41 Advanced Logic X Features I Wish I Knew Years Ago

hey guys this is shane here from echo soundworks in this video i'm going to show you a ton of advanced features inside of logic 10. so these are the type of features that i wish i knew existed right when i started using logic so this is going to be one of the longer videos i think it's going to be the longest video i've ever done on youtube so i'm gonna cut this intro really short and we're gonna get right into it so let's go so the first thing i'm gonna show you isn't all that advanced if i'm being honest but don't skip ahead because you need to turn on this tool set that i'm going to show you in a second for a lot of the other things we're going to be doing in this video so our first tip is turning on the advanced tools so to go up go to the top and you're going to go to preferences and you're going to you can general because you can tab through any of these right so we're going to go to advanced and we're going to select show advanced tools and then just turn all these on you'll notice that when you do this if you had this off some things will appear in and around your toolbar and your transport bar that you may not have seen before okay so this first tip is pretty cool i'm gonna show you how you can use the scripter in logic to never play a wrong note and this works really well when you're trying to write melodies and if you're trying to write like world or ethnic melodies it works exceedingly well so the scripter is a midi effects plugin in logic and it doesn't get a lot of love not as much love as like the arpeggiator does the modifier the modulator right and it's a pretty weird plug-in the first time you load it up in any session you'll see this white text screen where it's like hey write some javascript and you can make a custom midi effect you're probably like nope i'm going to get back to making music but it's a pretty little pretty boring looking little plugin and there's some factory scripts and there's not a lot of use i would say to the factory scripts but i stumbled across someone who used this to create scale scales and i thought that's a really interesting idea so i dove deeper i downloaded that i tweaked it and you can freely distribute it it's not a paid thing and what i ended up doing was i ended up making scales both conventional normal scales and modes like dorian ionian locrian major natural minor you see them all here as well as world scales and what this does is it allows you to do a few things you can use this as a way to learn new scales you can use it as a way to lock the keyboard to where you can just play white keys on your key on your on your actual physical keyboard and you could be playing like some weird hungarian scale in g sharp minor so our g flat minor rather so there's a lot of different things that you can do with this so let's check it out so here is a piano progression i played in that is in [Music] g flat minor f sharp minor depending how you're looking at it and what i want to do is i want to load up a scale that will allow me to riff and not play a wrong note so we're going to go to the folder we're going to go to normal let's choose we'll do natural minor just to keep things simple for now now you get a couple options with this the main one you want to be worried about is this first drop down strict or you have a couple different options now up is the one that allows you to never hit a wrong note you will get some duplicate notes depending on how many notes are in a given scale and that's more of something that will come up when you use the world and ethnic skills all right so i just noodled in that melody and if i turn off the scripter and we hit play it's going to sound super out of key with our track so good oh yeah all right so let's turn the scripture back on oh there it is right in the feels so i pulled up the keyboard just so you guys can see the notes i'm actually physically playing on my keyboard and compare that to what you're hearing so these there's a couple different scale types they're strict up down random and filters so with strict what it'll do is it'll actually basically put the proper spacing within the scale this is my least favorite one to use in this so for instance and just to show you how this works if i hit a c right now that's actually an f sharp if i turn off my scripter and now play an f sharp you can see and here that's the same note right turn the scripture on i hit c it's an f sharp so what will happen is this is basically your f sharp minor scale so you're going to have you actually have to know the proper steps of the scale so there's no note here it turns them off so what i like to do when i'm just trying to noodle around and come up with new melody ideas i like to change it to up because then i can work up my scale but i can only i only have to play the white keys so i can basically just play c major to play any scale so i'm going to play physically a c major scale but because of the scripture it's going to play an f sharp minor [Music] all right so before we end this section of the video i want to show you one of the world scales so let's go pull one up i'm just going to pull one up at random let's do one of the japanese scales all right so this next feature i'm going to show you is something that i only recently discovered you can actually time stretch and use the time stretch handle just like you would with audio with midi to basically double or shorten or do whatever you want to do to your midi i'm going to bounce this audio this piano track to an audio track and now you guys are probably familiar with this you can hover over the edge and hold down alt or option and you get your time stretching handle or you can just simply turn on a warp mode or report mode i've been using ableton too much you can turn on one of the flex modes and select polyphonic because this is a polyphonic nail and now you just go up to the top and stretch this out so check this out you could take this stretch it out to make it nine bars right but that's gonna make that stretched sound you know it's gonna be a little less than perfect you can actually do that with midi and you don't obviously have to turn on a flex mode so hover over it hold down alt or option and you get the handle and now i can take this and it's stretching the length of my of each cord respectively right and if the instrument has enough sustain it'll sustain it out so if i wanted to shorten this to just two bars and really speed it up i can do the same thing [Music] so this next feature i'm going to show you i