17 Logic Pro X TIPS I Wish I knew When I Started!

what's up you guys nathan larson here with another video for those of you guys who make music at home whether you're a producer a songwriter composer an artist if you write and record your own music this is the channel for you and hey if that sounds anything like you you should just click the subscribe button hit the bell for notification just like right now because this this channel is for you and i'm coming at you with this video with another logic pro x tutorial and what i'm going to be showing you are 17 things that i wish i would have known when i first started using logic don't ask me why 17 it's just what came out but at the end of the day i use every single one of these things on a very regular basis so without wasting any more time let's jump into the daw and hey if in the meantime you like the video make sure you click the like video helps me out a ton and it's totally free all right so we are in logic let's go ahead and just jump right into it tip number one or the very first thing i wish would have known and this is in no particular order just so you guys know was controlling the automation on midi instruments so if you click into the piano roll here just double click on audio or not on audio on midi or click e it's going to open up your piano roll if you now hit a or also just go up here and hit this it will actually open up the automation control for midi now automatically it's going to show up as note velocity but typically what i'm going to use this for is sustain pitch bend and modulation again not really in those order that order modulation and sustain the most because modulation i'm going to use on strings for adjusting the expression of strings or the volume of strings so like if you're using east west or native instrument strings you're going to be able to use modulation to control that so i'll typically you know do the modulation when i record it in but then i'm gonna need to go in and actually edit the modulation i can just do it right within here in sustain is the same thing if i'm recording piano a lot of times i want to adjust the sustain pedal to make things work a little better so it's not as muddy things like that so that is the very first one very simple very straightforward but it's controlling automation within the midi regions so number two and number three are actually related number two is to use track alternatives so to turn on track alternatives you're going to do right click or control click on a track header and you're going to go to track header components and turn on at the very bottom track alternatives now you're going to see these little arrows right here if you click on them you're going to be able to see that you can now create a new track alternative now you might be wondering why on earth do you need to do this how is this useful well the reason this is so useful in particular is if you're creating comps editing and doing whatnot for vocals this is typically why i'm going to use this is for vocals so right here i have just an example of a harmony this is not actually what we're going to use we haven't done vocals for this specific track yet but i have two takes that i did this was just so i could demonstrate to my client what i was thinking as far as what we could do for for the harmony now i've got these two and two uh two takes that i did so let's go ahead and say that i wanna go ahead and do this for my comp now i have my two takes for comps now by doing that what most people might do is they might either go in here and flatten which we're gonna talk about a second or they're gonna export to a new track which is what i used to do and the problem with that is by exporting it to a new track is it you now have two tracks and like one of them you're just you're never going to use that right so instead what you can do is go and create a duplicate and then rename this to be comp so now this is our our our it's the same but we can go back to the different track alternatives okay and this is going to make it so much easier to keep track so we can always go back so we can keep our take folder all the way to having our final vocal that's been corrected timing corrected pitch corrected all that stuff and we can always go back if we need to so that leads me to number three i told you number two number three are connected and that is to flatten your your takes now you wouldn't necessarily want to flatten this if you're not doing the track alternatives because this actually deletes so by doing that it will delete everything else and it will create this now you want to just do flatten you don't want to do flatten and merge but now by doing this we can go ahead and you know we can add this was really lazy lazy but you could add you know your crossfade if you want to do that which in this case i might actually just create actual fades you can do your whatever you want and then now we can join those and start doing all the rest of the editing that we want by flattening and then if we ever need to go back boom there's our take folder so those are two kind of separate things but they're related the first one create a track alternative the second one is to flatten so then you can actually go ahead and do all of your editing and manipulation there rather than doing all that in your in your take folder you don't want to be doing it in your take folder okay so the fourth thing that i wish i would have known is how powerful logic is for editing features and editing capabilities so if you haven't already done so make sure you click command comma go to advanced and have show advanced tools you want to have audio and all this stuff advanced editing in particular you want to have advanced editing selected you want to go up here have drag set to crossfade x fade snap to smart is probably what you're going to want to have it and then set your second tool to scissor now what this means if i go back to my comp here i am now going to be able to do all of my editing and you already saw i created a crossfade in here by doing that that's because i just overlapped it and this can automatically create a crossfade but now with the editing uh that i want to do let's say this part right here is out of time it's a little late or something i can basically you know go away in there i can you know cut here it looks like that's kind of maybe the beginning of where i want to do the edit and then i can move that around adjust that and all that stuff and actually do all of my editing right within logic using the scissor tool the pointer tool and then the other thing is is that you want to go again