3 Tips To Play W/ Pitch Using Drum Machine Designer & Step Sequencer

hey friend chris van der veiver here from wylogyporules.com the website that helps you get the most you can out of apple's logic pro today i want to share with you three different ways that you can record perform or program different drum elements to change pitch over time using drum machine designer what do i mean by this let's say you have a hi-hat kick or snare and you want that hi-hat kicker snare to not just play one constant note throughout the entire song but instead change pitch over time so an 808 kick playing different pitches for a more melodic drum element or a hi-hat that changes pitch you know just subtly so it doesn't feel like one constant robotic hit this can be helpful for any style of music but obviously specifically for styles of music like hip hop and electronic where this is commonplace before we begin some eagle-eyed viewers of the channel are going to notice that i'm no longer on catalina on my mac system i'm instead on big sur now i'm testing it out just seeing how everything works out on my particular system but i made sure to create a time machine backup just in case i need to backtrack everything's so far so good a couple hiccups along the way and if i have to backtrack you'll be sure to know cool let's dig into drum machine designer number one i am in love with drum machine designer since the 10.5 update i think it is absolutely brilliant and any sort of mv or jealousy that i had for other software instruments like battery that is long gone i couldn't care less now because i think drum machine designer is the best and what's interesting about drum machine designer is it's not actually a software instrument it's a container for other software instruments if we take a look at drum machine designer and take a look around the interface we have all these different drum pads and we can you know click on each individual one and we can see that the bottom updates not only with the pad controls which allows to affect different plug-in parameters but also the instrument in this particular patch the 808 flex is backed up by quick sampler so if we open the track stack and look in the mixer here each channel strip is no longer a multi-output instrument it's its own instrument with quick sampler on each one but you can swap out any of these instruments at any time whether for a third party solution or for any type of instrument regardless if it's a drum instrument or not and in fact let's do that right now so i'm gonna go navigate to my clap here and let's bring up drum machine designer i'm gonna swap quick sampler for drum synth which is also a relatively new instrument since 10.5 and immediately for that pad drum machine designer has been updated for drum synth parameters drum synth by default loads up the kicks but we're just going to navigate down here to snares and claps and find the human clap here and then we'll take a listen to this basic beat that i've created [Music] amazing we don't have access to every single software instrument in logic from within drum machine designer but if i were to speculate i imagine that's a direction that we're heading at least for select instruments but to really cement the versatility of drum machine designer to you i'm going to navigate to my first snare here and instead of quick sampler i'm going to go down to au instruments and load complete control right out of the gate if we take a look at drum machine designer we don't have access to any of the plug-in controls from complete control but we do still have access to plug-in controls of the channel strip itself so right here the enveloper channel eq and fatfax i'm going to select a one-shot and i have one in mind i think it might be one of these first ones here that's the one so i'm going to drag it in and tighten this up to that first hit and just so you're absolutely certain that i'm actually using complete control with drum machine designer here let's check it out okay so let's pitch it up a bit and within the context of the full sequence [Music] amazing all right let's dig into these three different ways that you can play pitched instruments using drum machine designer the first way in my least favorite way but obviously makes sense is you could create a completely separate quick sampler track lane within your project i'm going to do this i'm going to squash up my entire track stack here i'm going to find the hi-hat because that's the instrument that i want to affect that i want to change pitch over time just so it doesn't feel like the same exact hit over and over to remind ourselves [Music] it's playing that eighth note hi-hat sequence so i'm going to hold option and then click and drag this first hi-hat down outside of the track stack and we've now copied that hi-hat with quick sampler onto its own track lane so i'm going to collapse the track stack here and what i'm going to do is i'm going to copy and paste these two pattern regions to the new track lane of course you might be asking yourself hey chris why aren't we digging into the different edit modes for notes within the step sequencer and i'll show you why we're not going to do that we double click on this region here and we're going to navigate to the hi-hats and we're going to set the edit mode to note and for any sort of pitched instrument we would be allowed to adjust the note on a per step basis but check it out i'm going to use ctrl z to expand this view and listen as i start to adjust the note of the hi-hat up and down the unfortunate thing here is at this top level with