11 of the most essential
Logic Pro tips right now. Right now! Let's cut to the chase. And by chase, I mean MIDI chase. This is a feature in Logic Pro that's
like a bloodhound for your MIDI notes. It sniffs them out and makes sure
they're heard, even if you start playback in the middle of a note. Here's the problem you run into
when MIDI chase isn't enabled. I'm hitting playback in the
middle of this long sustained pad. I hit play. I don't hear it! But, if I enable MIDI chase,
I'll hit playback at that same spot in the middle of the phrase. MIDI chase. Alright, so to enable MIDI chase,
you'll want to head over to File, down to Project Settings, MIDI, And this
window will pop up and you'll want to make sure that you go to chase and then
you're going to want to click notes. So you'll see there's a few options here. If you click sustained, it'll make sure
to chase after the long sustained notes. Uh, we've got pitch bend here, which
will make sure to chase after those pitch bends that you put into your production. So feel free to play around
with all of these settings. So, I've got this guitar part, an
audio region, but I'm thinking it might sound better on a synth, and
I'd like to switch it over to MIDI. Now, I could spend hours trying
to recreate it by hand, or I could just use Logic's Audio to MIDI
feature and get it done in seconds. So I'm actually going to be doing
this using the tool FlexPitch. So I'll make sure that's enabled here, and
I'm going to want to make sure that I set it to FlexPitch in this drop down menu. So you can see already that Logic has
read this audio file, and found all the notes that this guitar part is hitting. So now I'm going to bring up
the editor window by hitting E. And now it's starting to look a little bit
more familiar, like a typical MIDI region. You can see these MIDI notes here. So I'm going to go to the edit window,
and I'm going to go down to create MIDI track from flex pitch data. And there you go, it created
this new track underneath here, a typical MIDI region that you
might be more familiar with. Once you've got that MIDI data, you can
assign it to any instrument in Logic. Now, keep in mind this will work best
for a monophonic sound, like a vocal or a guitar or some kind of lead sound. Whenever you get into something
more polyphonic, like chords, things like that, it won't work as well. Tip three, remove silence. This tool is great for vocals. In any given vocal session, you'll
have your lead vocal, doubles, triples, harmonies, adlibs. That's tons of vocal tracks that each
individually have so many gaps and silences in between all the lyrics. Now you can go in and manually
chop up all those spaces. Do all those fades, or you can use
Logic Pro's Remove Silence tool. Check it out. All right, first I'm going to make sure I
select this vocal region that I would like to remove all these silent spaces, and
I'm going to hit the shortcut Ctrl X, and it opens up this Remove Silence window. Now you can see the edit is kind of
already done, but if you want more control, you can mess with these
parameters, like the threshold. the minimum time to accept a silence, the
pre attack time to make sure that you keep those natural sounding breaths from the
vocalist and the post release time to make sure you don't cut off the ends of words. I think that's looking pretty good. Let's give that a try and it's done. Now, if I want to, I could go
in and fine tune This edit. And what's great is that
everything's already selected. I can just add a little fade to every
audio region, fade in and fade out. And it's done. Just like that. In a matter of seconds, I've removed
the silence from this vocal take, which would have usually taken me way
too long than I'm willing to admit. Next up is overlapping audio. This is perfect for when you're
recording vocals, you want alternate takes, when you're layering
audio tracks, it's the best. Logic has a couple of different
ways to handle overlapping audio. You can find these different
options under the record menu. down in overlapping audio recordings. All right. So I'd like to record some vocals from bar
four to eight here, this four bar loop. So I've turned on the cycle
area, which we'll get into later. This cycle area is very powerful,
but stick around for that. And since I've got the cycle on, I could
choose create take folder, which is great for when you want to scrub through and
comp the best of the best vocal take. What it's going to do is it's
going to keep recording and it's going to keep all of your takes
and just line them up super nicely. Check this out. La la la la la la la la la la
la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la Yeah. And just like that, I've got
these three different takes. I could choose the beginning of one, the
end of another, and the middle part of this last one to create one super take. La la la la. The other option is create tracks
and mute and this is great if you'd like it to create new
tracks and mute the previous one. Check this out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, okay. And just like that, I've got three
muted tracks of those different takes, and it'll always keep the most recent
one live and ready to listen to. This way, I can stitch together
all those different tracks. I could build harmonies. You can get really creative
with this function as well. So by default, all these
tracks are grouped together. For example, if I solo one
of them, they're all soloed. If you'd like more control, all you
have to do is just create new tracks and just drag down your new audio. All right, let's keep going. Tip number five, MIDI transform. This is an extremely powerful
tool and there's a lot to unpack here, so stick with me. If you really like programming your
own beats and using the piano roll to draw in notes, this tool is for you. It's a great way to add a human
feel to whatever you're working on. Humans, good, robots. Ah, robots? God! First, select the MIDI region that
you'd like to transform, and you can double click it or hit the
shortcut P to open up the piano roll. Once you're in there, you can
head over to the functions menu. MIDI transform. And you can see there are so
many options to choose from. Some of my favorites are fixed
velocity, which is going to make sure that every note in that
region is at the same velocity. Just hit select and operate so it selects
all the notes and operates the function. And voila! Now for drums, that kind of
took away the human feel. Fixed velocity is great for something
where you want a consistent feel, maybe something like a synth bass. But for drums, let's
humanize it a little bit. Lucky for us, there's a tool
called Humanize in MIDI Transform. Again, select and operate. And what this is going to do is it's going
