Vocal Production with Logic

Alumna Kerry Leva showed summer students how she uses Logic and other programs to produce her music.
July 28, 2011

Kerry Leva is well versed in vocal production. An electronic dance music producer and vocalist with releases on Anjunadeep, Armada Music, and Black Hole Recordings, with an appearance on the renowned In Search of Sunrise compilation series (twice), the Berklee grad is also a staff lab monitor for the Electronic Production and Design Department. Showing off a new remix of her song "Boxing Gloves" (with Ad Brown, to be released on Black Hole Recordings), she ran the gamut of vocal production techniques at a recent Learning Center forum.

Beginning with cleaning audio tracks, she showed students how to remove clicks, reduce unwanted consonant sounds, and use a tool like Melodyne to fix tuning issues. She then previewed the different audio processing algorithms in Logic's flex-time editor, stretched out a small portion of audio, and ran it through a long-tail reverb to create a drone-like swell. She also walked through reversing audio files, sidechain compression, gating duplicate tracks, and many other techniques. Some of Leva's favorite plug-ins are McDSP's compressor and Eos, a reverb by Audio Damage. (Click here for free plug-ins by Audio Damage.) Layered beautifully, Leva's tracks show impeccable attention to detail.

Read her articles and hear more of her music at kerryleva.com and beatsmedia.com, and follow other Learning Center events at learningcenter.berklee.edu.