Taste the Rainbow: Practical Use for Logic's Color Palette

I'm currently working on some music for a video game. I can't really reveal too many details, but the process basically involves creating loopable pieces of music that can be smoothly cross-faded between according to what's happening in the game, thus creating a more 'real time' soundtrack.

This obviously requires some thinking not ordinarily involved in writing music - namely, that the pieces need to be in the same tempo and key to allow cross fading to sound natural. So in the process of composing these pieces, I needed to be able to compare them to one another easily to check that compatibility. As you might imagine, this can quickly become an organizational nightmare. Enter Logic's "Color Palette" feature.

The Color Palette function allows you to assign colors to specific audio or MIDI regions in your arrange window. In this case, I arranged the colors according to the different pieces so I could quickly and easily know which regions belonged to which pieces. Obviously, there are tons of other uses for this feature, but any time you need to get things organized in an otherwise chaotic arrangement, this is the perfect tool for the job.

Assigning colors to regions is dead simple:

1. Select the region or regions you want to color.
2. Control-click over the regions to bring up a menu and select "Open Color Palette". (You can also bring this menu up by right-clicking the regions if you have a two-button mouse,
3. Select the color you want to change the regions to.

1 More Non-Musical Purchase That Will Improve Your Life in the Studio

Thanks to reader Mangadrive for pointing out a HUGE omission I made in yesterday's post about non-musical purchases that will improve your music-making experience in the studio: a big monitor.

LCD monitors in 20"+ sizes are getting cheaper all the time, and once you switch over to one of these, you'll wonder how you ever lived without one. If anything, this one should've been number one on that list. Trust me, you won't regret it.

5 Non-Musical Purchases to Improve Your Life in the Studio

Being a musician can be expensive. I tend to break down musical purchases into "sexy" and "non-sexy" categories. Buying a new synth? Sexy. Buying MIDI cables? Non sexy. The thing is, a lot of the time, it's the non-sexy purchases that can make the biggest difference in our day to day lives in the studio. So today I'm going to concentrate on a few of these that I've found particularly important.

1. A Comfortable Chair
Few people really think about the furniture in their studio, but it's really important. After all, you're going to be spending hour after hour parked in front of your monitors, you might as well be comfortable, right? Which chair is the right one for you depends largely on personal preference, but you want to make sure that the comfort doesn't come at the expense of offering proper support. I also recommend looking for a chair with wheels on it so you can scoot around your studio to access equipment easily.

2. Nice Lighting
I feel like a hypocrite for writing this since my current studio has pretty ugly overhead fluorescent lighting, but it's only because I don't have a lot of extra outlets in my studio. Soft lighting from a lamp or two can really make your studio a lot more pleasant and relaxing to be in. The mood you set in your studio often will set the mood for your sessions, so take time to find something you really like. Ikea has a ton of good, cheap options perfect for studios.

3. Cable Organizers
If you have a lot of hardware like I do, then you undoubtedly also have miles of cables snaking all over the place. Aside from looking ugly, it can also be a real pain in the butt when you're trying to trace one cable from output to input. There are a lot of options for keeping your cables neat from simple velcro bands to fancier split 'looms'. Have a look at Cableorganizer.com to see a number of creative options to this end.

4. Cable Storage
Again, this mainly applies to those of us with lots of hardware, but any studio worth its salt should have an ample supply of spare cables of all sorts. You never know when a cable might go bad or when you might find yourself needing to plug in an extra piece of equipment and you're going to be bummed if it's 1 AM and you suddenly find yourself in need of one. Equally important as having these spares is keeping them organized in a way that makes them easy to find. My studio closet door had an old wire frame for holding shoes that turned out to be perfect for this purpose. I wind the cables up neatly and organize them by type. If I need a 1/4" to 1/8" cable or an RCA adapter or even a USB cable, I can find it quickly and easily.

5. Avery Labels
I've mentioned this one before, but it bears repeating. If you take the time to label both ends of your cables, or your various power cords and adapters, it'll make your life so much easier. You know instantly what belongs to what, and if you've ever had to move, you've probably had the experience of not being able to remember what bit of gear a particular power adapter belongs to. Avery makes adhesive labels in virtually every shape and size imaginable. I use the standard size mailing labels. They're just the right size for wrapping around a plug or adapter and they're easy to find in just about any office supply store you're likely to run into. Another nice thing about Avery labels is that they have templates for Microsoft Word so you can make your labels nice and neat and have them print out perfectly.

Can you think of any other non-sexy studio essentials that you can't live without? Share them with us!

The Tour Bible

When my band tours Europe, we hire a tour booker and manager, mainly due to the language barrier that can sometimes be an issue. But when we tour the United States, we book and manage our own tours. This is obviously a lot of work, but it saves money, and at the end of the day, if something goes wrong, we know it was due to our own screw-ups and not someone else's.

A large part of what makes for a successful tour is organization. The more information you have at your fingertips, the less likely it is you'll find yourself in a stressful situation. To this end, every time my band tours, we bring along what we call our 'tour bible'. This is simply a huge 3-ring binder containing all the info relevant to the tour. I can't stress enough how helpful this is. What info yours contains is up to you, but here is how we set up ours... (The binder is divided up by each city, using dividers to keep everything organized.)

