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Coldplay: Plugging into Waves and Amp Farm
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“I’ve been using Logic for about a year now, and it was a little daunting at first — it can be a little hard to get to grips with. But once you do, it’s unbelievable,” he says. “I think it’s going to start luring away from all the other sequencers that are out there.”

“While working on ‘A Rush Of Blood To The Head,’ I was generating a lot of sounds in Logic on my Titanium PowerBook and then sending the audio files through a VXpocket into the Pro Tools system, so I could generate keyboard sounds that Chris could then play through a MIDI keyboard,” he says.

True Mac Faithfuls. “We’re pretty geeky when it comes to Apple Macs, to be honest,” says Berryman. “We’re huge fans.”

Waves Faithful
“There are loads of plug-ins we’ve tried,” he says. “But I’ve found that most of the plug-ins don’t come anywhere near to being as good as the Waves bundle, so I’ve just been sticking to that set of plug-ins, for the most part. The Waves reverbs and compressors are really good.

“We’re using some of the reverbs and the compressors and plug-ins within Pro Tools — you can get things like the Fairchild plug-in and all those compressors modelled from the 60’s and 70’s. We like to use those as well — like the Telectronics ones,” adds Berryman.

“We used Amp Farm on Jonny’s guitars, just to go through different distortions and different sounds, because it’s just so easy,” he says. “Instead of plugging in numerous actual guitar pedals, you can just scroll through different sounds really quickly, just to get a good idea of what you’re trying to achieve.”

Previous page: In the Studio with Pro Tools and Logic

Coldplay

1.	In the Studio with Pro Tools and Logic
2.	Plugging into Waves and Amp Farm

Sampling and Sound Design
Logic is integral to Coldplay’s songwriting and recording process — from designing sounds on a PowerBook that can later be triggered by a controller via MIDI, to processing guitar tracks with Line 6’s Amp Farm and various other plug-ins in Pro Tools.

“I like to sample vintage instruments and dump the audio files into the EXS24 and then mess around with the samples within the EXS24 sampler,” says Berryman.

Useful Links

Records/DVDs
Coldplay

Software
Digidesign’s Pro Tools
Emagic’s Logic Audio
Emagic’s EXS-24
Bomb Factory’s Fairchild
Line 6’s Amp Farm
Waves

Hardware
Power Mac
PowerBook
Cinema Display
Controller Keyboard

Audio Interfaces
Apogee
Prism
Digigram’s VXpocket