Mixing With A Midi Controller In Lightroom and Logic Pro X
Working with a DAW. Recording tracks in a studio.
Mixing With A Midi Controller In Lightroom and Logic Pro X
The xtouch compact midi controller
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148 Mixing With A Midi Controller In Lightroom and Logic Pro X
Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast, recorded for the first week of June 2020. I hope everybody’s doing good. I got a cup of coffee made over here, and I’m hanging out at my studio desk and trying to get a couple of minutes of recording to make a post up today. I hope everybody’s been doing well. I have been hanging in there through the lockdown reopening been hanging in there through the protests that have started up a lot of news and stuff going on, a lot of pictures and stuff, a lot of new images from all the different media sources, either the press photographers like the AP press photographers or are more impressively all the cell phone footage that’s been captured just in the last two weeks or so has been astounding. I think it’s it is going to go down in history is sort of an interesting event, sort of similar to how, what am I saying here, even just as media progresses, and now the proliferation of everyone having a camera in their pocket is sort of what’s created a revolutionary moment, in a sense, you know where we get to have a lot of information captured not only from, from specific media sources, like an AP press photographer but also a 17-year-old girl gets to record a video and send that out. And that piece of media captures a moment that has a huge influence on a huge part of the culture. And I think that’s one of the systems that that maybe hadn’t been foreseen before, in, in the way that media works, and that the way that media spreads messages through the world, but that’s thinking about, well, how would we say so just in the last couple of weeks, given that everyone now has a phone. In some way, to capture media, we’ve had all sorts of instances of these, this specific? Well, I guess, let’s say police brutality, circumstances, and murders that have happened, that have been captured on video, and photographs, and you have just like different tear gas things or protesters different peaceful protesters being attacked different rioters being exposed for the crimes that they’re committing. And so it’s fascinating to see like how fast we can get these pieces of media I was thinking about maybe something like 911 when, when we just first started having digital media on the ground for recording you know, I think that’s one of the first events where we had VHS like tape footage just from someone who had a camera on them when the event had happened. I think that’s like one of the videos from now 11 we saw again and again after the buildings fell off this camera, kind of running away through the cloud of dust that was there. Intense footage. I also remember looking up that photojournalist back in 2001, had just started using a Canon D 30, which I think was their very first think their very first digital camera that was put out into newsrooms. So, even on 2001 September 11, 2001, a lot of the media was created on film. And a lot of the media was created on what, you know, like VHS tape or like really low megapixel, like three mega, maybe three or two-megapixel cameras back then. So I thought that was fascinating. I think it was like another year or another like, oh, maybe that I think the Nikon Done had just come out, which I’d probably talked about on this podcast before that was like one of the first cameras. So there were only a couple of digital photography options back then. The idea of cell phone videos, you know, I mean, imagine what that kind of event would have been like if every single person had a feed of video that had been uploaded or recorded on the day of an event like that. So this was fascinating about the kind of changes in those events as we progressed through history. But I was also thinking back to Vietnam, where there were a lot of videos, well, I guess, the Vietnam era and maybe the era of the 60s there, the protests and riots that had gone on to end Vietnam now. And to get the civil rights bill passed. There’s a lot of media created around that we still see in history books now. But a significant amount of that media was all created by the press at the time. And that’s the divergence that we see now is that instead of sort of edited message that was represented by the press, we’re seeing an unedited message that’s developed and created and shared by a wide population of people across the United States. And then it’s edited through the crowd and then edited through the links that you receive, and even still, that’s probably a manipulation of the total amount of information available. But it’s just fascinating to see kind of the changes and progression of media. I’m not saying it’s better now or worse than it was before. The application of media to communicate a message to a population seemed like, you know, I don’t know. It’s just interesting to analyze. I guess kind of the types of things that are changing. I remember, I guess, first thinking about this with 2000, maybe I don’t know, probably not the first time, but I was thinking about this again, with the 2017 Eclipse. I know it’s odd to try and compare these two circumstances. But historically, I started thinking about this idea that when 2017, all American Eclipse happened on, I think, what was August 21, maybe 7/17 2017, it was 2017. So it was probably the 28th. I don’t know what it was. But when we had the all-American Eclipse, there were videos, and there were great photographs from almost every photographer, every Instagram photographer, every you know, amateur prosumer, or semi-professional. I have a bunch of photographs from the Eclipse that are okay. But