actually randomly just did in my last video that i posted on youtube and i got a bunch of people in the comments being like hey how'd you do that what was that so i thought this would be a great way to actually explain it so you guys are probably all super familiar with your loop right your cycle range so when you have this on if i turn this on from bar five to nine it'll loop from bar five to nine continuously as i play so you can actually use this as a way to skip whole sections of your track which is really cool so i use this all the time when i'm like let's say i have two different versions of like a pre-course or you know the second half of a drop or my build into a drop or whatever it is and i have two different versions and i'm testing them out what i can do is i can sk i can use this to skip a whole portion of my song so let's say i wanted to skip hearing what it sounds like with this build with the drums and just see how it hits going from like nothing to an explosion of a lot in the drop so what i can do is i will make my loop point right here and i need to basically set that to bar let's see bar eight and now check this out i'm gonna hit play from bar five and i want it to jump from bar five to bar sixteen essentially so to do this with my cycle range on i'm going to hold down command and click it and now it turns black checks out as soon as it gets to this it's going to jump over it and skip [Music] all right so raise your hand if this has ever happened to you you've sketched out part of your track and you think oh crap i need four more bars for a build or four more bars at the end of my verse and you're like oh i have to go move 20 or 30 tracks right it happens to me all the time i think it happens to everyone i think it's completely normal well there's a better way to move all the content and get that space that you want as opposed to having to go and select every track from scratch basically so here's how you can do it in logic so make a loop or a cycle right before where you want the space so let's say i want four bars of space in this section of my track right here so let's say this was my verse and i need four more bars from what i have i would go to the four bars after it create a loop right click and select insert silence between locators you'll notice that everything in my session moves over four bars and now i have this empty canvas to work in so this next feature i'm going to show you is pretty much a straight up hidden feature called slipping audio so let's say you're working on like a vocal chop or some type of chopped up material and you've determined where you want certain things to happen in terms in terms of the rhythmic playback right so you want to know here a note here two notes there etc so what what slipping audio allows you to do is it allows you to slip through the audio of an entire region that you've chopped up so for instance this note right here what if i wanted that note to be this note right here right you could grab grab this copy and paste it and drag it back but slipping audio allows you to achieve similar results but it allows you to explore the audio in a different way so check this out let's say i want to change this note right here i can open up the uh browser over here by hitting f on my keyboard and you can see that these are the files i've colored red so there's the whole region and then there's each i mean there's the whole audio file and then there's also these individual regions what you can do and you can make this screen as big as you want you can go and hover over this and your mouse will turn into the two arrows left and right and this corresponds with this little section of audio that's been trimmed from the greater region so i can take this now and move it around and now it's going to keep the rhythmic position of that slice right there but it's going to play whatever occurs there and so if you go through this you can find some really cool differences in your audio just by slipping through to different parts and you can find kind of these like bob ross unexpected happy little accidents that can lead to some unexpected but a lot of times really cool results let's try this [Music] so every once in a while you learn about a new feature in a daw in this case logic that you think to yourself how did i ever get by without knowing this and i think this feature i'm about to show you is one of those so first time i i ever opened up ableton one of the first things i noticed was that anytime you clicked on a region or they call them clips in ableton and then you hit play your play bar would play from that selected clip and i thought holy i need to figure out how to do that in logic and thankfully there's actually two ways to do this in logic so the first way is more of a global technique go to your play button on your transport bar right click and select play from selected region so you can see here my transport bar is at bar 17 and change if i wanted to play back at bar 9 i can just click this and it jumps back i can jump forward to here right so it allows me to jump around my session and my arrangement without having to worry about where my play bar is and that is a game changer in my opinion now there's another way to do it without turning on the global method so i'll go up here and turn it off just so you can see so i'm going to uncheck play from selected region so let's say i want to play from bar five i can click this region and then hit shift and space bar and it jumps me back to that playhead position all right so this next tip and trick is a game changer for those producers out there who make genres of music where you often have to layer sounds together to create more unique leads or basses or chords or whatever it might be so here's a perfect example i have four serum presets coming from a few of our different serum sound banks and it's making up the chord sound that we hear in the drop so what happens now if i want to change the timing or note or pitch or you know change the chord length what is any change right i'd have to go do it to four different regions which is a huge pain in the ass so i can't just highlight all four regions and change one note you'll see that the other note remains there stacked under it so here's how you can bypass that problem you can actually place the midi region on the actual first track of your track stack like that and what it will do is it will trigger any track that is routed into that group so check this out i'll delete these other three regions of midi and if i play this it's going to sound