go – that’s better isn’t it”. I remember the sporting metaphors he would recite of how getting a great sound from the violin should be effortless and graceful – like the shots of his cricket hero David Gower!

Colin Sauer led the Dartington String Quartet and world renowned Academey of St-Martin-in-the-Fields playing the Kustendyke Stradivarius violin lent to him by the Royal Academy of Music.

However good the samples and ‘virtual instruments’ of string instruments become, there is nothing that can replace the human element. The infinite variations of bow hair across strings and the constant variations in pitch are just some of the subtle and endless characteristics that make the real thing bring the music alive.

Booth

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The main mic is a Neuman U87ai (see pic) which is powered by the pre-amps on the RME Fireface 400 interface in the control room. I also use the Beyer 201 – a much underated lovely smooth mic great on guitar and vocals.

The Studio / Live Room

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Control Room

In my control room I am very much an “in the box” person, meaning I don’t have much outboard equipment! These days I prefer to use software to do things because it’s easier, quicker – and for that reason it allows you to be more creative. I can see the romance of having a 2 inch 24 track reel to reel machine and a mixing desk wider than both arms outstretched, but hey I’m over that… (no I am

So in this room it’s just an Apple Mac, a Fireface 400 for getting the sounds in and out of the computer and some Adam monitoring. Simple kchh.

The violin

I’ve had this violin since very young. I can remember being allowed to take it to boarding school back in the late seventies. I’m not quite sure how it survived…but survive it did. My parents bought it for £40…it’s worth a little more than that…and perhaps is one of the things I would never sell. I’m not sure of its history, but it has a Hill identification mark on the fingerboard.

Tension and Release
The piano is mostly based on a slow moving pattern of F major 7 and Dm7 broken chords, with the violin creating a tension by playing the E with the F major chord, and then resolving upward to an F over the D minor chord, but because of the long reverb tail the E is still there,  and creates this lovely slow releasing tension.

The Reverb

The reverb used in this piece is a software plugin called Valhalla Room by the company ValhallaDSP. This is quite simply the best reverb I have ever heard or used. It’s a versatile, true stereo algorithmic reverb, and features several original reverberation algorithms and has been designed from the ground up to produce a wide range of natural reverberation sounds: small ambiences, warm rooms, halls, plates, cathedrals, and into the void.

It is truly outstanding – my breakthrough product for 2011. Astonishingly it retails for $50. You can check it out at the ValhallaDSP website.

Next “bounce” your selection (file/bounce or CMD B). In the bounce dialog options make sure you select the RealTime option but also, and this is the important part, select the option to “Bounce 2nd Cycle Pass”. That way Logic will print the audio from the second pass so you get the reverb tails etc from the first pass, and therefore a nice seamless loop.

I also edit the final files you create by just adding a tiny fade up/out value of 2 to each file. If there are discrepancies in the zero crossing you can get a click, and putting the fades in eliminates this. Give it a whirl.

This started out as an exercise in creating a loopable music bed. It’s a chillout track using just the lovely Alecia Keys piano, a bit of gated pad, electric bass and a tiny bit of beat.

So here are my ‘takes’ on recording, editing, mixing and mastering voiceovers in Logic Pro. Remember there are many ways to skin a cat – this is just my way. It’s all focused on a sound fast workflow.

Template and Setup

First up, I have a template for recording voiceovers. This sets up Logic ready for me to go straight into the booth and record. (I have a second screen and control of Logic in the booth)

In the arrange page I have one audio track, the input of which is the booth microphone. Consequently in the mixer there’s one channel strip for the audio input and a second channel strip for the main output.

I tend to work without take folders. If I fluff a read I just go back a few words and carry on.

Preferences

Saved to the template are some handy preferences for editing audio.
When you are de-breathing and de-noising voiceovers there’s a lot of mouse work and switching between tools. (usually pointer and marquee for me)

Tools for the job
The tool I found the most useful for audio editing is the marquee tool, and you can avoid having to press a key to select it each time. To do this I have my preferences setup with the ‘pointer in arrange tool’ set to auto select the marquee tool. (see pic) You’ll find this in Preferences/General/Editing.

