10 Tips Every Producer Should Know in Logic Pro

hey friend chris van viver here from ylogicparools.com the website that helps you get the most you can out of apple's logic pro today i want to share with you 10 things that i think every single producer should know when using logic pro these 10 things aren't necessarily super complicated but there are 10 things that really can make your creative life easier faster more efficient and ultimately more satisfying and to illustrate this list of 10 things we're going to create a riff we're going to create a little basic riff using many of the tools in logic from drummer to apple loops to the samplers to software instrument tracks and my hope is is that this video instead of diving really deep into one subject we can keep things fun light-hearted and just moving forward but if you're looking for deeper knowledge and insight into some of these functions or features i've made sure to link to some of the other videos on the channel so just watch out for those links as they pop up cool number one in our list is drummer for instant percussion dropper is awesome it offers so much versatility you can get instant drum tracks without even having to think about it but drummer is great for instant percussion that sounds human they don't sound like a stale loop over and over in fact i've called up an instance if we open the library of quincy the pop percussionist and if we look at his editor here i've just said it to be simple but loud i've turned the fills all the way down and we've got some hand claps and shaker and tambourine let's take a quick listen to what this sounds like perfect it sounds great it gives me something instantly to start recording to instead of just a click track so let's close all this up and i'm going to actually track some upright studio bass and the next thing i want to show you is the global quantization while every time we record a software instrument part we could you know go into the piano roll and tell logic to quantize that performance over and over and over again we could also just tell logic hey as soon as i'm done recording just quantize the performance automatically for me so first i'm going to record a performance without any sort of automatic quantization and then we'll see what automatic quantization looks like so here we go [Music] okay take a look at the piano roll you're gonna see for sure that i do not land on the grid each and every time that's cool now we could select all the notes in this performance set our quantization value to our preferred value and hit q for quantizer or press key command q but why not just have logic do this automatically for us so let's get rid of this performance and what you want to make sure to set an automatic quantization globally across your projects is to make sure that no regions are selected in the project and then we go to the region inspector here and right here in quantize you can set this to any value that you prefer so i'm going to set this to 16th note i'm going to record again you're going to hear the humanity in my performance but as soon as we're done recording logic will automatically quantize the performance afterwards here we go [Music] cool and we take a look at the piano roll editor there we have it everything is locked to the grid it's freaking amazing and logic will continue to quantize everything as long as this quantization value has been set again you want to make sure not to select any of the regions go here and set it to your preferred value and if you don't want logic to automatically quantize everything just you know deselect all regions and just set it to off but we're going to leave this at 16th note next up is the key signature where we tell logic hey this is the key and the scale for our project this project is in c minor and for the longest time i had no respect for this feature because i grew up playing guitar and bass and rock bands and i was only ever recording audio i was never using software instruments or apple loops or anything like that but the key signature is so helpful because things like logic remote if you use the chord strips to play chords it will match up with the key and scale of the project and apple loops will also transpose up and down to match the key of the project and in fact now squash this up a bit we're going to open the apple loops and i'm going to go to loop packs here we're gonna go down to vision inverse and i'm gonna look for the blue memories chop sample o2 now if i hit play in our project and then click on this apple loop we're gonna hear that it's in the key of the project check it out [Music] beautiful but if i show no respect to this instead it's a b minor let's say let's hear it again [Music] okay so that's not going to be helpful to our project so let's set it back to c minor and we're going to bring this chop sample right in but i'm actually going to chop it up i i don't prefer the performance as it is again if we take a listen [Music] that's not what i'm looking for so instead let's dig into the drag and drop samplers i have a whole video dedicated to all the ways that you can drag and drop around logic but we're just going to focus on quick sampler and if we just drag this region and it can be midi it can be drummer it can be a pattern whatever if we drag this into the track headers we have these options from quick sampler to draw machine designer to alchemy to sampler i'm going to choose quick sampler at optimized and now we have a track with this region bounced into the sampler for us to play up and down the keys if we want i'm going to set this to slice and now we have this loop