exactly the same and you can see that audio is coming out of all four tracks in my stack and i can solo them [Music] and now if i change any notes and i'll do a drastic change just so you guys can hear it i'll pitch this first chord down an octave it's going to be applied to all the tracks in my track stack so if we solo the kazoo right that's down low this one all right so now let's run over some advanced features in midi now these are just going to be random cool advanced features not really in any order but they are still really helpful nonetheless so let's talk about velocity editing there's a few different ways to edit velocity and here's some advanced tip and tricks to make it a little bit easier for you so you guys probably know about the velocity tool which is you can hit your toolbar your t for tools and get the velocity tool and you can change multiple notes at once or one right so you can actually open up a velocity editor in another way you can go up here to the top and say show hide automation now with this you can then choose instead of volume you can choose velocity note velocity and now you get these little green dots so for certain types of midi this can actually be helpful versus going through and you know like going through each little note because these are all short short little notes right choppy notes so if i want to change the velocity i can just drag down and you can see the corresponding note apply there right so this is the first note and this is the highest note that's occurring there right so that that is pretty straightforward now let's say you want to change every note's velocity to be the same velocity let's say you're using a synth patch and you don't you want it to all be the exact same energy well here's how you can do that very very quickly so you're going to hit command a and you're going to highlight every note in the region you're going to hit t to bring up your toolbar and then v to bring up the velocity tool and now you're going to go and find any note that you want to change and you're going to hold down alt or option and then shift and then click and drag that up and down and you can see that every note in that range now changes so if i want everything really soft drag it down to the lower values really hard up to the higher values all right so we're going to keep going with another midi tip and trick now this one is i mean we all we're all aware of quantization right we can quantize poorly played notes or notes that we put in you know incorrect timing i want to show you a couple other features you can use to tighten up performances and also just make them more applicable to certain instruments if that makes any sense it should in a second so i have this pad sound here in this track let's take a quick listen [Music] and you can see here i did not play this perfect now with a pad you typically aren't going to want a lot of gaps so i use this these features all the time on pad sounds strings even bases and leads that i want a legato feel so there's a couple ways we can fill in the gaps so if you're working with chords and you want every note within the chord to be the same length this is the way to do it so you're gonna highlight every note and then you're gonna you're going to hold down option and shift just like with our velocity tip we just saw and then change simply change the length you'll notice that they snap all to the same length so that's really helpful if you want every chord to be the exact same length like block chords on a piano or a keys patch or whatever it might be someone undo that so here's another way you can do the same thing but apply it to different note lengths so for instance this first chord is held out for more counts than the second chord and the third chord so i couldn't highlight this and just make them all the same length because it would change the actual timing and rhythm of my progression so here's how you can do that highlight everything or hit command a and then go up to edit go to trim and select one of these two they're both different options for forced legato so i have a key command set for the one that i use it's called it's a called it's shift and then backslash so i'm gonna do that now hit shift and then backslash and you're getting something if you want to keep delete or shorten so i want to shorten any overlapped notes in this instance and now you can see everything all the gaps are closed and now i have my pad patch exactly how i should have played it in the first place if i was better at keys [Music] alright so we're gonna keep trucking with one more amazing midi tip so this is something that other daws do by default i don't know why it's not turned on by default in logic i think apple thinks we're all fools so it's called chase midi so check this out if i play from the center of this note or of these these multiple notes making up this chord i don't hear that chord i have to wait until the very next time around right so that's kind of annoying when you're working with long chords and long note changes like if you're a composer and you're doing string stuff that can be a huge issue because you might be holding out a chord or a note for four to eight counts or drone or something like that and you're not going to hear it until it cycles back to you know the beginning of a midi note so you can get logic to do what's called chasing midi and it will actually be like oh you're playing this chord so i'll let you hear it even though you didn't start it right at the beginning so go up to logic go to your i'm sorry you're going to file you're going to project settings and then go to midi now from here you're going to go to a tab called chase and you want to turn on the one that says notes and now if i simply play this like if i'm trying to listen to this patch with you know let's say i'm editing things and i want to actually hear this first chord but i don't want to go all the way back it'll still play that chord in time with the rest of my track [Music] so i can do it right here which is really nice all right so this next feature is called q flam and what q flam does is it spreads out the notes the starting point of each note in a chord so instead of having a chord sound like this right where it's just like a block chord every note starts at the same time you get some human some humanized vibe going on where it goes like more like this so to do this you can select your region because it is a region based effect and go to the region inspector drop down more most likely probably isn't showing by default for you and then