10 Life Changing Logic Pro X Tips

logic pro has a ton of different features in it that can actually make your life so much easier so much more efficient and faster in this video i'm going to be sharing 10 of them with you that i know that have made my life a heck of a lot easier and i think you're going to find them to make your life a lot easier as well let's do it tip number one is when you are working with actual audio samples here's what a lot of people do but go in here and be like hey that's a cool sample and they will drag it and drop it directly into the timeline or the arrangement window and then it'll be like hey i want on b2 boom it's on b2 right and then they play it and then they're literally just working with audio and then they're going in here and they're copying it and moving it wherever the heck they actually want it that my friends is not the best way of doing this instead what you should do is this go ahead and grab the audio sample that you want like this grab it and drag it and then actually put it right underneath the tracks in here and it's now going to ask you here create new track using it's going to give you a few different options in this particular case i tend to prefer using quick sampler but you could use drum machine alchemy the sampler with a zone per note i'm just going to go ahead and use the quick sampler instead of two original it will automatically create a midi region with that sample dropped in using the quick sampler within logic and now check this out boom and we can actually start manipulating it inside of this itself and i usually don't but now i can go in here and record obviously that's just an example that's not actually a song i'm working on and now we have the actual midi here we can quantize it we can start working with it as actual midi instead of having to work with it as an audio file that right there alone has made my life so much easier and i think it's gonna make your life easier too that's tip number one that brings us to tip number two and this is something that i have found incredibly useful when i'm working either with myself as a vocalist or playing guitar recording anything or especially if i'm working with a vocalist in the studio here and that is adjusting the metronome settings so all you need to do is go up here to where your actual metronome is hover over it and when you have this little arrow right there you're just gonna hold down your mouse go to metronome settings so now we actually have the metronome settings pulled up now there are three different things that i'm going to adjust within the metronome settings depending on what i'm needing help with in a lot of cases if i'm working on a really dense track the metronome where the click can get buried within the track where the vocalist might not really be able to hear the metronome so the very first thing that i'll do is adjust the tone of the metronome so as we move the tone of this metronome listen to what's happening let's open it up so obviously as we move the tone to the right hand side it's going to really open up the sound and make it a lot more bright the next thing we can do is adjust the actual volume of the metronome and this is something again i find incredibly helpful because when i have vocalists or other musicians in the studio in a lot of cases i have issues with them maybe rushing a little bit or maybe they're behind the beat because they're just not hearing the metronome as well as they should be able to hear the metronome and these two things alone are very helpful but that brings me to the third thing that i oftentimes will do within this and that is actually adding the division listen to what happens when i add the division it actually throws 16th notes into the mix now we can adjust the velocity and we can also adjust the note so check this out adjust the note the velocity so that's going to essentially adjust the actual volume of the subdivision and so again one of the big reasons i use the subdivision is just to help make sure that you can really get a sense for the actual timing of the track especially if you're working in a track that is a slower tempo or there's not really anything percussive happening in the production very ethereal type things where it's going to be a lot easier to get off beat that right there my friends is going to make your life a whole lot easier with the metronome tip number three how often has it been that you've been working on a production maybe it's a big production maybe you just don't have the best computer in the world and you start having issues where when you try recording vocals or recording anything with a guitar microphone di whatever the case it may be you start having latency the big thing that a lot of people are going to do is they're going to try to jump in here and open up their preferences and the first thing they're going to do is you say i'm going to change the i o buffer size and they're going to try to make it so that the buffer size changes however what you should try first before going to this and i'm not saying that's not a good solution the very first thing that you should try go up to record and make sure they have the low latency monitoring mode on and what this is going to do if you have like a preset or something on top of this and then we actually turn the monitoring on look at what happens with these uh plugins over here turn that on it's automatically to take the plugins that are pretty heavily cpu dependent it's going to shut them off temporarily until we turn monitoring back off so this makes it so that when we are actually recording it's going to basically monitor in such a way where you're not going to have that latency or very low latency and then once you turn it off it will add those plugins back in so this is incredibly helpful i've been using it more and more because i'm working on very dense productions where i do have to use it even with a computer with 64 gig of ram and that brings us to tip number four which i just learned recently and this has everything to do with how you actually approach overlapping audio hear me out this one kind of blew my mind so you can go to record and you can adjust how you want the overlapping audio recordings to handle depending on if you have the cycle on or if you have the cycle off so in this case right here i have cycle on and so if we go to record overlapping audio regions automatically it's going to just create another take folder which is something i think we're very used to so when you record something and you record over top it's just going to go ahead and create a nice take folder for you however what you can do instead is do create tracks in mute now watch what happens when we do this [Music] so in most cases it's going to go ahead and create a take folder but in this specific case what it actually does is it makes it so that it puts it on new tracks now the benefit of doing this is in many cases when i'm doing group vocals or gang vocals which is basically