sliced across the keys of our keyboard i'm going to power this down for now and i'm going to set this mode to equal divisions and we can have as many slices as we want up to 64. one i'm going to set this to maybe 16 slices i'm going to set the keys instead of chromatically instead of having these placed from c1 to c sharp d to d sharp i have this only on the white keys so i only have to worry about you know just the white keys for playing a performance and i'm going to make sure to set this loop so each of the slices matches the tempo of the project and this is what is so amazing about the samplers in logic drag and drop slice it up how you want play it up and down the keys in terms of pitch or have it sliced up so you can create your own version of the sample and if we take a listen [Music] beautiful so now i'm going to record myself reimagining the sample to what we have [Music] here and if we remember everything is quantized because i left the global quantization at 16th notes so i'm just going to make sure to set this guy here to a lower velocity because it's a little too much for me all right perfect so now we have this new reimagined loop that we were able to create from an apple loop into a sampler and that kind of brings me to my next thing that i want to bring up is that apple loops are not something to overlook they're amazing there are so many for you to choose from but if we take a look in the loop library here let me set the loop pack back to all packs just look at that number at the bottom there that's a lot that's a lot of royalty-free sounds and loops for you to dig into and recreate from or just use as is it's amazing don't overlook it and in fact we're gonna go into a loop pack we're gonna go into the step sequencer loop pack and we're gonna look for the big dreams beat 01 right here and check it out let's play our loop with this drum beat and if we drag this in check it out we're not just dragging in just a loop with all of the effects and the performance burned in to an audio loop we have if we look in the mixer here we have all the plugins at our disposal so we can play with the sound of the loop we can work with the instrument itself so we can actually change the samples out if we want we can adjust the smart controls we can even pop open the track stack and adjust the routing and the plugins and the send effects and all that stuff and we can even dig into the step sequencer and reimagine the performance it's amazing and in fact if we just take a look if we just go to all packs and look for any of these whether their software instrument their pattern their drummer drag this in look at that we have this guitar loop that we can adjust again the instrument plug-ins performance we dig into the piano roll we can select all this and transpose it up or down as much as we want you have the entire inner workings of a loop at your disposal to re-imagine and recreate from so if we like this tight trap drum kit but we don't like the performance well guess what let's get rid of the performance and come up with something else from here i'm going to get rid of this guitar i'm going to reduce the level the drum kit here i'm actually going to parse things out a little bit because i've got a little arrangement in mind so let's just copy and paste these guys holding option and dragging all the regions and i'm going to get rid of the drum beat right here i'm also going to get rid of the bass right there and next up we're going to bring in another apple loop and this is the crate digging guitar and there it is if we take a listen to our loop we can hear this with the loop and it's transposed to our project so let's bring it in now it is crazy loud so let's reduce the level of this quite a bit i'm going to close the apple loops and next up we're going to dig into some of the region inspector options because there's so much for you to dig into first i want to transpose this riff up an octave and i don't want to use a plug-in i don't want to use the pitch shifter i don't want to use the third-party plug-in and you don't have to in fact if you just go to the region inspector right here we have the option to transpose and we can transpose anything whether it's software instruments whether it's audio regions in fact if we just bump this up an octave you know and you have easy options just by clicking on the little triangles to the right of the transpose option you can transpose this audio up either three octaves or down and anywhere in between so you know you can just drag up and down let's take a listen to this guitar now [Music] obviously logic is doing a lot of hard math behind the scenes to pitch this audio up or down but if we take something like our quick sampler performance here and if we transpose it up or down we're just transposing the notes up or down you know so there's not any hard math that's just moving up and down the scale i'm going to chop this using command t in the playhead so we're just going to get rid of that extra little bit i'm going to bring this probably like right there and next up we're going to reverse this region just by going again to the region inspector under the more section and let's reverse this crate digging guitar so now we get kind of the swell effect into the next section [Music] awesome and i'm actually gonna use the marquee tool to get rid of the section right here in fact this is gonna bring up a really great point about looping so next up we can loop and you can use key command l you can also just click on the little loop icon here so i'm going to select my percussion track i'm going to loop it and then i'm going to