go to q flam and drag this up you'll see my notes start to start to fan out now here's the only annoying thing with this is it does it on a region basis so if you want each chord to have its own q flam value you're gonna need to chop it up but if your chords are all the same length you can just option slice this like we talked about and now we can do it region by region so here we'll go q flam 7 ticks we'll do 22 ticks three ticks and we'll spread that one out so now each one is going to be its own q flame amount and we can listen to this and see how it sounds [Music] this actually sounds great all right so logic comes with a bunch of really cool and unique midi transform functions that allow you to really up your midi game to a whole other level now there's a few that i use all the time i don't have time to go through each one because this video is already going to be long enough but i do just want to show you a couple so you can see just what you can do with this so here's a good example where i use it all the time let's say i have a this chord progression and i want to reverse it you know get that reversed dark sound so i need to reverse it as audio well if i bounce this out and just hit reverse on the audio region it's going to play it backwards right it's going to play this chord first then this chord then that that so if i want it happening in the same order here's what i usually do i duplicate my my midi i go into midi transform here and i select reverse position and then all i have to do is hit select and operate and now the chords are in the reverse order so now i'm going to bounce this out instead of the chord progression that i actually ultimately want to end up with and then i reverse this i'll delete this one here bring back my actual chord progression that starts with f sharp minor and this also starts with f sharp minor [Music] alright and like i said i don't have time to go through all of them but definitely open this up and mess around with it there's some really cool stuff you can do with this now so these next few advanced features i'm going to show you they all center around one core concept and that is trying your damnedest to avoid the inevitable carpal tunnel syndrome you're going to get being a music producer i'm going to show you how you can turn logic's mouse into a swiss army knife of tools so you can click less and do more so up here at the top you'll see that i have three click tools assigned yours will probably just be the two so the first tip is how to assign a third tool for those of you who don't know you have this left click tool which is you know the tool that's assigned to your left click and i think most people unless you're just absolutely crazy you're going to have that be a pointer tool i cannot imagine you want your left click tool to be the flex tool now the second one is the command click so you hit command and then your mouse turns into that tool by default most people probably have pet eraser pencil or the scissor tool probably one of those two now this third tool you probably don't have there and we're going to turn that on here so go to logic go to preferences go to general hit editing turn on right mouse button is assignable to a tool all right so you can actually apply a different tool set for your piano roll or your midi editor which makes complete sense because really your workflow with chopping up audio is a little bit different when you're working with you know midi notes and penciling things in so how i've set mine up is left click is a click tool and then a option click is my pencil tool and then a right click deletes everything so very quick very efficient and you can set those up however you want but i think this is you know having an eraser in pencil somewhere makes sense when you're working with your piano roll in logic all right so there's one other thing we can do in our quest to avoid neuropathy and that is we can turn on what's called the marquee tool click zone i don't know why these names are so stupid they're they're a mouthful but basically what we want to do is we want to make logic more like every other daw so for instance if you load up ableton and you click over you hover over region and audio region or even midi and you hover over the top half of it it'll be your click tool so you can click on the audio and you can move it around hit you'll click hit delete whatever you want to do the bottom half lets you select in the actual you know region so in logic that's called the marquee tool and that's the tool that you'll see in your toolbar and up here as well so what i want to do is i want to go back up and i lied i said i was going to leave it up but i don't know when i turned it off we're going to go back to preferences hit general go to editing and turn on marquee tool click zone so that's a mouthful for saying that if you hover over the lower half of any region you get the marquee tool which allows you to do anything that the marquee tool allows you to do all right so because we just looked at some audio editing workflow features or enhancements let's look at some things you can actually do to the audio that's more creative using the inspector region so you can apply classic kind of dj turntable style glitch effects right from the inspector region in logic so i can go and apply a fade in to this lead and then i can open up my inspector region this is actually a drop down menu where it says fade in it's this ugly boring unassuming menu and you can change it to a speed up and that's going to speed up the audio as it plays through and our fade turns orange to indicate that it's not just a fade in [Music] and we have slow down as well now there's no really good example that i can show you with this specific audio i have pulled up but you can also reverse audio here so let's say you wanted to reverse a note or section or passage you can just slice up your audio clip into different regions and you can just reverse that one region or note so this one is not reversed this region is reversed and this region is not all right so we're going to continue with this theme of slicing and chopping and applying fades so here's a baseline that i chopped up to match a chord progression lead that i made and let's say i wanted to avoid any pops or clicks at the end of every region you can actually apply a fade to each region at once so you can just highlight every region and use your fade click tool zone or your fade tool to do that or you can go into your region inspect inspector and this is what i like to do for clicks and i like to you