command comma to open your preferences go to general go to editing have fade tool click zones enabled this will make it so that if you hover over the top corner there it'll create a fade boom so you don't actually have to use the fade tool you can just literally have it built in like that super super handy those three things alone will speed up your your time so much and then again having the drag to crossfade i think automatically might be set to no overlap which is kind of weird but crossfade that's what you want and if you guys don't know how to edit i have a whole course on it link in the below link down below it's it's pretty cheap if you want it cool if not whatever i don't really care number five is option click drag this is a super super handy feature so let's say you have something that you want to copy over you can click on anything and do option click drag like such and it will literally just create a copy of it and then you can just you can just go berserk with it you can create like a ridiculou you can grab anything in everything just like all that stuff just like be like option click drag and you can move it wherever you want do whatever you want it's kind of cool you can do the same thing with plug-ins you can actually so like let's say i want to take this compressor and move it over you can just do that and then it just creates a copy of it and moves it over super super handy number six is to bounce tracks in place so right here i've got these strings right let's listen to it [Music] sounds pretty cool so this is uh this is a track for a client and uh so i've got these live streams in here that i did but then i've also got midi strings i use these to kind of add a little bit of richness and fullness so these are native instrument strings now what i want to do here to just take off some of the strain on my computer is to do what's called committing which is to bounce down midi to audio you're going to do control command b and i'm going to call these there we go so native instruments lead strings i'm going to go to replace track you want to have a volume and pan automation included and you want to have normalize off and then when you click ok it's going to then create an audio track check it okay there we go all done now if for some reason you want to keep the the midi just in case you ever want to go back you don't have to do replace track you can make it create a new track it'll just disable that midi but you can always go back and still kind of change things i didn't do that because i already know that i'm done i'm not changing anything at this point this this whole thing's done at this at this point this is going to save space or save computer processing power it's going to make it much much easier to work with and it's just it's good to commit to things to make a decision say yes that's what i'm doing i'm going to turn into audio so i can't go back the next one number seven is to adjust metronome settings if you go up here you've got a little drop down arrow go to metronome settings there are three things that i want to tell you about tone volume and division just listen to this right now so we've got the tone if i turn that down listen to how much of a difference that makes into the volume up cool so that is super helpful so say for example you got a singer in your studio and they're having a hard time here in the metronome you can turn the tone up and that will make it kind of pop out a little bit more or say that you're having a really hard time with like a slower tempo song in in feeling the beat because it's slow you can turn division on and here's what that would sound like [Music] and you can actually change the pitch and change the velocity so if we want the pitch to be lower or whatever you can do velocity you can adjust that anyway something to mess around with but this is actually really helpful this might seem like well that's a weird tip this is actually super helpful just really practical stuff that you should know about all right number eight this one's also really quick and easy one but super helpful i use this all the time and i wish i would have known about it years and years and years ago like back when i first got started that is if you do option click on anything it will just reset it so for example i have volume here set to minus 8.6 if i do option and click on that fader it will just reset it now if you do undo it will not undo that just fyi which is kind of annoying well let's say we got this pan all the way i can just option click and it will just reset it this works for absolutely everything you can literally have like eq set to there if you do option click it's just going to reset it option click reset option click reset option click reset this works on literally everything might seem weird to you i'm just telling you guys this is something that you'll use a lot just trust me use it all right number nine is making your output a bus this is something i think a lot of people who are newer and maybe even having been producing for a while that are not doing and you should be doing it and that is sending multiple tracks to the same bus naturally when you create a new track it's going to go straight here's your output it's going to stereo output which means it goes straight from this track to the main output instead what you want to do let's say we've got all these vocals here um my client hasn't finished the vocals yet so that's why none of that's why i'm not playing any of this here these are all just like scratches and stuff like that but let's say that these are all done vocals that we've got what i would want to do is actually send all these to a vocal bus and i'm actually going to send them there on the output now what i can do is go down to bus and then create a bus so like bus nine click x to open up my window here and then i can name that vocal bus and then now that'll show up right here and now what we can do is add effects and processing on this bus in anything that has that output bus nine is going to be run through that processing now why is this handy this is handy because what i could do is i already have all these things on here this is just a preset that i created for like whenever i pull vocals in i almost always change it but i could take all this and just load it up on this bus right here and then take all the effects off of all of these individual vocal tracks here and they will all be processed the same now this doesn't work that way necessarily that extreme because you might not want your harmonies going through the same bus so you might actually have two separate buses but again you can