use the marquee tool to make a selection we're going to delete that section again but check it out we removed that section that i wanted to cut out and logic kind of reoriented the loop so we continue the loop down the line here and though this is not technically looping we can also use key command command r to repeat a section i've committed this to memory because it's such a helpful feature if you make a marquee selection and even select any section outside of the region itself watch this command r to repeat and the section that's repeated includes anything that was selected with the marquee not just the region but the empty bits as well so handy for what we're going to do next and i'm going to duplicate this guitar region just by holding option and dragging the region to the empty section here and now i'm going to unreverse this guitar i'm gonna drag this right here to bar five and you can see that the region doesn't exactly line up with the next bar at bar seven so just for easy math i'm just gonna separate command t to separate the region gonna get rid of that tail and next we're gonna do some easy time stretching now you could just hold option and if you hover your mouse about you know about halfway on any side of the region boundary so the left or the right side you could stretch the region but check it out if we turn on flex mode which you can turn on right here if we set this to the appropriate flex mode i'm going to set this to polyphonic we can easily stretch this region without holding option or anything you just hover your mouse halfway on the region boundary and i'm going to stretch this twice its length and logic easily stretches this region no problem which means that this guitar is now twice as long [Music] cool so i'm going to repeat that and now i want to reverse this region here so we're kind of getting this loud to quiet quiet to loud sort of effect going on but we don't see the reverse function over here and that's because flex is on so i'm going to use ctrl b to bounce this region in place i'm not going to include volume or pan automation and we're just going to hit ok bounce it in place awesome so now we can reverse our guitar loop so if we take a listen great i'm actually gonna select both of these tracks use shift command g create a track stack we'll just call this ax for now i'm just going to add a couple quick effects just to make it a little more interesting so we'll go to chromaverb i've set up a preset and we're just going to add eq take a quick listen [Music] awesome and we'll add the step effects as well and i have a whole video about how you can create awesome panning effects using step effects we're gonna turn the filter off set the output back turn off reverb go to pan here and we'll set this to a quarter note and we'll take a listen to what that sounds like [Music] awesome so now i just have one more idea of a track that i want to add we're going to go back to the apple loops and this case i'm going to go looking for around the bend and these are keys but i'm not going to actually use the apple loop i'm just going to delete the performance because i have my own in mind but we can take a quick listen to what it sounds like [Music] and i mean that's awesome but i'm going to get rid of it and the last piece that i want to show you is the midi effects we've never really dug into the midi effects here on the channel but they're amazing for example chord trigger i'm not a piano player so i'm not super handy at playing chords or multiple hands at one time so i'm just going to go single down to triads and set this to minor if i play a chord here i can play freaking minor chord with one key i'm just pressing c and it's playing the minor c chord next up i'm gonna load the transposer plugin and just to make sure that i stay in key i'm going to set this to c natural minor check it out if i play up and down the scale here just stays in the key it's amazing and now if we also load up the arpeggiator i'll leave the arpeggiator at a 16th note rate going up through the keys so now if we play the c minor chord [Music] if i set the options here i'm going to adjust the note length so it sounds a little more gated i'm also going to turn off the amp reverb here and i'm going to load up an instance of the sample delay i'm just going to adjust the right side by about 10 milliseconds i think so if we take a quick listen actually let's bring back that reverb yeah that's a lot better okay let's lay this down real quick and then we'll have our riff and again if we look in the piano roll editor everything is locked to the grid as we want it so if we take a listen to our riff now from beginning to end and i'll even drag this out you know i'll repeat some of these sections here take a listen [Music] true cool a simple riff but just using all these little tips along the way we've been able to craft something pretty quickly it's been a ton of fun to create this riff so i hope that was helpful for you if it was as always i highly recommend subscribing to the youtube channel why logic pro rules or subscribing on the website itself whitelogicprorules.com every week i'm posting new videos new emails and posts to help you get the most you can out of apple's logic pro thanks so much

Channel: Why Logic Pro Rules

Views: 58,672

Keywords: logic pro x, logic pro, audio, audio production, apple, mixing, audio mixing, recording, audio recording, 10 Tips Every Producer Should Know in Logic Pro, music producer, music production, quick sampler, apple loops, flex time, why logic pro rules

Id: oagrz1toHJc

Length: 19min 2sec (1142 seconds)

Published: Fri May 14 2021