to randomize The velocity, and the timing, a little bit of every note in the region. Let's have a listen. Much better. Speaking of humans, we need more
humans to subscribe to this channel. So hit that like thing, the subscribe
thing also, the bell thing also, and let us know in the comments below that you are
in fact a human and not an AI robot thing. We love you. Say no to robots. Say no to robots. Say no to robots. Alright, let's keep digging
in with some more MIDI tips. Next up is Q flam. With Q flam, you can add realism
and expression to those big block chords that all hit on the beat. This function will give those MIDI
notes that natural roll of the fingers. Alright, I'm going to double
click the MIDI region. Look at those big block
chords all landing on the one. No one can hit all the
notes at the same time. I know I can't. Let's add some human. So let's go over to the
region inspector here. And you can see down here we've
got Q flam, but it's grayed out. So to enable it, we have to
make sure we quantize this region to some kind of amount. So I'm going to do 16th notes for now. Now Q flam becomes available
and I can click and drag up. or down and you can see those midi notes
moving around sliding around to add that flam at the beginning of every beat. So let's have a listen to these
chords without the Q flam. Sounds great but pretty robotic,
not a very human piano player feel. Let's add some Q flam. Q flam. Next up, tip number seven, midi reverse. Midi reverse. That's not how that works. It literally takes the MIDI and
reverses it so you can hear any chord progression or piece of music backwards. So again, select the MIDI region,
double click to open the piano roll. Go to the functions menu. We're back in MIDI transform and
we're going to hit reverse position. Our parameter window comes up and
you can hit select and operate. And boom, it switched the position
of all the midi notes in reverse. So here's the chord progression
before it's reversed. But I want to hear what it'd
sound like if I switched around those chords backwards style. Awesome. This works great too. And now I can maybe use this section
for a different part of the song, like the pre chorus or the bridge. Love it. Now, this next tip isn't Logic Pro
specific, but it's definitely the easiest and fastest way to get a bounced mix from
your computer directly onto your phone. If you know of a quicker way, let
me know in the comments below. With the LANDR desktop and
mobile apps, you can hit export in your session and walk away. And that mix will be directly uploaded to
LANDR, which you can access on your phone. The best part, it's free, it's free. I'm gonna hit command B
to bounce this project. And when it comes to the destination,
I'm going to want to make sure that I hit LANDR bounces, hit bounce. And there it is. And if you want LANDR will
automatically master it as well. Perfect for referencing your
mix to hear what it would sound like when it's mastered. Tip number nine, detect tempo. You've been in this situation before. I know you have. I know I have. Let's say you've got a piece of audio
or you've imported a loop, you don't know what the BPM is, you want to
sync up the tempo to your project, but you have no idea how to start. You try shifting things
around, changing numbers, doing mental math, smashing plates. It took me years to figure out that
logic actually has several different ways to detect the tempo of audio for you. Plates are way too expensive to smash. So I've got this piece of audio here. No idea what the tempo is. So on the track itself, I'm actually
going to go down to metering and add a BPM counter plugin built into Logic for free. Hit play. There it is. 133 beats per minute. Now I can change my project tempo
to match the audio and we're done. There's actually a second way to do this. I can double click on the track, make
sure I'm on the Smart tempo menu here. Click analyze. It'll do its thing and boom,
one 33 and it'll change the project tempo to that as well. Smart tempo. It's so smart. This next one is a tool that I've
only ever really seen in logic. If you've seen this tool in any other
DAWs, let me know in the comments below. It's definitely a special one. Speed up and slow down your fades. So the first thing I'll do is add
a fade in to this piece of audio. And the region inspector here, it's
automatically a fade in, but if I click on that drop down menu, I could
actually turn it into a speed up. Let's hear what that sounds like. Kind of makes for a really cool intro. Same goes for the fade out. I'll add a fade to this
last section of the song. And on the fade out menu, I'm going
to change that to a slow down. Let's hear what that sounds like. Amazing. This tool is a really quick way to
add creative DJ style intros and outros to your pieces of audio. DJ ballsy. This last tip is the most efficient
way to navigate around your project, make huge edits, and just solidify
your arrangement on the fly. The cycle area function is a
must know feature in logic. You can loop a section over and over. You can skip over sections. You can insert new sections. Let me show you what I mean. To activate the cycle area, you
just click above your arrangement here and you'll get this yellow bar. This is the cycle area. When it's yellow like
this, it's activated. When it's off, it's gray. You just have to click it again. When it's yellow, it's just
acting like a simple loop repeat. It's just going to keep
repeating that section. You could change the length of it
to be longer or shorter by dragging. You could click and drag
it to move it around. Pretty great, right? We can go even further. If I hit command and click on
it, it turns into this kind of Mario Kart speed racer situation. What's going to happen is
instead the playhead is going to skip over that section. Here's what I mean. This is really handy when you want
to hear what your song would sound like, for example, if you wanted
to skip a pre chorus and just go directly from the verse to the chorus. Instead of having to do that
huge edit, you can just hear what it would sound like first. But we're just scratching
the surface here. There's so much more to
do with the cycle area. Check this out. If I activate the cycle area here in my
toolbar, I've got tons of new options. I can repeat that section. I could cut that section. I could insert a section, put it back. I could also insert a silent
section if I want to create an entire new part for the song. The cycle area, the possibilities
are endless and it saves so much time in your workflow. Love it. Hey, I'm Isabel, and welcome to this
video all about Logic Pro Tips that are going to speed up your workflow. Make sure you scroll backwards back to
tip number two, which is my favorite. Yeah! Intro. See ya!