set the output there so let's say you got four different harmony tracks you can send all four of those to say a harmony bus and you have all your lead vocals that you send to a lead vocal bus you can process those you now only have two channel strips that are being processed but you have multiple tracks running through it if that's confusing i'm sorry that's the best way that i can explain it in a very short period of time i might have to just make a whole video on that let me know in the comments if you want to see that all right number 10 is to use latch mode for automation one of the most common things you can do this for is for filters so let's just go ahead and do it i'm going to go ahead and set this to this filter here and when you set to latch mode whatever i do with this it will basically record cool so watch this i'm gonna solo this out [Music] okay so i did that i got latch i'm going to turn it back to read now if i click a for automation go down here it will now show me what i just did let's go ahead and zoom in now i'd want to do that like this who what are you doing now listen [Music] cool and then now it'll just do it so latch mode just makes it so that basically whatever you do it will basically record it uh you can set these parameters to your midi controller to control you can do just about anything with it super handy latch mode i know i talked about that in another one of my videos but it's it's handy enough that though for those of you that haven't seen those videos uh super super useful okay number 11 is to use the region editor window i'm going to show you what the main reason is i use this for and that is for reversing things so i've got this percussion down here this is audio go to the inspector window over here drop down to region now what you're probably gonna see is just this but if you open up more you're gonna see reverse i'm gonna unreverse this and i'm gonna show you what this sounds like just normally oh come on come on now here's what it sounds like okay so it's basically just a percussion hit now what i can do instead is go in here and reverse that and it's gonna do this super cool now i'm going to add that fade um and then i want i don't want the all right so i want to change the shape of that okay and then that will be like this cool this is really good for transitions like this [Music] cool the other thing that you can use that for is doing all sorts of pitch stuff so um one of the one of the examples that i have uh i don't have it in this track but i've done this before let's say i record like an electric guitar part and i'm like it would be really cool to have like the octave down or the octave up rather than rather than tracking it that way you could certainly do that and that'll that'll work but in some cases maybe the effect you want is a little more a little different let's just go ahead and act like this piano is an example i'm going to just create a duplicate of that piano create it downward here now what i can do is go in here and go to transpose now if you try clicking on it there you go so transpose we're going to go down 12. that's an octave so it's gonna have to analyze it might it might probably sound really strange on piano but here's the original piano [Music] okay you can see this one already has on the on the region listen to this that actually works pretty darn well but what if we did it up 12 so up an octave let's try that now you can hear some weird artifacts because by boosting it up it actually shortens the wavelength and so it kind of has to stretch it out a little bit which can sound really weird but let's we could turn that way down that effect actually can work really well this works especially well with guitars uh you can either bump them up an octave or down an octave especially if you do two it two instances and then pan them hard right hard left there's just you know that's an idea for you but anyway just using this whole thing you can actually do more stuff in there there's more that you can do than just that you can kind of check out all the different features in there but the main thing i use is reverse and then the pitch stuff so there's that okay number 12 is uh this is uh kind of might seem a little bit out of left field but this is for those of you guys that are interested in ever scoring to picture um this is something i used to do a lot more i haven't really done one recently but i've done like i think maybe like 10 different short films and uh doing it in logic is actually really annoying um because of some of the ideas of if you go like ahead and start working on it if you change any of the tempo later on it really screws things up so what am i talking about what i'm talking about is let's say that this right here is a movie like and if you were to pull in a movie it would show up on the top here but let's say that you want to start composing in the middle of it because you know hey i think i could i could really start spanking this part out here real quick and get a good feel for what i want to do and then i'll go back to the beginning if you start composing right here the moment you go back to the beginning i can tell you almost every time you're going to want to change the tempo change the time signature or key signatures not time signatures you're going to start changing things well as you change those things it will literally change everything you did over here and it's going to screw the whole thing up so how do you fix that well you go into here click on whatever it is that you're doing and go down to smpte lock lock that sucker that thing will not move it'll stay fixed to that time stamp not to the grid does that make sense and that my friends will save you literally hours you're welcome number 13 is to create and save custom presets so let's go ahead and say that uh i want to create my own like little preset here for like piano i want to process piano i could be like here i want to do this and do that and i want to add a compressor on this thing and then i want to like add like valhalla super massive which you wouldn't want to but okay why not uh you can go into settings and you can save channel strip setting as and then you can save that as a preset and it could be like piano super massive and you could save that thing and i'm not going to save it but if you save it it will then show up at the bottom down here and you can use it forever and it's super it's cool i don't do at a time but the ones that i have saved i use i do use those a ton in fact let me demonstrate this thing right here ut video yeah that's a preset that i made just to make it super easy for me