know figure out just enough to get the click because i don't want to lose too much volume you know on the actual source if i zoom in here if i hit five that's gonna basically get out that entire last note i don't know if i want that so i might try one or two it can be very hard to actually swipe in one a value of one or two for a fade in or out with your actual mouse so this should get rid of the pops right and it did now you can actually change the curvature of this line now when you set it to a really low value like one or two you're gonna have to zoom in really far but if you do zoom in really far do you see how my mouse just changed uh to a different cursor basically this allows me to curve basically the how aggressive the slope is for the fade in and fit out and you can do that over in your inspector region as well so this next feature i'm going to show you i find really helpful when i'm applying a lot of crossfades maybe i'm editing a vocal take and there's some timing issues or i'm chopping something up and i'm having to apply a lot of crossfades because i'm moving audio back on itself and the regions are touching so when this happens instead of having to click and do the phase like we just did that's helpful when there's you know only so many regions what i like to do is i like to turn on the x fade drag feature so what this does is if you drag audio back on to another region of audio even just slightly like this it's going to apply a x fade a crossfade between those two regions so you don't get a pop or a click so very helpful when you're editing i find real live instruments like guitar takes vocals where there's some timing issues and you need to move some things around so this next feature is called the option slice click what it allows you to do is it allows you to rhythmically chop or slice audio midi or actual midi notes inside a midi region so i use this all the time for hi-hat so i'm trying to create hi-hat rolls you can use it to just chop things up to mangle it warp it whatever it might be there's often a use case for this alright so it's not the greatest real world example i should have pulled up a hi-hat pattern for this but let's say this was a hi-hat and i wanted to slice it up into quarter note values instead of going through and you know slicing each quarter note grid that would take me quite some time i can use the option slice so pull up your scissor tool if it's assigned to your right click tool you can just use that start your slice and don't let up on the click and then hold down alt or option and then let up on the click and you can see that we just sliced this into equal parts so now it's a quarter note value right it's not a great example for this music box passage but i'll show you this with audio as well so let's say i wanted to slice this up into really fine slices i can go hold down all alt or option and slice and now i have equal slices here and i can apply like a little stutter a little fade in [Applause] [Music] all right so this next feature i'm going to show you goes hand in hand with what we just looked at the option slice so option slice only works when everything is rhythmically consistent quarter note 8 note 16 whatever it might be what about if you want to chop and slice something up that isn't rhythmically consistent you have quarter notes here you have some eighth notes there right so here's how you can do that so i want to reverse this melody that you just heard this musicbox melody but instead of reversing it in a way that plays the melody backwards i want each note to basically be reversed so it still plays my same melody because that way i can layer it together with the normal forwards playing melody and get a really cool texture and sound so we're gonna kill two birds one stone at this tip i'm going to show you how to reverse things like a goddamn wizard and i'm also going to show you how to slice things up not using option slice so what you want to do is you want to double click on the audio go to click file then click view and go to transit edit transient edit mode now logic usually does a really good job selecting the transients and this looks all fine here so now we can turn on a flex mode and it's going to place a flag where our transients are so this step saves you from having to manually input the flags see this is going to follow our transients so what i am going to do though is i'm going to go to this very first one this very first flag and we are going to turn that one off because we don't want to slice right there so let's do that now and now it should be ready to go so what you can do is right click and select slice at transient markers or because we have the flex markers on we can do flex markers as well so and it will slice up the audio so now to reverse it i need to turn off my flex mode because you can't reverse anything with flex mode ons and now hit reverse so now this will play my melody as i wrote it [Music] alright so this session is actually the perfect session to show you these next couple of features so i have a lot of muted tracks here and muted audio regions that go with those tracks basically they were ideas that i messed around with but i didn't like and didn't make the chopping block so when you're mixing and when you're finishing your arrangement this can be kind of a pain in the ass to deal with right it's a lot of scrolling a lot of zooming so you can actually hide tracks in logic so to get the feature to hide a track all you have to do is hit h on your keyboard and on your track header you'll see an h appear before the m or the mute so let's say i want to hide all these muted audio tracks and regions i just swipe through h then hit h on my keyboard again and they disappear and i have a more condensed session i use this all the time a couple weeks ago someone saw a video where i was making a track from scratch and then within like five minutes they're like wait how do you already have 70 something tracks well in my template that i use when i open up logic i'll see maybe 10 tracks like my favorite few synths and you know contact that sort of thing and i have tons of other things pre-loaded that are turned off and hidden and hidden in that session so if i ever need to like use diva or a synth that i seldom use but you know or not seldom but i use not as much as like serum it's there so you can do a lot of cool things with the hide feature in logic now expanding on this idea let's say you're working with midi and you don't want to hide an entire track but maybe you you have two different regions of a melody