15 Useful Logic X Tricks Every Producer Should Know

hey guys today i'm going to show you 16 advanced tips and tricks for logic pro x that you should know going into 2021 and right before we jump into this video guys i really need your help please let me know in the comments what tutorials you would like to see from me and what you would overall like to learn in your music production this year i've been hurting for some inspiration on youtube titles so that would really really help me to just see all of you guys commenting some really cool ideas let's jump into it tip number one is to make sure that all of our logic pro x's look the same and work the same so we're going to do is go to logic pro x preferences and then advanced tools just make sure you check the box show advanced tools and this will make sure that your logic pro x is ready to work in the most advanced way possible tip number two is to practice making drum loops using the step sequencer that's built into logic which was a new feature introduced last year so what we do is we go down to our instrument rack here and load up a drum machine designer this is where we're going to load up some drum one shots so for my samples i use splice.com it's just a database of like millions of samples i'm going to take a kick and a snare and a hi-hat and go to work with them so we can load up to 16 drum samples and probably even more than that and then the next step is we open up the piano roll by clicking these scissors here and clicking on step sequencer and you can see we have a nice sequencer here but what i'm going to do is where it says 16 steps i'm going to give us 32 steps so we can get a nice full loop here and all you have to do now is press play and start clicking in some notes [Music] so that hi-hat's a little loud so what we could do is just drop down this little arrow here turn down that hi-hat and you can make a pretty dope sequence uh just using the built-in step sequencer tip three is to use this pane here in the upper left this pane does a lot of shortcuts what i use it mostly to do is adjust the gain so you can take an audio file here just a piece of audio you can adjust the gain just on this and that's really helpful for when you have multiple files on your microphone and you would like to have different amounts of gain per file and that works very well with like hi hats and drums another thing this does up here is we can fade our audio files in right from this pane and what's cool about this is if you have multiple audio files you can do them all at once by selecting them like that or you could do them individually for if they have individual needs one last thing that you could easily do up here using this pane is select your audio files and reverse them for if you need to reverse the audio tip 4 is how to quantize recorded audio so if you record guitars or vocals a lot this will be really helpful for you i have a guitar sample here if i zoom in you can see like a lot of these strums are not perfectly lined up on grid but what i could actually do is click this and enable flex make sure flex is on here then what we do is we just highlight the audio file come up to quantize and then quantize to the note that you wanted to quantize to so we'll just do a simple 1 8 that should line us up all on grid so you can see this hit now is perfectly on grid this hits on grid this hits on grid and all the way throughout the audio file now all of our strums are going to be perfectly on grid or in other words perfectly quantized tip five is to use buses to add reverb to drums and this will save you time and a lot of cpu load because we're going to be making our project more efficient by basically using less plugins to do easy simple tasks like adding reverb so i have a drum loop here and it sounds like this so instead of just adding reverb to this snare here we all know that i could click here and add reverb but instead of doing that i'm going to come to where it says sends bus and then i'm going to pick an unused bus you can pick any bus you want then what i'm going to do is click on that bus and then go over here and now bus 13 is over here so i'm going to add a reverb plugin to bus 13 add some decay make it sound like whatever you want it to sound like and then all we have to do is increase the volume to our snare and we can hear we have some reverb on this air what's cool about this is now we could go down to the hi-hats and instead of running an entirely new reverb plug-in we could just click send bus and then increase this and we got reverb we could do that for all of our drums now tip number six is to use buses to do some really cool dynamic side chaining things if we have a melody that sounds like this we're going to use a bus send to duck the reverb to that lead and i actually did this in my last video so we're going to take an empty bus again and then what we do is we grab a reverb plug-in of choice you could use the stock reverb or a paid reverb plug-in in my case i'm going to use a paid reverb plugin and that reverb sounds like this [Music] just normal reverb here's where it gets really cool now we're going to use a normal bus compressor you could use a bus compressor of choice i'm going to use a paid bus compressor because i think it's a little bit stronger and it's a fab filter pro c2 now we do is we go up to side chain click on audio and find our vocal chop melody so then what we could do is start ducking the reverb tip number seven is to group up certain instruments so that you can process them easier and pretty much better so if we take our drum loop here it sounds like this i'm just going to select every drum in this drum loop and create a track stack and then we're going to do a summing stack we can cut click on the top of this summing stack here and then add effects to every drum so instead of just affecting every individual drum we can do it on the group master and it'll sound even more uniform and even more powerful because we're processing them all at once so if i come down to multi-effects and select fat effects add a little bit of compression and a little bit of saturation we can add saturation