everyone was able to capture photographs from all over the country. And that’s because they all had, they all had a piece of media equipment. And then, as you go back in time to different eclipses that have happened in the past, I was trying to do that, as I was looking up information without Eclipse coming up. There’s almost no information about that the past cycle of that Eclipse. So you know, I think it was like back in the 90s. And so you had some news reports from France or something, it was this, you know, cache kind of wobbly VHS tape that was uploaded to YouTube, there are a couple of photos, like one or two photos from its app, its appearance in 1945. And it’s cool to see a black and white photo of an eclipse, but it’s like one or two that exist. And now there are hundreds of gigabytes of images and different sequences of renderings of how that Eclipse progressed past. So just seeing that as a macro of it or as a controversial example, the change in time creates a change in the representation of a media and how it’s used to show what’s going on. So I thought that was fascinating. But we’re seeing that now. We’re just in the last 15 days. We probably have more coverage and more media evidence of things we were interested in than we probably ever had before. For a significant newsworthy event like this, though, I think it’s all been kind of interesting to see and see that this sort of stuff. But well, it’ll be interesting to really, it’ll be interesting to see how it progresses. Over the next weeks. I think this is one of the wells. Everything seems like it’s the first time as you continue moving in toward the future. But it seems like it’s one of the first times that it’s happened this way. I have to move the mic a little. Up the stairs. And there we go. Let’s see the other pieces I was going to talk about today. I’ve been working in the studio still been working with Logic Pro 10. Sharp left turn, working with some audio production software, Logic Pro 10 recorded a bunch on the idea during the last podcast, and still, Yeah, I enjoyed Logic Pro 10 quite a bit. It’s pretty fun to be working with. What is it about it that I like? I think a big part of it is all the free loops and sounds that you get. There are many other programs out there and many other applications that have software instruments that you can apply or loop packages that you can download. So those are certainly available to a lot of producers. But a real positive convenience about Logic is that you can download nearly 70 gigabytes of a sound library just for free that’s available, sort of with the program without doing any additional or extra steps. And so that’s a part of it that I think is a cool advantage. But so yeah, I’ve been just going through and messing with those loops and trying to check out the live loops dashboard. And I don’t know if it’s a dashboard, but I’m trying to look at the live loops tool of how you can throw in loops to this grid and then trigger them and sequences. So it’s been fun to check out while I’ve been trying to do some guitar stuff, really. Pardon me. Just kind of regular practice stuff is up to you. But it’s cool. There are a couple of amp modelers that you can get into when you have your guitar plugged into an interface on the computer. And yeah, it’s a great, great system to do it with. I’ve been trying to master it called mastering if you do it this way, I’ve been trying to produce out the podcast using Logic Pro for at least the last one, and then I did some editing on a couple of others but yeah, I’ve been trying to go through and sort of learning how I could use Logic Pro to do the production of the podcast stuff, which kind of goes up and down. I mean, so I’m recording said, probably many times recording into an h4 n, which has, which has good preamps. For, for vocals, I think, you know, part of the tonal quality of how a microphone ends up picking the sound, I think is part of the preamp power that’s supplied to the way that the microphone picks up the information. I don’t know how it’s recorded. There’s something about that, I guess when it comes down to a sort of the, I don’t know the quality of the sound that you’re hearing. So it sounds quite good and natural just coming through. As it is, I’ve used other systems before that. That is not the case, it sounds really tinny or really, really thick and muddy, or just some weird digital noise. It’s in there a lot of problems and stuff that I’ve had to try and overcorrect in the past. So this is okay, so when I throw it into Logic, I don’t have a ton of things to do. But I do try and set a track like a channel strip, with a few different effects features applied to it so that it kind of adjusts the audio enough to make it I guess a little more suitable for listening to in a podcast, most of that is adding a compressor and a stack, so I had the voice compression. So really loud things and really quiet things are, are normalized a bit so that they don’t pop and become loud. If you’re like hearing it on headphones, you know, it doesn’t go from the normal state of voice that my voice is in now to some other high loudness, all of a sudden, have an equalizer out there to get rid of a couple of odd room tone frequencies, I think there’s like a, like a high pass, or this is this little filter pass that you can do where you kind of pull out a piece of EQ high and sweep it across your spectrum, then you find this frequency. That’s probably like two or three that are just sort of these weird warble high pitch tones that can be in there. And, and you can kind of drop those out with the EQ. And that really kind of changes, you wouldn’t almost notice it, if you were just listening to the full mix, you think, well, I can’t hear that sound. But really, you can in some ways, the sort of agitating, a bad sound that you also hear along with