two different melodies a bass line whatever it might be there's a way you can basically hide that and recall it quite quickly so you do need logic 10.5 for this next feature so what i'm going to do is i'm going to use the live loops view to basically house alternate ideas for a melody so here's two melodies for my dream box here and here's the here's one here's the other i think i like this one more so what i'm going to do is i'm going to open up my live loops view by toggling that button there take this one and drag it into one of the slots now the way live loops was intended was to be able to trigger different loops at different points in your range but check this out i can delete this and then i can you know use this chord progression right here now let's say later on down in the process of finishing this beat i'm like oh i want to use that melody for maybe a breakdown or maybe i ended up not liking this melody or a rapper didn't or vocalist didn't i want to change it all i have to do is open up my live loops view click and drag this back to my range and now i'll have that melody again so i use that not as it was intended but it is a nice way to you know if you have three different bass lines you don't know which one you want or maybe you want to use one later on the track dump it over there hide it and now your range isn't all cluttered alright so the next thing i'm going to show you how to do is how to customize your control bar and your toolbar inside of logic so the control bar is this top light gray strip that spans the entire screen now it's broken up into sections and you can add different buttons different contextual icons to each section if you find yourself using those quite often so that way they're always within reach so to do that go to your lcd screen click the drop down arrow and select customize control bar and display and you can add anything that's not checked while you're here because we're going to cover these later in the video turn on capture recording and then turn on low latency mode now moving on to the toolbar a lot of people don't even know where the toolbar is at it's actually collapsed for most logic users and it's right up here at the top so if i take my mouse to where the arrange window meets the control bar i can actually see that my mouse changes shape i can click and drag down and there is our toolbar and that works the same way we're going to right click on this hit customize control bar or toolbar sorry and you can add anything that's unchecked all right so these next features they all center around cpu optimization so if you find yourself struggling to avoid the dreaded spinning ball of death or just logic you know having freakouts here and there as it pertains to cpu these should help you out so there's a few ways a few ways we can mitigate cpu hits in logic now with the release of logic 10.4.5 apple released what they called dynamic plug-in loading which is a really fancy apple way of saying plugins won't be active on tracks that don't have audio regions so we can manually apply that to midi tracks as well so to do this we need to configure what's called our track header and add the on and off switch that you see here so right click or option t on your keyboard to pull up the configure track header and you want to add on and off as well as freeze while you're there so here's a good example we'll go to this arp sound that we have here it's coming from electra x and if i turn this track off we won't hear it anymore right and it mutes that region so we're actually reducing the cpu hit from electro x and the channel eq and any other plugins we have on this by turning it on and off you can also conversely freeze the track now i like turning on and off if you know if it's an idea that i'm not sure i want or you know just something that has a lot of processing that type of thing if i'm kind of to the stage where i like this but i don't know if i want to commit it to audio yet i will freeze it when you freeze a track it will not allow you to edit that track again so to freeze it just click freeze and then hit play and then logic does this thing it's going to freeze that track so if i try to load up like my channel eq it'll pop up saying it's basically turned off and inaccessible i'm going to have to unfreeze my track to have access to that and same if i want to change a midi note right now the third tip and trick we're going to look at to help get over cpu issues pertains to latency so let's say you're recording a vocalist a rapper guitar any live instrument and you notice there's a lot of latency well of course you can change the latency in your preferences by going to preferences general and then you go to audio and you can change the i o buffer size so when you're recording audio you probably want to be about 128 or lower 256 would be a little bit too much so i i'm usually about 64. so let's say you have a session though that has you know some group bus processing or some processing on the master or even some processing on the actual track you're recording maybe it could be reverb compression whatever it might be you might have loaded up a plug-in one time and you know started to record like why is there so much latency it's because the plug-in you're working with adds latency channel eq and logic adds no latency that i can tell for instance though let's say i wanted to record uh something i had a pitch shifter on like elastic pitch too this is going to add a lot of latency and if i hit the low latency mode up here you'll notice that logic kind of orange they add orange text this track saying hey this is adding more latency than you've selected in your preferences so we've turned off this track for you while you're recording or you have something record enabled so it's a really nice way to basically you know keep the track as is in terms of your plug-in layout but still be able to record with the latency that you chose alright so the next couple of features that we're going to check out in this video they center around one core concept and that's going to be accessing your plugins a little bit quicker a little bit easier so in logic you can actually open up any active plugin on a track via a key command so for instance you see that i have a foul filter pro q3 fabfilter pro de-esser rvox and cla vocals so if i hit on my key shift and two it's going to open up the first plugin on an audio track if i open up shift 3 or click shift 3 there's the de-esser shift 4 and shift 5. now if i hit those same combos again shift 5 goes away goes away goes away and goes