Key Of Grey

Photo courtesy of Tim O’Brien

October 26th, 2008 – David Dennis writes: “Can you elaborate a bit more (maybe in a follow-up post) on what the Protools features are that you like?”

As many of you know, I’m a big fan of Logic. It includes everything I need to take a song from idea to CD-ready. I don’t have to fool around with adding new plug-ins or new sounds (unless I want to) because Logic includes a great library of sounds. Apple and Emagic have put together a package that is all inclusive for a very reasonable price (even more so with Logic Studio). It may not be as cheap as ProTools with an Mbox, but I can choose what interface I use with it and, with all the added content, it’s a much better deal.

So why do I still use ProTools, and even prefer it when recording vocals? Well let’s start with the “pro” of ProTools; that it’s the industry standard. Sure, all recording software is able to record to WAV or AIFF format. Certainly you can take an audio file in Logic that has been recorded in AIFF format and open it in ProTools, but you only get that audio file as an audio file. You cannot take a track that has multiple comped audio files, and hope to open it with all the timing properly in place in another DAW. The only way to transfer a track completely, is to bounce each track separately as a complete audio file, thereby creating one contiguous audio file per track.

Regardless of whether an engineer in a studio likes ProTools or not, every successful studio has it for their clients. Even people who know nothing of music production, will know what ProTools is. The basement engineer with a ProTools Mbox wants to know that he can mix on a big studio’s ProTools TDM or at least Digi002 rack set up, and still use the nice mixing console, pre-amps, EQ’s et al. I would love it if all the DAW companies got together and made a common save file format but I’m sure it’s not in DigiDesign’s best interest to do that. I seem to remember trying something like that out a few years ago but I don’t recall it working very well.

Ok, now on to why I think the audio handling in ProTools is better than Logic’s. The difference in the implementation of audio is small, but the philosophy behind each is radically different. I feel that Logic treats audio as if it were pictures, while ProTools treats audio like it was still on old-fashioned tape reels. This difference is what allows ProTools a massive lead in my opinion. Within Logic, each audio region is like a picture arranged in a collage. Regions sit on top of each other and can be shortened, but ultimately precision with each region isn’t the goal, it’s the final comp that matters. Like ProTools, Logic gives precedence to the next region, so from left to right, the latter will be superimposed onto the earlier region. But the difference is, Logic leaves the bottom layer intact and simply decides what plays by what is more important. This eliminates the need to edit each region to the sample level, you just have to worry about region placement. I feel that this is the way that Photoshop works with layers. The top layers are cut so that what overlays on previous layers is precise, but the lower layer is just pasted on. On a side note, I much prefer dragging my mouse over a track and deleting whatever is underneath the highlighted timeline (whether that is one or many regions, or if it makes a smaller region out of a larger one), over resizing each region individually like Logic forces you to do.

ProTools acts very much like its analog counterpart, the tape reel. When you place an audio region on top of another, it “erases” what is beneath it. This newly shortened piece of audio is made into a separate audio region automatically. Of course, you can re-extend it if it was a mistake, or you can further chop it apart but the difference is that each cut you make generates a new region. In Logic, this is not the case. If you shorten a piece of audio, it is not a new region. However, if you separate a region into multiple parts, then you can turn the pieces into separate regions.

You must be wondering why I’m such a stickler about this small difference if it doesn’t affect anything. In fact, it does make a difference when you’re doing fine audio work like comping vocals or lead instruments lines, or doing very intricate cuts for something like a glitch remix of your favorite electronica song. When dealing with regions that you want to copy, you want the ability to make each region separate so that you can affect each piece without affecting the others. For example, say you’re comping a vocal track and you have a lot of takes but want to only take certain parts, maybe even comping together parts of one word. First of all, you definitely want to be able to cut a region so that it’s clean down to the sample, something that’s darn near impossible to do with accuracy in Logic.

Now what happens if that vocal line appears somewhere else in the song but you want to put together the comped parts in another way so that the song doesn’t sound like it’s robotically looping. If some of those regions are shared, you will not be able to change those regions without changing the regions that you already used. You could manually make that region a new one, but shouldn’t that be automatically done for you? How often does someone want regions that are in different parts of the song to be changed when a copied version of that region is later changed? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been working with drum samples and wanted to extend the tail of cymbal and not realized that I did it to the rest of the cymbals until much later.

Speaking of cymbals, sometimes I like to do effects like reverse cymbals (tacky I know, but it’s a pop standard). In Logic, unlike ProTools, I have to make that specific cymbal region its own, so that I can reverse it without affecting the others. That, or I have to go into my directory structure, copy the file so I have a duplicate and rename it so it’s considered a totally different region by Logic. You might consider this a small annoyance, but when dealing with a large amount of material, getting the job done efficiently is paramount. You spend time learning quick keys to save time don’t you?

I hope this provides more insight into why I think Logic is lacking in the audio handling department. If they fixed it, I would have no reason to use ProTools but when doing fine audio work, Logic just doesn’t cut it for me.

NB. This post relates to Logic Studio and ProTools 7 and below. I have no reason to suspect ProTools 8 handles audio any differently, and Logic Studio has not yet proven to me that regioning is handled properly.