where i want it to sound like a big crowd a big audience of people singing something like this where to be shouting i want 15 different versions of this instead of having a take folder and then having to unpack all those takes we can actually create all these new tracks where the audio is already split out and then all we have to do is go in here and then create however many new audio regions we want so let's say we do 10 times and we just grab the audio and move the audio up to those new tracks and now we have it so that we do not have to unpack the audio tracks at all now the reason i do this is because for some reason it's going to treat these as if it's the same track so notice when i'm moving the fader it's actually moving these as if it's one same thing with panning it's moving as if it's one that's not something you want so this is just kind of a workaround and now we have it so that we have these two audio pieces on two individual tracks [Music] again you can obviously imagine doing this 10 15 20 times and now you boom you've got your gang vocals that brings us to tip number five and that is using logic remote when you were recording yourself now logic remote is useful for a handful of different things it's not just this you can use it for a lot of different things but one of the biggest reasons i love logic remote by opening it up by the way you can just open up logic remote it's totally free by opening it it will automatically connect into the wi-fi and we now have this opened up in such a way that we can start controlling the actual daw from here on my phone now in a lot of cases i will sometimes sing things where i'm just like sitting down but if i'm doing something like lead vocals if i'm actually the singer i don't want to be sitting down i want to be standing up but here's the problem is if we take this mic we put it up here and then say we're going to go ahead and do some recording well if i want to start recording and i'm not using logic remote then i have to literally come over here be like okay all right gotta get this ready to go okay now we're ready okay cool gotta give myself enough time right which is super annoying not very fun especially if you don't want to be this close to the to the computer like say for example the fan is is going really loud you don't want to be capturing that fan noise with your microphone you might want to go even further away across the room so instead you just use logic remote and we can stand over here and then we can start controlling the actual timeline on here we could turn that cycle on we can turn the cycle off go it's off now you can turn it back on we can control where we want to be and then from here i can control everything from the fader to record boom there we go so using logic remote is definitely one of the most valuable things that i've done i've had this question so many times how do i record myself without having to like walk all the way over and change it to where it's like a two bar countenance that i have enough time to run back over the microphone and then record and sing and blah blah blah and this is so much faster so much easier so if you have an apple phone an iphone make sure you get this it's totally free to do you're welcome that brings us to tip number six and that is that you can actually take audio and convert your audio into a midi region now nathan how is this actually useful let me show you say for example you're not a wizard of a keyboard player for me i'm really fortunate i'm a pianist so this is not a problem for me but let's say you have a really cool idea in your head and you're singing a song you're like so you've got this melody right but you can't play it out so you're like okay now i'm gonna have to go create a media region and then i'm gonna have to go in here i'm gonna have to now try to figure out okay what notes are these like that's so annoying and then all right so you know this is what most people are gonna do right they're just gonna like draw it in again i'm talking about this if you don't actually play the keyboard takes forever super annoying not fun because now i'm sitting here wasting time doing this here's what you can do instead just grab your trusty microphone and literally all we're going to do is sing this idea in all right not the best performance in the world but you get the idea you could do this on guitar too so if your guitar player you could just play that guitar riff in because you know you know how to play it in but maybe you might not be able to get into midi so now all we have to do is go in here open it up in the editor window turn on flex turn on pitch so once you actually have this in flex you open up flex pitch you're going to go over to edit and you're going to create midi track from flex pitch data yeah look at this beautiful beautiful thing we have here of course we go here and quantize it now we can grab this audio we can now just place it on that track we had before so the first thing is it's gonna be really quiet so we have to increase the velocities on this so we can actually hear it here we go [Music] all right so obviously there are some little discrepancies and mistakes that you need to fix up and clean up you know you might not want that but one way or the other this is by far the fastest way to turn something into an idea in your head singing it or you know playing it on an instrument recording it in and then converting it into midi and now we can actually start working with this boom all right that brings us to tip number seven and that is actually using the midi arpeggiator that is built right inside of logic now i know many of you are gonna say okay yeah i get it i'm actually gonna show you a couple little crazy tricks that i have found that i think you know just a little extra added value for watching the video if you will so if we go to this keyboard instrument right here it's like this muted plucky thing right very short what we can do here is go to the midi effect we can grab the arpeggiator and just by opening the appreciator obviously it's going to do what an arpeggiator does and this is built directly into logic and this is something that i love about logic is that you have this directly built into it you can get extremely creative about how you use this you can do the live mode which is where you can literally just just play out ideas you can change the rate from slow to fast eighth note basically just based on the actual rhythm itself into octave range you can do variations [Music] which that's cool but then you can also go into the grid mode you can turn on chord pattern and you can adjust the actual velocities of these which is really kind of cool so say we want to do a chord pattern you can also adjust the actual rhythmic value of this not the rhythmic value but how long it hangs onto these notes by just dragging in here so if you want to have like short so long short short and then like maybe long here like this [Music] which is pretty cool and here's one of the