Presence controls

Have to admit I never knew what they actually do but here's a good, clear explanation.

When playing an amp cleanly, increasing the presence control simply results in more upper midrange and treble.
When pushing an amp into distortion, though, the presence control behaves differently. It changes the “texture” of the distortion and adds complexity to the sound, making the amp feel a little “less predictable” for higher notes.

Spring reverb

Love the sound of the Catalinbread Topanga but as I record mostly and seldom play live, buying one would make little sense.

Instead, it struck me as more sensible to try to get the same sort of sound in Logic Pro, though the spring reverb sounds in Space Designer lacked the liveliness of the Topanga, particularly in the area of 'splash'. Eventually settled on a 3rd party plug-in, Aegean's Spirit Reverb

Generally, pretty happy with it though as it's new I must admit I'm saturating the guitar tracks a bit, and still only using the Vintage Spring settings.

More examples of what it can do here  

Compressors and harmonic content

Excellent article here

Also like the idea of using two EQs, a 'surgical' one before the compressor and a second to shape it after the compressor (and anything else that alters harmonic content, e.g. amp simulator).

Logic Pro X Compressor Types

Fully explained here

Personally I tend to use:

• Platinum for ducking as it's pretty neutral in terms of sound
• Studio VCA (= Focusrite Red) on guitars for its brightness
• Classic VCA (= dbx 160) across the drums due to its fast attack
• Vintage FET (= 1176) on vocals, seems to add a slight, pleasant colouring
• Vintage Opto (= LA-2A) on bass, just seems to work best

Usual aux bus assignments

Reverb channels

1 - Short reverb (Bigger bathroom) or tape delay set for slapback echo => 7

2 - Medium reverb (Ambience) => 7

3 - Spring reverb (Old spring) => 7

 Submixes

10 - Drums => Stereo out

11 - Bass => Stereo out

12 - Guitars => Stereo out

13 - Keyboards => 7

14 - Vocals => 7

15 - Centred guitars => 7

Other

7 - Stereo imaging => Stereo out

Stereo imaging

Stereo imaging

I've been putting the imaging plug-in on the stereo out of a mix, when it's unnecessary on anything already panned. So it occurred to me to put it just on its own bus and to put all the channels that need it through that rather than directly to a stereo mix. Basically, anything centred other than bass and kick, but mainly vocals, synths, guitar solos and reverb channels. In terms of settings, use the mid and high preset, and increase the order parameter a little.

DnB style "distressed timestretch" in Logic Pro X

At the start of the 90s in Drum n Bass there was a "distressed timestretch" effect that was widely used but has since fallen out of favour. An example can be found on the Flirt With Danger track, Dr Manhatten. I found out how to do this from a web page which I've been unable to find again, otherwise I'd give the author the credit for this.

Select an audio area in the song you wish to use; only short areas will work due to a limitation of the Exs24 sampler. Click on it while holding down the ctrl key and select Convert to new sampler track.

  

 This will give you a new track with the audio region loaded into the Exs24 sampler and a midi region to play it. The original audio region will be muted. Open the midi region in the editor window, it should look like this:

Now shorten the single midi note and duplicate it until you get something like this:

 If you play this region now, you'll get a Paul Hardcastle style stutter. Next open Midi draw in the editor and pick a midi control that you never normally use, in this case I chose #13. Set a point with value 0 at the start of the region and 128 at the end. This will give you steadily increasing values of control #13 throughout the stuttering, though I find it sounds better if it increases rapidly to begin with then slower, to do this, click somewhere on the diagonal line and raise this point upward.

 
 Next open the Exs24 sampler and assign a controller with the source as Ctrl #13 and the destination to Sample start. Set the 'via' part of the controller to any used midi control, you can use the same control as the source. This splits the little arrow head: keep the bottom half in the centre and move the top half all the way up, so that it looks like this:

You should now get the "distressed timestretch" effect. If it remains as a stutter it may be the original audio region is too long - if so split it into 2 or more pieces and stretch them separately.