• Copies of each of the contracts. You do have contracts, right?

• A master phone list with the names and phone numbers of each promoter and venue. Other helpful phone numbers include any rental companies you used for vehicles or trailers, friends in each city, your insurance company, your merchandising or record companies, and AAA's number if you have it (well worth it!)

• Mapquest directions from hotel to hotel (most hotels offer booklets with listings for all their branches in each state so you can find one ahead of time), and from the hotel to the venue. It's a good idea to have either a dedicated GPS navigator or one on your cell phone, as sometimes online directions are inaccurate, or you might encounter construction that makes the suggested online route impossible, but having Mapquest directions is a helpful backup if you are in areas where there is no cell reception. (And where this is might surprise you. Downtown NYC can be a nightmare given all the tall buildings...)

• We usually don't bother making reservations for our hotel rooms (we prefer to book our own instead of having the promoter do it), but in large cities, it is always a good idea to make reservations, so in these cases, printouts of our reservation confirmations are included.

• A merch sheet for each city with sections for each merch item (with the price listed next to each). This way the merch person can simply make a mark in the appropriate section each time an item sells. This makes it easy to double check that the merch sold matches the amount of cash onhand, and if you use a program like QuickBooks (highly recommended), you can easily keep track of inventory, so you will know at an instant how much of each item is onhand, and when you might need to reorder.

• On a related note, we print out tons of price labels to display on the merch itself. Travel takes its toll on stuff like this, so having back-ups is important.

• If you have band members or crew members who need to fly in to or out of the starting/ending location of the tour, it's not a bad idea to have copies of their reservations.

What you include in your own tour bible is up to you, but the more info it contains, the easier life will be on tour. Even if something seems excessive, include it anyway. You'll never regret having too much info, but having too little can really put a damper on things. One final note... the name 'tour bible' is no coincidence. Treat it as if it was sacred. Make sure it is in a safe place at all times, and always confirm you have it with you. It's not a bad idea to have all the info in the tour bible backed up on an FTP server so you can retrieve it if you lose the real deal, but this should be a last resort only.

Back That Thang Up

If you work on a lot of music, you probably know the importance of backing your work up. Hard drives are notoriously unreliable as long term storage solutions, and there is nothing worse than the realization that you just lost a year's worth of work in the blink of an eye. Still, most musicians are pretty bad about this until it actually happens to them. (And it will sooner or later...)

Even if you're bad about backing up works in progress, chances are you've filled up your audio hard drive a time or two before and needed to purge material to make more room. Personally, I'm a believer in keeping everything, so any time I need to do this, it means I've got a date with a stack of DVD-Rs and Toast. (Believe me, I've had worse dates!)

I think it is very important, however, to think ahead when you are backing your projects up. You may need to restore a project for one reason or the other 5 years down the road. If that happens, you're going to be really happy if you document the contents of your disc thoroughly. This is also useful if you need to send a project to another musician, producer, etc. How you do this depends entirely on your own workflow, but here's what I do.

Name of Act
Name of Album (if any)
Name of Song in Quotations
Name of Producer/Engineer
Is the song a demo, pre-master, or master?
Backup Medium (CD-R, DVD-R, DVD-RW, Tape Drive, etc.)
Date of Back-up
What DAW format and version number is the project in?
If there are other proprietary file formats, what software and version number was used?
If the project is for a client, it's not a bad idea to include their contact info. Make sure to write this info on the storage medium itself too, as CD-R's and DVD's frequently get separated from their cases one way or the other.

One final thing to keep in mind is that occasionally DAW programs go under drastic changes in their native formats (such as when Logic Audio Platinum went from version 4 to 5), that may make your project unopenable in a future version. One option here is to keep every version of the program on your hard drive. I think the better solution, however, is to restore your old projects and convert them to the new format and then re-save them on a fresh DVD/Tape, etc. If you are really serious about keeping all of your old projects, it's not a bad idea to do this just to save it to new media every 5-10 years anyway. That's probably a bit anal if you store your backups well (in a cool, dark place), but no one ever regretted backing things up too much. The same can't be said for those who don't do it enough.

Labeling Your Studio

If you have a fair number of hardware synths in your studio, you probably have a mess of different cables snaking about. Power cords, audio cables, and MIDI cables can quickly become a confused mess. This becomes an even bigger problem when you need to rearrange your studio or troubleshoot a MIDI connection, etc. Suddenly you have to figure where all those cables are going to and coming from. My solution for this is mailing labels. Just the standard Avery 5160 mailing label. These wrap around a cable nicely, and the resulting 'flag' can be written upon to label what the cable belongs to and where it's going. This can be especially handy if you have lots of extra cables and power supplies laying around. Especially with power supplies, there are sometimes proprietary connectors that might only work with a specific piece of gear. Before I started doing this, I had a whole drawer full of power cords I no longer knew the origins of. But now, I just label the cord when I get it and I never have to worry about forgetting what its purpose is. This works great for all the weird USB cables that come with cameras, proprietary cell phone chargers, marking all the plugs in a power strip, etc.