I am writing these while sitting in the catacombs studios and listening to a very raw mix of the new upcoming CULTES DES GOULES album. All instruments and voices are recorded. I am very glad to say that this album is the most obscure, dark and evil work I did till now. I don’t have any labels for the music. It’s a mix of deep drums, orchestral strings and trumpets and – on some parts, where it fits – with distorted basses.

How would you call such a music? I really don’t know. But I guess, this is good for CULTES DES GOULES, which is experimental in all kinds.

The next time is beeing the time for mixing and finally mastering the album. Besides that, cover artwork is calling too. For that album I have very special ideas. Look forward for the title announcement of this… radio play!

Yours in darkness,

Cy Ghul

Logic opened

What you see above is Apples Logic 8 – I bought it before a while and installed it on my Mac Mini with Intel Core Duo (not to be confused with Intel Core 2 Duo!!) and 2 Gigs of Ram. I was afraid that it won’t work with my old box, but gladly everything turned out well!

Logic 8 runs like a dream – it seems that it doesn’t need more performance than Logic 7 did. I have composed simultan between 5 and 15 tracks with both, mixed audio and audio instruments. No problem.

As far as I can say I don’t miss anything. Tons of synthesizers are included. The GUI is very intuitive and I like it MUCH more than the old one. It reminds a bit on GarageBand, but more profesional.

At least – i expected that and I am so happy that I finally have done it. Recommended!

My new CD will be finished with that Software now

I guess I have to sit down and practice for a while before I can bring this instrument into my music. It such a difficult beast cause you don’t have such a thing like a flute header. You have to form the header with your mouth and well, thats quite unusual for western guys like me.

But as frustrating as it was in the beginning, I think it will be good some day. A Shakuhachi is a wonderful instrument (generally speaking). I will never surrender!!!

As i thought a little more, I remembered of my performance issues with GarageBand, as my compositions grew and used lots more of EXS instruments. Now I am sure that performance issues come from unsufficient memory. 1 Gig of RAM is too less for more than 6 software instruments, esspecially there are EQ tunings on em.

This issues and of course my thoughts about an upgrade to Logic 8 brought me to this post, where the guys explained in detail how to open the Mac Mini and upgrading the RAM.

Well, I did so and succeded

The post above is excellent written. Upgrading is really easy, just do it. Just one thing is to remember: if you have an Intel Core Duo you CANNOT have more RAM than 2 Gigs. You have to use 2x 1 Gig of 667 Mhz SODIMM (= notebook ram!). If you use more RAM, the screen will stay black and won’t even hear the chime.

Just the Intel Core 2 Duo seems to support more than 2 Gig. Officially it is said by Apple that a Mac Mini supports 3 Gigs. In fact I heard about people using more than 3 gigs with success. Just take a look at the performance benchmark.

So, please check out which mac you have. You can do this easily in the System Profiler (click the apple – about this mac icon).

I own now more RAM and yes, my Logic is working much better. I have nearly no performance issues anymore. I really would like to have a trial version of Logic 8, but unfortuneatly Apple isn’t offering such a thing. Bad luck. I guess I will stick with Logic 7 a bit longer and enjoy my new RAM.

When switching back to Logic, i didn’t find my GarageBand Instruments anywhere. I get ravenous, i had installed them on my external drive. However, i found it as Instrument / Insert / Channel Strip – no worries here. My article about “moving the garageband instruments” still work for logic

Kore Player is quite nice and integrates well as a “Generator” into GarageBand, but the standard installation just gives you 100 MB of sound. This is ok for testing purposes and for use sometimes, but I am not excited. The sounds are fine, mostly for electronic music, but didn’t leave me stunning. I will now try out any longer and leave it installed, but I am not sure if I should buy these Kore Packs, with which you can extend your sounds.

However it’s a nice idea for all those of us, who have not 999$ to buy the NI Komplete package

This morning i had a reinstall and decided to put all that space consuming stuff on my external harddisk. If you want to do like i did, i recommend you about 300 Gig space on a Mac OSX journaled filesystem. I had a FAT32 on my mac to get on it via Windows too, but this harddisk is not always activated when i need it. I have to make a harddisk check to activate it, which is quite uncomfortable. I guess you don’t want to have that problems with your instruments.

However, having your instruments on an external disk is straightforward. Please note, my volumes name is FELIX, replace that name with whatever you call your harddrives.

LOOPS
I created the folder:
/Volumes/FELIX/audiolib/loops/Apple Loops/Apple

With my Finder I clicked at “Macintosh HD”, where my loops are currently installed. Switch further to
/Library/Audio/Apple Loops/Apple
and copy all that folder in there to your new Loops-Folder (and delete the old content). You can do the same with “iLife Sound Effects” if you want. Cause you instrument installer indexed all that loops, you have to go to:
/Library/Audio/Apple Loops/
and delete all txt files in there (maybe three or four or simliar- depends on how much Jam Packs you installed, i guess). Start up GarageBand and open you Loop-Browser. It will tell you that you don’t have any Loops installed. Open your finder with your new loops-place, drag the folder where all subfolders with instruments are and drop the into your loop-browser. GarageBand does the rest for you.

