BILL HOLLAND: Hey everybody, I'm Bill Holland for Gearwire.Com, and I'm here with Kate Simko at Mosaic Music Studios, and right now we're looking at Logic where you do most of your mastering for music, right?

KATE SIMKO: Yes. I do most of my mixing and mastering here at the studio, Mosaic Music in Chicago. This is also where I work as an assistant producer, and yeah I work in Logic Audio with Waves plugins and this is where I do my mixing.

BILL HOLLAND: But now, this is where you're doing your mixing and mastering for your albums, but we're going to look at Ableton where you do all of your prep for doing a live PA, so let's move over to that right now.

KATE SIMKO: Basically, what I do is I create all of my music in Logic Audio, and I play all the different parts and I bounce loops that are different lengths, maybe some eight bars, some 16 bars, some 32 bars, some longer, some odd lengths, and then I bring them into Ableton Live, and you know what I do is I try to get the levels correct as far as volume and just mess around with it as far as trying to create an arrangement for the first time I'm going to play a song in a live setting. For example, here's a newer song where I have just a kick and a tom that are together. I don't know if you can hear it or not off these little laptop speakers. A kick and a tom, and then I'll have on the next track some other kind of percussion, and I'll go in inside here. So, inside here you can see that even when I have an audio loop that I've created in Logic, sometimes I'll go inside and decide that I don't like part of it, I'll take it down with volume just to make it a little bit more random sounding, and stuff like that.

So, I'll bring everything in here from Logic, set it up different melodic components. This, for example is a 32-bar loop so that's longer. I'll just set it up and, you know, at home listen to it, pretend I'm in a live setting, playing these separate parts, and do my best to set it up so that I feel comfortable and confident that, you know, it's going to sound good, and I can play it for at least, you know, to start three or four minutes, and when I'm playing live then that's like the second part of my process. You know, the way that I work with it, everything is in its separate part. You know, snare is separate from kick, separate from tom, separate from pads, from bass, and so when I'm playing live I see what people are reacting to positively and negatively and that's kind of how the song ends up in its final form.

BILL HOLLAND: It seems like it's much more intuitive compared to someone who might be a singer-songwriter or somebody doing more song-based electronic music would work with this. Well, let's go back to the studio and we'll come back and talk about that second part you we're talking about after this.

KATE SIMKO: Okay.