everything else. So going through and doing some EQ, doing some stuff to the low end of the EQ, which is kind of fun to mess around with. And I’ve been watching some YouTube tutorials about vocal production and how different producers go through there. They’re working with compressing and mastering and mixing vocals, and I was looking at Radio production stuff, which is okay, a lot of those a lot of the searches sort of end in some dopey guy kind of talking. I mean, what do you listen to do right now, some dopey guy kind of talking about sound in a way that you can’t apply. Sorry. But, but when I was checking out things that were a bit more helpful, I was looking up hip hop vocal production mixes, because that’s sort of a spoken word technique. Some E cueing and compression ideas are sorts a little more relevant than they are for a vocal singer. And I guess I mean, that’s kind of obvious. But yeah, but I think it’s a bit more of just mixing to the volume and loudness of sort of what it is. Yeah, it’s cool. Learn a little about how to add some different effects to the audio. What is the channel that I’m working with? So have a de Esser placed on it to get rid of some of these sounds? I don’t even know if you can hear maybe a DS at all. I’m sure it didn’t. But the oh and also, I think, what is it like an echo or an echo or reverb effect that’s on there. And I think that’s supposed to be like a dry and wet mix; it’s supposed to add like a bit more space to the sand. Sometimes it can be a little too flat, or I guess dry sounding. So you’re supposed to add a little reverb to it to make it feel like it’s in a more natural room space. And then like a quiet box or something. Also, put a noise gate on there so that any sound in there like a certain level will be cut out and stripped away. So there’s not any distracting lower hums or buzzes or something like that. I remember on my first podcast, I think I was running like an analog input into the computer to record it my first podcast like back in 2009. And there was always this like kind of this low ground hum this that would be floating around in the background. And it was annoying. But I think I’d apply like a pretty aggressive noise gate to try and chop it out. And it just sounded way over-processed. Shoot. So kind of live and learn part of it, but I wish I did a little more learning of it. So I have this channel stack, and we’re working on Logic Pro, I’ve been trying to figure out the mixing stuff and kind of tweaking it here and there and just kind of have fun with some music production stuff that you can do, I’m looking at this controller, there are different types of MIDI controllers out there, a lot of time, when you start talking about a MIDI controller, you’re talking about like a keyboard, or you know, like a piano keyboard kind of thing, but not a piano, just a controller, they call it because it doesn’t have any sounds in it a piano has strings and hammers that, you know, it’s sort of a physical operation is triggering an actual harmonic sound to occur in real space. With a controller. It’s, it’s just, it’s just buttons, you know, and then the computer processes that MIDI sounds to playback, a sample or a generated to the tone of some sort. So I have this, this m audio 25 key keyboard, which is a MIDI controller that I have plugged into the computer to do some stuff with it. But really, that’s just, that’s just like a MIDI instrument that’s plugged in cool and great for the music production stuff that someone might want to do. But this other type of controller that I’m looking at is a little separate from what a DJ controller would be maybe you’ve seen this kind of the pads, or the scratch pads, or the sort of, you know, the mix fade in and out or whatever that kind of stuff is, this is DJ controllers, but this one is, is more like a digital console. So it’s a think an eight-channel mixer is really what it looks like with the ninth channel master. And instead of having like outputs, like sends and outputs for quarter-inch Jacks on the top to go to analog equipment, it’s really just a controller that drives MIDI information through USB into Logic or other digital audio workstations, and then allows you to control those knobs and features of your digital audio workstation through the controller. So it’s cool. So you know, you slide you’re going to mix something, so you want to slide the mix of channel one up to a higher volume, but you want to take channel three down a bit. You can do that physically just on these sliders that are there. And then you can, you know, punch in for record or, or you know, arm for record or select or mute or whatever it is. And then there are several kinds of control features and knobs on the sides where you can get into some things. So we’re looking at these controllers looking at an X touch Baron or was made by Beringer. And it’s an X touch compact, is one of the ones I was looking at, there’s an X touch one. And I think just the Gen X touches like, you know, like a full size, like digital console space, it takes up most of the desktop. It’s like there’s a mini out there too, which I think you can, you can throw on a laptop bag. Cool that those options exist out there. And Yeah, it seems like it’d be kind of interesting for music producers to try and use. But I was also looking at some things you can do with it in Lightroom, too. So this, these controllers, you can have MIDI signals run into the computer to trigger different keyboard commands or different clicks and stuff. So I guess what you can do, and there’s been some pieces of software made for it over the last couple of years that they do Lightroom control. So you can have a controller like this and turn a knob, and then that knob will respond to a fader, or you know one of those sliders that exist in the develop module of Lightroom. So you