away now if you're wondering why did it start with shift 2 well i'm glad you asked because i will explain it to you shift 1 is dedicated for the actual synth track on a on a midi channel so if i hit shift 1 on this track it'll actually open up serum once i get over the spinning beach ball of death so there it is now you can actually set these up however you want you don't have to do the numbers that i chose so you want to go to your preferences your key commands actually so you're going to go to key commands and then hit edit so then when you're in the edit screen you're going to search for open and then we'll do plugin open plugin and see here where it says open and close audio insert plugin window focus tracked our focus track so you do have to select the track obviously you see that i have shift 1 2 three four five six all the way up so you can set up any key command that you want that makes sense to your workflow but oh man is this a huge time saver should just simply look at the track and be like oh i need to open up the de-esser shift three there it is all right so another advanced tip that you can use to better access more quickly access any plugins inside logic is to make use of the custom folders that you can do and i see a lot of youtube videos where logic producers just don't do this now admittedly logic has one of the worst plug-in browsers in my opinion so ableton's way better fl studio is arguably better uh studio one cubase is better for sure so you have to if you have a lot of plug-ins you're gonna do a lot of dumpster diving you're gonna be scrolling through a lot of folders like here's my master list my plugins it's a lot right and it's just all the same color it can be very hard to see so what you can do is you can create these custom folders so for me i have lo-fi hip-hop sidechain granular creative amps eq compressor and you can stick any plugins here third-party or logic stock so you can see here's all my favorite compressors my favorite distortion plug-ins right so it just makes a little bit easier because now it's more you know music music related as opposed to being like wait which audio developer made my favorite reverb so if you don't know how to do that i'll show you right now you can go to logic go to preferences and then you're going to go to plugin manager now so you see where it says show all in top level top level actually applies to midi instruments which i'll show you in a second so we're focusing on audio right now so you can actually create categories you can hit a plus here and name it whatever you want and then you can go through your list select the manufacturer and drag it in so for instance i haven't done this yet the ssl bus compressor i'm going to add that to my compressor folder right now then i'm gonna hit done and now if i go into my compressor folder which is right here there's the ssl native bus compressor so let's go to a software instrument track so you can see how that looks so you can see here that i have all my favorite synths and samplers right here alchemy in a two battery four electro x i mean contact massive nexus pigments pigments two well it's pigments too anna we have spire serum right they're all there so to do to do that to get that set up how i have it you'd go back into your preferences you go to your plug-in manager and you would want to do top level and then go to choose you know your favorite synths let's say i wanted to add let's find one that's not there that i like oh diva i've been meaning to add diva so i'll go to yuhi go to diva and i'll add that to top level i'll go and hit done and now if i want to load up diva it's going to show up right here as opposed to having good au instruments yuhi yuhi and then diva so it's a little bit quicker a little bit easier now another thing you can do to quickly load up a couple of these stock plug-ins in logic there's these little like hot zones i don't even know why they're why they're there i think they're just like a remnant of future past basically so let me delete a couple of these plugins here so let's say you wanted to load up the stock eq on logic you can of course go here and drag you know go to the drop-down list but you can actually click this eq tab right here and it will pop the the channel eq on your track now the slit right above it which is even weird at least at least that other one says eq this will actually load up the compressor so it's a quick load for accessing the compressor now here's a cool thing let's go to a plug-in here that i have other things on so let's say i'm like oh crap i didn't eq out the lows of this track and i have cassette and replica and i don't want to drag these down manually like so and then add my eq right so if you hold down alt and click you'll notice that eq jump the equalizer jumps to the first slots so the next few features we're going to look at they're all going to be advanced automation features so here is a perfect example of how you can make use of one of those so in logic you can actually curve your automation line so you can actually change basically the aggressiveness of a slope in terms of turning it down or turning it up kind of like when we looked at changing the curve of a fade in and fade out earlier in the video so here's an actual real world example i'm starting a lo-fi demo here and i want to have a super cliche beach ocean wave sound start out in the intro but i want to have this volume [Music] dip down a little bit faster as the synth comes in so what you can do to curve your automation is you can bring up your your toolbar and you can select the automation curve toward w and now i can curve this down so this will help me avoid this big wave splash right here a little bit better [Music] alright so that's actually a perfect segue into the next automation feature i'm going to show you so if you don't have this feature turned on you might kind of really hate automation in logic so by default if you want to find the parameter within any given plugin that you want to automate you have to go into a drop down folder and find that plug-in in a drop-down list and then find the parameter in the plug-in that you want to automate and with something like for instance fabfilter pro q3 you have hundreds of options so there's an easier way and it basically allows you to just touch the control on the actual plugin and that will bring up its automation lane whether it's active or not so check this out if i pull up fab filter pro q3 and i want to automate all i have to do is touch the knob and watch the automation lay in the background