our pattern regions living on the track stack track lane all of these notes are accounted for by the different drum elements across the piano roll so we're not adjusting the note of the hi-hat up or down in pitch we're just picking different drum elements and this is not ideal for the workflow that we need so in this case i'm just going to mute the hi-hats here in each one of these pattern regions and then i'm going to unmute my hi-hat on the separate track lane select both and right-click and go to convert to midi region you can also go down to convert convert midi region and just like that i'm going to join the two key command j and double-click to open the piano roll and at this point i'm going to turn off the midi output here i'm going to remove every note that's not that consistent hi-hat note you can see right up here that c3 is the root note of this hi-hat so where it is right now is probably a bit too low for our production [Music] very mechanical sounding so let's drag this up to the root note take a listen [Music] okay now we can start adjusting pitch if i select holding shift some of these different notes i can bump it up to the half step above our root note so let's get rid of all these select our four notes and then command r to repeat these midi notes for the entire loop and take a listen now [Music] and now our hi-hat is subtly adjusting over time we can accentuate this if we like so let me just select all these and drag them way up obviously not ideal in this particular situation but perfect for that pitched 808 type of sound this is my least favorite way so let's dig into the second wave which is not the same but can be a quick fix for subtle variations if that's what you're after let's bring back our hi-hats on the track stack here and instead i'm going to navigate to drum machine designer and click on the hi-hat close to pad and then navigate right into the synth section under q sampler detail what i'm going to do here is i'm going to set one of the lfos to modulate the pitch over time for the hi-hat i recognize that things like lfos modulation can be a bit intimidating if you're not familiar with these sort of functions but what i'm going to show you is very very simple basically just imagine you wiggling a light switch that's what an lfo is it's just wiggling or modulating a particular parameter it's a way for you to change a particular parameter over time you connect the lfo to that parameter and it starts to do that wiggling effect and you can set the waveform or that wiggle of that particular parameter based on you know a triangle wave or saw or square i suggest giving each option a try in this case i'm going to lock the lfo one to the grid on an eighth note basis and from here i'm going to go to the bottom to via i'm going to set lfo1 to impact a target and that target is going to be the pitch so we're going to be able to adjust the coarse pitch of the hi-hat over time i start to drag this slider here we actually have two and as i drag the right edge all the way over we now have a red line that indicates to the lfo how much of a window it has to wiggle that control i now take the other slider here and drag it all the way down we now have a pretty wide berth to work with so if we take a listen to just the hi-hat i'll solo it so we can focus on it let's take a listen to the pitch of it and if we turn off the lfo if we want to accentuate it a bit more i can set this to maybe a 16th note okay that's a bit drastic but if we set it to that eighth note and then if we select both sliders here we can drag it to be a little narrower and now take a listen it's not the same as adjusting the pitch of each individual note yourself but this can be a quick and easy way to add variation in subtle degrees or even more drastic degrees if you'd like just from within the quick sampler and drum machine designer now the final way i'm going to show you which i think is the best way of going about this so let's take our region from our completely separate hi-hat track here and just drag that region right onto the track lane of the hi-hat within this stack and this to me is the best of all worlds if we just double click on our region here i'm going to mute the hi-hat within the pattern region once more and to me this is kind of the best of all worlds we have the track stack of our drum machine designer patch we can sequence on the top level if we like and then if we need to adjust the pitch of different elements we can just create a region whether it be pattern or midi on the channel strip within the track stack so check it out if we just double click and take a listen and again let me just kind of back out of here on solo everything check it out we can make adjustments as necessary you have the world at your fingertips in terms of drum programming and sequencing and adjusting pitch and everything all within draw machine designer it is truly fantastic for drum machine style production and performance so i hope that was helpful for you if it was as always i highly recommend subscribing to the youtube channel why logic rules we're subscribing on the website itself yologyporules.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: 5,307

Rating: 4.9597316 out of 5

Keywords: logic pro x, logic pro, audio, audio production, apple, mixing, audio mixing, recording, audio recording, 3 Tips To Add Pitch To Drum Machine Designer Performances, Drum Machine Designer, 808, Trap, Electronic, EDM, Why Logic Pro Rules, Step Sequencer

Id: z2vfLWcE4vI

Length: 11min 51sec (711 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021