Hey everyone,

I have a few questions. I was surfing the forum here about information with Virtual Drumline and Logic Express. It's graduation time here in Michigan, and I have plans to purchase my first Macbook Pro, and I want to load it up for all the recording needs I'll have in the coming years. As far as I've come across, Logic Express is good for quality recordings, which is all I'm going to need it for. I'm in the period where I'm getting job offers and searching for jobs, and I feel having good quality MP3's on my side will help show my professionalism.

My main question is how do the two programs interact? Do I send in actual Sibelius Files, or do I send in MIDI files? Is there a way to effectively ";mix"; the notes on the page to sound live and real? This website it a plethora of prime examples, and I was kind of hoping for the guiding hand to help me on my way to Tapspace/Visaudio quality MP3's.

I did some searching already, but most of the results were way too tech-savvy for me to understand. What I'm looking for is Logic Express/VDL/Sibelius/MBP lamens terms.

Depends on the approach you want to take.  It's just a matter of getting to know the software and necessary concepts to make great recordings, be it through tutorial sites like Lynda.com or Groove 3.

Most people making professional quality recordings start with a MIDI file exported from Sibelius/Finale, and have normally added velocity values to every note or almost every note in the score, whether it be Live Velocity or in the DAW itself - in your case Logic Express.  The more information you put into the Sibelius score, the better your starting point in LE will be.  Honestly, your best bet would be to look for information about making better MIDI orchestrations. 

The soundsonline.com forum is a great place for this sort of information, as there are people there who score for movies, with the intent being that the recordings sound humanized.  They also have a board devoted to MIDI Tricks and such.  That's the biggest thing you'll come up against is making your recordings sound human, not computer generated. Northern Sounds is also a grea source for that type of information.

Thanks for the quick response. I'll have to check those out.

What do you use for Visaudio Bryan ?

It depends.  Lately, for the sake of getting recordings done quicker, I do a lot of work actually within Sibelius and only use Logic as a means for having reverb.  Most of the recordings you hear on there as of late were straight out of Sibelius (as far as the music goes) and the sounds effects/narration were added in Logic.