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you’re learning how best to partition your hard disks; and by page 51 you’re learning what Core Audio is. Then you’re diving into Logic itself, and by the time you get to Chapter 7, you’re customizing Templates and saving Screensets, just like in the good old days of Logic 5 when the program had a reputation for blazing speed in the hands of an expert... and being black magic to everyone else! The book’s pace is fast and there are lots of illustrations to help you along. Novices beware, this book assumes you’re past the point of being scared of even launching Logic, and are comfortable at following directions to figure out where various functions and settings are accessed in Logic’s user interface. But if you’re already at that point, then almost every page (once you get into Logic itself in Chapter 3) will have something you probably didn’t know how to do before, or an explanation of something that was bothering you. Don’t know why Logic still offers the Sample Editor window when the new Arrange window has sample-level editing available? There are lots of reasons, and you’ll find them all on page 226! The book comes with a bundled DVD-ROM with 14 QuickTime movies illustrating concepts from the book. The subtitles on many of the videos have spelling and punctuation errors, but fortunately the material contained in them is good solid data, carefully narrated by the author and two colleagues, subtitled where appropriate and moving at a fast but not hurried pace. The videos are short, roughly three to eight minutes each; the first few start with pretty basic concepts, and ramp up into the “Power Tools” realm by the end of the series. Some of the items demonstrated on video are marvelous at communicating important concepts instantly that might be less clear in print; my personal favorite is listening to an audio track recorded at 48 kHz dropped into a 44.1 kHz Session without being sample-rate converted, so you can actually hear the “low and slow” result! The videos (some of which are a bit more elementary than the book, and serve to help less experienced users get up to speed) combine with the text to provide Logic users with a broad-based way to get better at what they do with their DAW of choice, and if the wide range of the book doesn’t daunt you, it has lots of great knowledge to impart.

Time To Get Wise!
performance by force-running maintenance scripts in Mac OS X using UNIX ‘sudo’ commands in the Terminal window... on page 5 of Chapter 1... I knew this wasn’t going to be your average compendium of hints! This book has a little bit for everyone, and I mean everyone, who uses Logic. It’s the kind of book you read for fun, to smack your forehead and say, “How did he figure that one out?”, or to have on your shelf as an emergency reference when all else fails. In a strange way it comes across to me as a book that no Logic user would think of as vital... yet one that no Logic user should be without. Does that make sense?

Logic Pro 9 Tips and Tricks
By Stephen Bennett. 200 pages, paperback, illustrated B/W. Published by PC Publishing. 2010. ISBN 978-1906005-153. $19.95; www.pc-publishing.com This book is definitely not meant to be a guide for the novice Logic user; that’s not to say it’s not useful to Logic folks at all levels of expertise, but someone who’s already familiar with Logic will definitely get more out of its pages than someone still learning his or her way around. That’s because the author goes in full throttle and never lets up; this book probably has more raw data in its slender binding than many competing tomes that are much larger! The information in this book is organized into ten general chapters on topics like optimization and setup, getting around, recording, mixing, etc., plus a glossary, an index, and an appendix called “Logic And The Internet” that consists of a single web address at PC Publishing and a short paragraph that boils down to “Links always change; go here for the newest ones”... a sensible approach. The chapters themselves are made of up of lots of hints in cryptic but very precise language, with appropriate screenshots in all shapes and sizes crammed in all around them, and with crossreferences to other chapters listed in the margins. There’s no “comfy” language here, no attempt to ease the reader into the subject. It’s understood that if you’re reading this book, you want to learn cool stuff and you want to learn it now, thank you very much, with no messing around. It’s like listening to an expert on the subject happily sharing his secrets to impress his audience, with the added advantage of being able to stop, reread, and try things out at your leisure. If you can get past the book’s incredibly dense packing of information, then you realize it’s a gold mine of all kinds of useful hints. There’s stuff you’d expect to find in a book on Logic, stuff you don’t expect to find in a book on Logic (not many of the books out there stop to tell you how to clean up notation in the Score Editor!), and stuff that comes out of nowhere. When I found a detailed explanation of how to optimize system
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Ableton Live 8 and Suite 8: Create, Produce, and Perform
By Keith Robinson. 394 pages, paperback, illustrated in color. Published by Focal Press, an imprint of Elsevier, 2010. ISBN 978-0-240-81228-1. $44.95; www.focalpress.com Ableton Live is the first DAW designed as much for interactive live performance as for studio work. Learning it, therefore, starts as an exercise in figuring out what you need to know. This book teaches Live from the perspective of three different users: the creator (or composer), who writes

http://www.pc-publishing.com http://www.focalpress.com

Recording - August 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - August 2011