want to turn up the white balance of a photo, well, you have a slider for your white balance, or rocker something you can turn it up or down, or you have a slider that can go to high exposure or low exposure or change your brightness or hues or adjust your blacks, your tone curves. You have access to that, of course, on the screen, but you also have controls of that in physical spaces, buttons mapped to that controller through the software, I think a couple of the pieces of software that I’ve seen are MIDI to Lightroom or as part of MIDI to LR I think is what it’s titled as which I’m sure you can search there’s a paid software called p fixer that exists out there that I that has a free trial. Just try it out if you’re interested. And then there’s another software called LR control. And I think that’s also another piece of paid software that you can get a free trial for. There are a few videos online that kind of express how some of these mixing pieces go, but really, I don’t think there are that many videos that describe how you know mixing with a like an X touch or mixing with some kind of MIDI controller or photos in Lightroom works. There’s some stuff like, you know, there’s a couple, a couple of guys kind of going around and tweaking some photos. So you get the general idea of what it is. And I guess that’s enough. I mean, you know how to edit photos. But yeah, it’s kind of interesting to see how the controllers plug into it, I figured it helps with productivity and workflow. I’ve also seen plenty of professional photography. No, it’s not like every, every top photography studio is implementing a controller, and that’s why they’re getting better at editing. I think they’re hiring an editor. Is that what they’re doing? I need to learn about sort of the higher-end stuff. But sometimes, of course, there are a lot of them, the bespoke journeymen photographers that, that just sort of work and do all the work and then build a package and send it out. But there’s also a lot of photographers working in commercial markets or wedding markets to that, that, shoot a bunch of photos and then have several editors go through the library, and they’ll, they’ll do editing, color editing, and stuff. But they’ll also do more tedious tasks like keywording, or, like metadata description, editing, or something, you know where they go through and make a bunch of changes, or a bunch of log lines to, to have liner notes inserted into the metadata of a photograph. Interesting as a process. But yeah, I’ve seen like, you know, a couple of interns hired in a photography studio just to work on, you know, tagging and logging and keywording stuff, which I don’t want to do, I don’t do that in my Lightroom catalog at all. You know, like, I don’t know what to do whatever degree I need, but it’s like a collection or something. So, I’ve seen that. But I’ve also seen talented visual editors, you know where their training is like, is just to use Photoshop to apply to sharpen. You go, oh, man, wow, that’s what you do, is just use Photoshop at a high level to add multiple layer effects into a channel so that you can apply a type of sharpening to the pixels that we don’t understand the use. I mean, I’m sure it’s quite good as just the slider in Lightroom. But, for these professional magazine layout photos, they go through a couple of passes of pretty high-end old school guys that go through and do specific types of sharpening modifications to the way that the photographs look, especially I think, if the photographs are being enlarged to a great degree, you know if you’re thinking about a billboard, but you’re thinking about you thinking about the physical size of 35-millimeter pieces of film, is that what it is 3635? What is it? I’m not sure, but if you think about just like a frame, like a film frame, it’s just, you know, a small little block, and you think about that stretched out to cover an entire billboard, or even just something on TV, I think they have to do a lot of image manipulation to what do they call it, interpolate to interpolate enough pixels to create out of nothing enough pixels, to make it so that the resolution of an image can exist is something that large, and I think there used to be some, some pretty specific processes in place for art directors to send those photographs through to get them appropriately edited for print in a magazine. And so all that sort of stuff has kind of gone out the window now. And now it’s just sort of, you know, juice the photo up and an editor to make it look cool to get it out online or to get it into a book or something. So maybe it’ll seem regrettable in the future that that was sort of the case with a lot of the images, but also probably not, I think it’ll be fine. It’d be cool to get a pro editor on board. But I figure I figured that’s sort of a way of the past. You know, I think I’ve talked before about different ways of the past that like film photography got where their stock photo sessions where you could just take pictures of a corral of horses, you know, 30 photographers, or take a picture of a crowd of horses, and they’d all sell that in a calendar and make, you know, make 10 grand for the year. Those days are over. I don’t think that’s happening anymore, as is the idea of hiring a full-time image editor to do professional color gradation on your images. I think that’ll just be up to me now. So I guess that’s probably a lot of the stuff that I’ll talk about on this episode of the podcast. Thanks a lot for checking it out. I hope you guys check out some stuff on Billy Newman photo.com few new things up there some stuff on the homepage, some good links to other outbound sources, some links to books, and links to some podcasts. Like this. Blog posts are pretty cool. Yeah, check it out at Billy Newman photo.com. Thanks for listening to this episode and the back end