and compression to the drum group this next tip i'm pretty sure only logic can do but it's great for if you can collab with other artists and you want to quickly share your ideas or you just want to quickly render out a piece of your track so we have a drum loop here and watch this if i give us a region right on the sum the summing track i can click and drag this onto my desktop and just like that we have a bounced out drum loop this next tip is great for if you play your melodies by hand or if you're lazy like me so if we have a melody that looks like this instead of going note to note and lining them all up with each other like i just did there we can select all of the notes right click and force legato what they will do is line up to the note in front of it just like that with one click this next tip is how to create your own drum kits instantly so what we do is click on this loop panel up here and all of your downloaded logic pro x loops will show up and so i just filtered this out to show me all the drums and specifically the beats so i'm going to take a loop that i like [Music] i'm just going to drag that into the grid here is right click and convert it to a new sampler track so just to do this slower we right click go to convert and then new sampler track then we click ok and it will give us this lineup of all of our notes and so if you have a midi keyboard this is where you could start messing around with some sick drums and if you would like to go a step farther you could actually combine this tip with tip number two and use the step sequencer to start writing out your rhythm this next tip is to understand the flex function i have a simple little drum loop here that we used in the last tip [Music] and what the flex function allows us to do if we engage that now is edit how fast our drum loop can move we can even make it slower [Music] you get that like really weird stretch sound but that's not all it could do you could also decide where you would like some of these drum notes to hit and so it gets a little weird sometimes like obviously just made that glitchy stretch sound but you can basically rearrange wherever you would like certain drums to hit and this is actually really really useful for vocals and any type of recorded guitar or anything like that to take the flex tool a step farther we'll take a little vocal phrase here and what we can do is we can click flex down here and it's going to enable flex pitching this is where you can edit the pitches of each individual note so let's say you record a vocalist and their pitch is off by one semitone or a half of a semitone which is quite common [Music] so they hit that note you can correct it to the note it's supposed to be or if you have a recorded vocal chop like i do here and you don't like one of the notes she hits so i don't like when she goes down here [Music] i'm just gonna put that back up and just like that i can fix her pitch and if i want make her sing entirely different notes this next tip is great for muting certain ideas quickly and easily if you click t and then m on your keyboard you can mute certain notes [Music] and if you don't like the muted and decide it's probably better with them you can go ahead and unmute them just by clicking tm and then clicking the notes and this not only works with the notes but if you have certain regions that you don't want to play we can click tn and click those regions and then tt to get back to the cursor and just like that we can select certain regions that we would like to mute without having to mute the entire track this next tip really gets the creative juices flowing and it's just a way to throw around chords so if we have chord progression [Music] we can load up the built-in arpeggiator and just start clicking buttons [Music] [Music] let's click grid and then [Music] ah that's nice [Music] this next tip is how to dramatically decrease your cpu load especially if your playback sounds like this [Music] okay we get the point well what you do is up come up here to logic pro x audio and then increase your buffer size to as much as it could go especially if you're not recording instruments because this will not affect you at all however if you're recording instruments like guitars or vocals and you have a big project like this i recommend recording the guitar or vocals in a separate project that way you can decrease the buffer size so that you have no latency in your recording and then you take the audio back to your big project and increase the buffer size again this next tip is simple but i really do use this function in every project and that is the built-in notepad it just helps to be able to take notes every session you're working on a track what i like to do is listen to a song and take notes like okay in the intro i'll add effects drop needs mixing and this way i could keep my thoughts organized and written down directly in the project if you guys enjoyed this video and would like to learn more about every element of music production you can join my edm bootcamp i have a link for you at the top of the description below my edm bootcamp is not just a self-paced course that teaches you all the elements of music production but it is also an entire back end mastermind group where you can get unlimited feedback on your music from me and ask me any music production question that you wish that sounds like something you're into like i said there's a link at the top of the description below and stay tuned for more [Music] you

Channel: Alex Rome

Views: 10,117

Rating: 4.9567566 out of 5

Keywords: logic pro x tutorial, logic pro x edm, how to make music in logic pro x, logic pro x edm tutorial, logic pro x beginner tutorial, logic pro x hip hop tutorial, logic pro tutorial, logic pro tricks, logic pro tips, how to make edm in logic pro, how to make edm in logic, how to record in logic pro, recording tips in logic pro, 15 Useful Tricks Every Producer Should Know, Music Production, Music Producer, Logic Pro, 15 Useful Logic X Tricks Every Producer Should Know

Id: KX9vFqZiTtQ

Length: 14min 57sec (897 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 23 2021