With this option selected, when you mouse into the lower half of a region you automatically get the marquee tool – very neat. Plus you still have your left hand click tool and your command click too.

A couple of other preferences I have setup are: ‘snap’ I have set to ‘samples ‘ and ‘drag’ to ‘x-fade’.

Channel Strip

On the voice channel strip I usually have some EQ, a little compression and gain. Both plugins are Logic’s own, but everyone will have different plugins they like and are used to.

If you feel you need to de-ess (and I tend to stay away from de-essing) the Logic De-Esser isn’t very good but there are some good settings for using the Logic Compressor to perform this task very well. See here for some great free downloads for Logic including settings for the de-esser.

My settings for the compressor are in the pic below – but everyones will be different depending on voice, style, mic etc.

The Edit

If you have the preferences for your mouse setup as above, you can now mouse into the lower half of a region and you’ll automatically get the marquee tool to swipe across audio you want to edit. Swipe out the breaths, take out the mistakes. It’s just a case of swipe and hit the backspace key to delete.

Closing up the gaps

A couple of quick keys for closing the gaps on the edited material.

1. If you want to select a region and all the following regions, shift + F does the trick (useful for when you can’t see all the following regions in a project)

2. To quickly move a region to the left so that it butts up to the previous region, I use key command: cmd and comma. (cmd ,) Pre-empt this with shift f and you can quickly pull all the following regions with it.

 Adding fades to your edits

Depending on zero crossings, you may get little pops and clicks on the start and end of your regions. To get rid of these, wait until you have finished all of your edits. Then select all the regions and add a short fade  (say a value of 2) to the in and out points. You’ll see the fade in, fade out options to the left of the arrange page in the inspector.

Bouncing the audio out

Once you have your audio edited and have added any processing to the mix, it’s time to bounce the audio  out. Now you can bounce out to MP3, WAV etc in various formats within Logic, but for any requirements like mono at 128 kbps MP3s etc,  I don’t do this within Logic, it’s much easier to do mono/format conversions within iTunes. So select the region or regions that make up your voiceover file, hit CMD B and bounce out to  an uncompressed format like WAV.

If you need to create different formats for your files, iTunes is one way to quickly and easily batch convert your files. See the iTunes help for details.

We’ve started a new website where you can download recordings of beautiful well known poems and readings. When you’re planning a special occasion finding the right words – and the right person to
read them - can be a daunting task. ‘Words, with Love’ has the perfect solution.

‘Words, with Love’ Website

For weddings, for funerals, for telling someone how you truly feel… here you’ll find some of the most popular and beautiful readings in the English language, professionally spoken and set to music, specially composed to compliments the mood of each piece.

For each reading, I ran the recording of the reading and improvised simple little structure, mostly with acoustic piano and a stunning reverb plugin from Valhalla DSP.

Take a listen…

About Words, with Love

Having often worked together over the years, Kate and Jonathan are delighted to combine their individual loves of words and music to create pieces to be played at some of life’s most important and memorable moments.

With a background in drama, Kate works on bringing out the essence in each reading, drawing listeners in to appreciate the beauty of the words and the mood the author creates. Kate hopes that her love of literature shines through the ‘Words, with Love’ recordings, saying…

“I’ve been a bookworm since I learnt to read and researching and reading the literature we choose for ‘Words, with Love’ is a dream occupation for me. I only hope other people get as much pleasure from it as I do!”

After the words have been recorded, Jonathan works with Kate’s reading, composing a musical background to provide the perfect complement to the words and sentiment of the piece.

“Many of the pieces are created by just improvising under the reading of the words – using simple structures and long reverberations – often just with piano. The music is there to support the words not to distract from them.”

Away from ‘Words, with Love’ both Kate and Jonathan provide voiceovers for a wealth of different applications and Jonathan composes and produces songs and music for tv & radio.

Find out more about Kate’s voiceover work here.