Please don't listen to these people, they have one point to make which is:
mastering/re-mastering/recording/mixing are difficult processes, for various reasons it's true.
I will take you through exactly what it should be that you focus on to make your project "sound" both clearer and better, which these fools have skirted because they lack the expertise.
Step 1: Make sure the recording is as clean as can be. Right, duh. Well okay, I mean "as can be", like if you can get an environment with no ambient sound DOIT. It isn't stated enough how much that really clarifies and sets solid boundaries between the bass, treble, etc.
Step 2: Track pan volume should not be set so that tracks appear to have 'negative' decibels. I say it this way because that is what it looks like, in actuality it is the difference in volume between your particular layer of the song and the master track.
Step 3: Use the smart controls to create yourself an equalizer. You'll have to do some customizing, different conditions will force you to correct in different ways, but experiment with pushing the frequencies a little bit, it'll give you a sharper sounding, altogether more "professional" song. And definitely Logic has a great feature that even allows you to punch the gain as high as you'd like. All that means to a layman is how responsive to sound the microphone should be, in effect it is similar to cupping your ear, it will focus or separate the tracks to either make them soft and clean or loud and harsh and grainy. Be careful here to avoid clipping... (Continue reading)
Step 4: Logic will automatically "normalize" a song that clips. You may not know what that means, and that is totally fine, but all you should know is that if Logic didn't have this limiter, you could potentially blow a speaker. Clipping is when something plays far too loud or harsh for the amp you're putting it through, and since a pre-amp will not avoid reading a sound bite just because of that, you can easily put way too much sound through a tiny speaker and literally break the membrane, which is fun but expensive. So if you don't want to "normalize" the song, just make sure you avoid clipping, it's really annoying to hear in a song even when the speaker doesn't break, it's just bad form.
Step 5: None of any of the former is really necessary if you have your own studio sound equipment, so just keep that in mind. And when I say that, all I really mean is that those specialized devices will have their own settings, so calibrating the device is usually more intuitive than trying to effectively "build" one out of the software on Logic already. It's really easy to get a louder track just by playing closer to the mic than by recalibrating the software on your computer.
<Edited by Host>