to pull that up all right number 14 moving on is actually a plug-in and this isn't uh one that they had back when i was starting so just fyi this is i i set the name of this video is things i wish i would have known when i got started but i'm just kind of saying had i started like a year ago i would i would have wished this but i started back when they had logic pro pro 9 not pro x and that is uh eq plugin everyone's used to seeing this channel eq strip right the one we've all come to see and love and you know whatever and you see these in all the videos but what about the fact that if you go down here you have the vintage eq selection or collection this vintage tube eq is super good seriously just use it it's got i use it primarily for like boosting frequencies not removing them but the attenuation you can remove frequencies you can boost them you can obviously change the bandwidth you can choose frequency drive i like the drive feature adds a lot of brightness um but this thing sounds great i'm just going to kind of play around with it so you can hear what this sounds like on the piano [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] okay so that was me kind of going through some some different sounds and stuff i could really hear it especially on the high part you can hear like the pad because this is a this is a prepared piano it has cotton so you can hear the hammer sydney cotton that pop you could hear that a little bit better as i started cranking up the highs a little bit more which is really cool sound um we are not in the mixing stage and nor am i mixing this i don't mix for my clients anymore i gotta get my team for that now so anyway um that's a really cool plugin to use so if you haven't used it try out the the tube the 2bq all right number 15 and that is a super dope feature called strip silence if you've not used this well i actually just learned this this year so i've been using logic for like 12 years and apparently only just download it but okay and that is strip silence you can go in here select some audio do control x and check that out ready for this watch as you lower whoa whoa whoa change the threshold and that'll change the sensitivity and uh there we go so i'll do like that and then do okay and oh it just did it on this one right here it just got rid of all the silence in there same thing right here just like okay got rid of all the silence in there super super super it's a super future super good feature super fast makes it a lot easier to do and of course you go in there and add all those fades okay we are close to the end stick with me the next one is to use pitch fleck pitch flex flex pitch to change the gain so here's a vocal typically you're going to use this on vocals let's say for example you've got a singer that's saying one word really loud in the very next one very softly you can go in here to the bottom left and adjust the game this is so much better than doing automation guys like you seriously use this use this still automate like i'm not saying don't automate stuff but this is super super handy um my my the artist that that i'm producing here this is just a scratch vocal but he's super consistent you can see all this stuff he's just got a very very consistent volume when he sings i don't even know how he does it he's just got a killer voice anyway ariel if you're watching this song you're the man you're watching this song watching this video you're the man um so you can adjust the gain and uh that is really really handy so i had a song i did with a female singer and she just like some words were just like so like in your face and then she kind of bring it down is like really difficult to work with um so that's where you know using this it just saved me so much time way way faster than automating with volume and finally number 17 it is not something that was even available back when i got logic but for those of you guys who are newer if you don't if you're not using this come on i'm gonna open up a new midi instrument go to alchemy okay if you are not if you're doing any sort of like mainstream production or electronic anything you're using synths before you ever go buy a synth seriously use alchemy i'm not saying don't go buy sense like especially if you're using like monarch or massive or any of that stuff those things are i love those they're good and i still use them but but alchemy is incredible if you're working on a serious budget and you want some really good sounding synths alchemy is like the hidden beast in logic and i think a lot of people when they added alchemy i think a lot of people just were like super impressed but then there are some people that still just they aren't using it like what why not like this thing sounds incredible there are a ton of presets that you can that you can use in here um here's one strings i use a spectral pizzicotto like all the time [Music] you can you go in here and edit all these macro controls [Music] [Applause] [Music] yeah and you have all these different controls of course you know reverb distortion you can go into your effects they have an arpeggiator in there you can go to your advanced mode i mean this thing is very deep um so do not do not just like say oh well it's a logic logic thing it's not that good logic has some fantastic sounds some some fantastic instruments and look i've spent i've spent a lot of money on sample libraries and stuff but alchemy i still use alchemy on a lot of my productions so don't don't act like it's not a good thing it's it's amazing if you haven't been using alchemy use alchemy it is the is the hidden beast within logic and that my friends is number 17. if you haven't already done so and you like this video make sure you subscribe to the channel hit the bell for notifications i'm increasing my upload schedule getting really serious about growing this youtube channel and be coming at you with a lot more video content and with that we'll see in the next [Music] video you

Channel: Nathan James Larsen

Views: 267,489

Rating: 4.9558969 out of 5

Keywords: logic pro x tips i wish i knew when i started, logic pro x tips to speed up workflow, logic pro x tips and hacks, 30 advanced logic pro x tips and hacks, logic pro x tutorial, nathan larsen, ultimate logic pro x tips, best logic pro x tips, logic pro x hacks, logic pro x shortcuts, logic pro x beginner tutorial, beginner logic pro x tutorial, record with logic pro x, how to produce with logic pro x, produce with logic pro x, best logic pro x tutorial, logic pro x guide

Id: fQmLpwsHszg

Length: 25min 18sec (1518 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 24 2020