INSTRUMENTS
It’s a similar process for your instruments. I created:
/Volumes/FELIX/audiolib/instruments
Then i copied everything from /Library/Application Support/GarageBand/Instrument Library to this folder. I emptied the Instrument Library Folder. Please note: if you have some stuff allready installed in you new folder (FELIX in my enviroment) pleas copy carefully. OSX will delete old stuff when you just copy folders, and this is not what we want. In this case you have to copy manually file for file. And: you’ll need your superuser password for this action. If you don’t have any yet, open a terminal:

> sudo su

This will ask you for a password. By default you have none. Press enter. If you are in without error message, do this command:

> passwd

and get a new password. By the way, you should do this ALWAYS, it’s a bad idea not to set a superuser password – everybody can login and manipulate your computer this way.

Before you do that, of course i cannot give any guarantees. And please note, i have some kind of bug with my method, if you know how to fix that, let me know. All my instruments are now in the same JamPack, which may be a result of my heavy metal copy actions

When you next start up GarageBand i tells you that it has no Instruments installed. There is “Choose” Button where you can point to your new Instruments folder.

COMPOSING
When I started with CULTES DES GOULES, I didn’t know anything about creating music alone. In fact, i was alone, and nobody of my former friends could tell me how to start. In 2006 I bought Magix Music Maker; this was a frustrating piece of software. Once I had something, one could name a “song”, I couldn’t develope it the way i want. You are built in a golden cage; everything simple and well designed, but you have not the chance to do something which the developers have thought of. Well, only good thing was that I felt that i -could- do it: I could compose songs.
In 2007 i bought my Mac Mini; a new life started, everything is simple, well designed and ready to use. I will not leave my Mac again, I love it. Included was a programm called GarageBand 1. I started it and recognized quickly that this easy-to-use programm could help me with making music. GarageBand 1 didn’t have any support for a “virtuall keyboard”, so i bought a keyboard from M-Audio. It’s connected via USB, quite simple, ugly, without dynamics keys, but usefull and cheap when you just work with midi files. With that equipment I composed my first songs. However, i quickly switched to GarageBand 3, cause this is so much more comfortable. I bought some Jam-Packs and then I had everything I wanted. BTW, if you are thinking you set up your Mac Mini and off you go- wrong. The Mac Mini has NO cable slot for microphone in. You need to get a soundcard for that. I bought a simple Hercules USB-Soundcard for 30 euro. That was enough for my tests.
Later I bought Logic Express, but it was fucking hard. I learned how to use it, but the MIDI editing stuff is uncomfortable. I used it a while for mixing, but had to learn that my money was wasted. I was happy that I didn’t bought Logic Pro which is much more expensive.

RECORDING
After the MIDI editing, I figured out that my sounds are OK, but I need real, analogue instruments to make my music work. I put in my bassguitar into the Hercules card. It was OK for a try-out but I recognized that this isn’t enough for a professional CD. Later i bought a Phonic Firefly 808 and hell what, this hardware is so fukking great- smooth integration into my mac, works perfectly with Core Audio on Mac OSX 10.4.x. Very fine- I started to record.
This was easier with Logic Express; you can record tasks here, one loop over and over again, and at the end you choose the very best and off you go. With GarageBand you have to click “start” for every loop. Well, in the latest GarageBand version this feature is integrated, but I didn’t want to buy it. Maybe the next version; this one has to less features which are of interested of me (who to hell wants a virtual band??).
However, cause Logic Express is so ugly and hard to handle, I used GarageBand again to record.

MIXING
For mixing, GarageBand is very very hard to use. You simply cannot have exact positions, cause everything is to small. Logic Express is perfect for mixing. It also offers the possibility with lots of VST-Plugins, which are usefull this task. I used Logic Express, opened my GarageBand songs and everything worked out well. I made some of the standard-errors a beginner makes, but cleaned that out half a year later.

MASTERING
Mastering- a new field for me. I learned that WaveLab is one of the best pieces of software, but I didn’t want to buy that for a important but short task. GarageBand has some features in this direction, but it looks very gory and low level- I really don’t understand what they want us to use here. However, Logic Express is of course possible. You have to construct your enviroment, and all that just for improving your song. Next problem: you cannot have multiple songs open, which is great for a beginner. However, I remembered Audacity, and thats it! Easy to use it was, and it could integrate all my Logic Express Compressors, Eqs etc. pp. At the end I mastered everything with this great and free Open Source tool.

FAZIT
At the end is clear, a combination of all that tools is the very best for me. My CD sounds great- ok, professional people may have there problems, but the rest will enjoy it like I do. I read very often about “use that, that is cool” and figured out, that this idealism is not worth to speak of. All products have there pros and contras. For a small production, this all is perfect. You don’t need expensive stuff. Just ignore all the “pros” out there or the “semi-pros” who try to tell you that you ONLY can have fun with the most expensive product. They are lying- it’s possible to have professional products without stealing software. I guess, it all depends on your quality and your ears.