really cool things i really love doing with arpeggiators that i think is going to blow your mind we can actually take this and do a crazy fast rhythm let's do like this i mean that just sounds ridiculous right but watch this [Applause] set this to like a crazy fast rhythm and then you can actually start creating melodies with this so check this out let's just hypothetically say we want some crazy lead kind of sound [Applause] i mean that that's pretty ridiculous right now i'm just going to show you one thing i could do with this because you might be hearing this and thinking that's kind of ridiculous but you do this in combination with a few extra little fun things like for example using some sidechain compression or in my case just using the lfo tool check this out [Applause] now we get this crazy kind of sound we could use something like spaced out to add some reverb and now it's going to start sounding a little less crazy a little less weird a little more awesome check this out [Applause] [Music] i mean come on you throw in some drums some bass some crazy stuff as just a wave reminder this is what we started out with what we ended up with [Music] [Applause] and again that's that's literally using something that's built directly into logic obviously the lfo tool is spaced out or not but you could use other plugins that are logic plugins for that but by getting creative with how you're actually using your arpeggiator that is directly built right inside of logic i think the midi arpeggiator is one of those things that like a lot of people don't know about but it's actually very useful to doing things very quickly that brings us to tip number eight and that is a feature called chase midi now i want to show you this right here if we have midi notes like this that are very elongated say you're using strings or in this case something that sounds like this right very ethereal it's long notes long patches if you have a lot of instruments like this stacked up the problem is is that what if i want to start on bar five in the middle of the note if i play this it's going to wait until the next midi notes actually play in order for it to then basically play so what we're going to do instead is make it so that when we play in the middle it's basically going to catch the midi notes or chase the midi notes to then play them right away even though that's not actually when those midi notes start so the way that you actually set this up is by going up here file go to project settings go to midi and then go to midi over here and make sure you have chase selected and select notes by simply doing that now when we play this no matter where we click and play it's going to automatically chase those midi notes and play them by the way if you think these sounds are awesome this is from the hammers and wave library i'm a huge huge fan incredible you should totally check them out all right that brings us to number nine so this is actually a tool that you can use within logic so when we go to our tools up here you can notice that you have this automation curve tool so let's go ahead and take this sound that we had before it's pretty ethereal cool sound but what if we wanted the sound to be more dynamic now you can do this with strings as well this is actually one of the best ways of automating and making strings more dynamic so we're going to make this actually a lot bigger so what i want this to start doing is i want this to start swelling so i'm just going here and use volume automation to do this and so i want this to swell for each cord change and so we're going to do is put a pin on each time the cord actually changes and then we're going to put a pin halfway through so it kind of swells up swells down so we're basically putting a little drop here and then we're going to go ahead and pull this down let's say that much why not pull this down pull this down so if i just go and play this this isn't going to sound bad but listen okay this doesn't sound bad right but here's what we can do with the automation curve tool we're just going to go and grab this we can now actually set it up so that it's going to actually add a natural curve to this which is going to be a lot more musical check this out now we could go in here maybe we don't want this curve to be quite as aggressive oh don't go crazy on me maybe we don't want this curve to be quite as aggressive on the slope down so we can obviously adjust this curve so it's not as crazy we can actually adjust it upwards as well which is another really great way of doing it i think i'm going to go and try that here let's check this out so you can do this obviously with volume automation but if you're using strings you're using the modulation and expression control do the exact same thing with your strings this is going to make things feel so much more natural and don't do it with just these types of long expressive things you can try this out in a handful of different ways it's going to sound a lot more musical and creative than simply having a straight line that's the next one and that brings us to number 10 and that is actually setting it up so that way when you play anything in with midi it will automatically quantize for you because this is one of those things that is not difficult to do but over the longevity of recording things with midi the more you do it the more you're going to realize i'm pretty much always quantizing things so let's go ahead and go back to this kind of art thing that we have here [Music] [Applause] all right so what we're going to do here is click on the track that you want and then make sure you pull the drop down window on region in the inspector window and you have this quantize button here drop down menu and it's typically going to be set to off but instead you can set this to automatically quantize to whatever value it is that you want so for me i'm typically going to go ahead and quantize two 16th notes because i'm typically not doing things beyond 16th notes obviously if you are you can make however the adjustments are that you need to make and now we can go ahead and record and it will automatically quantize these notes for me [Applause] all right so i'm done open up the editor window and voila just like that it's already quantized which saves a nice little step in the process and again this might not seem like a very significant thing but over the long term of actually doing this this is going to save you a huge amount of time if you think these logic pro tips are helpful i have a whole other set of videos on logic you can check out right here and i'll see you there

Channel: Nathan James Larsen

Views: 258,831

Keywords: nathan larsen, nathan james larsen, nathan larson, nathan james larson, 10 logic pro x tricks, 10 logic pro x tips, logic pro x tips, logic pro x tricks, logic pro x, logic pro x tutorial, logic pro tutorial, logic pro tips, logic pro tricks

Id: T9i_N7IG_nk

Length: 17min 59sec (1079 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 23 2022