i can touch frequency and now it's loaded up that automation lane so as soon as i click in here to create an automation node or point we'll be applying it to the frequency let's say i wanted to automate the queue watch what happens to this line back here as i tap the q knob it moves around so you have to turn that on it's not on by default i don't know why so i'll show you how to do that now and to turn that on you just have to go up to the mix drop down menu at the very top of logic and select this where it says auto select automation parameter in read mode so with that on that should work just like that so now i can go back into fab filter pro q3 i can tap the frequency knob and now i can start to increase that filter so more frequencies are coming through as my ocean waves are getting quieter [Music] all right so the next advanced automation feature we're gonna check out isn't super applicable to the track that i was working on that i showed you the past two examples for but it's a good time to show you nonetheless and it's called snap automation it's the perfect tool to use when you want your automation to actually be in time on beat in groove with your actual track so by default you can move any automation point or node in between any tick mark depending on what grid setting you have so i i have four four and then a sixteenth division so i can move you know freely between if i turn on snap automation by right clicking and selecting snap automation this will actually snap to rhythmic counts right all right so i just changed the division to 32 and now you can see i have more tick marks at the top and this allows me to hit each tick mark in between and the last advanced feature i'm going to show you this more of a tip and trick with automation centers around using touch automation so touch automation is pretty cool you can actually set the read to a different mode down here where it's called touch read mode reads the automation that you've penciled in touch mode basically records and remembers anything that you do while you're playing that track and if you move knobs around in a plug-in or an x-y slider or something like that it'll capture that automation so for instance if i will load up a plug-in that's good for this type of type of automation and i think this works well with more performative oriented instruments let's load up portal by output and what i'm going to do is i'm just going to hit play and as i do this i'm going to move this side around [Music] and you can see that a ton of automation happened in the background if i open up my automation lanes here we'll go we'll take this to read over touch well now we can now see that you know there's some crazy autumn automation shapes happening inside of this uh this track now and so this isn't going to be super applicable again to this track but let's turn off snap automation for now because that snapped everything to the actual grid while i was moving the automation around so this trips up a lot of producers there's this certain element of okay that touch automation is really cool it's fun it's performative but now i have all these crazy nodes and if you want to make any fine tweaks it is a pain in the butt so here's how you can get over that huge annoyance of trying to not deal with all these different you know nodes that are really tight tightly spaced so bring up your toolbar open your eraser tool and go in between the first point in the next area that you want to change and now you just start erasing and you can keep the general shape by just following along with the erase tool alright so the next few features we're going to check out in this video we'll all center around one concept and that's being able to better manipulate drum loops to get the rhythm or groove that you're after to make it more unique for your track so i'm gonna pull in two drum loops from our free lo-fi pack haze if you guys want to download that the link will be in the description they sound like this so the first thing i want to show you is how you can make use of what's called a groove template to basically take the rhythm of one loop and apply it to another all right so the first step is to turn on flex time for both of the loops now the best results are probably going to be had with either the slicing algorithm or the rhythmic algorithm anytime you're working with rhythmic material material in logic so i'm just going to go with slicing for this now what you're going to do is you're going to find figure out which one you want to use as your guide template so i think i want to use this one as the guide so i'm going to go into the inspect the inspector region over here and i'm going to go to the quantize drop down and i'm going to quantize it with one of the swings so that might tweak the rhythm just a little bit that's kind of the whole idea so now what i'm going to do is i am going to click that drop down again and select make groove template now i'm going to go to my track that i want to apply that group template to i'm going to go to the quantize and you'll see down the bottom we can actually apply the rhythm of that lo-fi top loop so that other track to this track so when i hit that and it just changed the rhythm for it all right so this next feature is really cool it's going to allow you to take a drum loop and turn it into a playable drum kit now this works best with more simplistic drum loops if there's a kick and a snare involved or it works really well with straight up percussion top loops high hat loops let's first do it with just a kick and snare loop so i'm going to drag this track in it's at 145 bpm [Music] and what i'm going to do is i'm just going to click this whole region and drag down to either quick sampler or i could do drum machine designer so you'll get two different results so if you're trying to do like a kick and snare and turn it into a playable drum kit on your keyboard or your your drum controller do drum machine designer logic is going to go through and turn this into a drum machine designer track depending on how many notes or transients there are in the loop it could take a second but now there's that kick there's my snare all right so with this percussion loop i'm not going to turn it into a drum machine designer track i'm going to turn it into a quick sampler track so we're going to go to quick sampler optimized and we're going to pull up it's going to click sampler with a bunch of flags it basically chopped everything at a transient now you can right click in this window and you're going to select copy midi pattern now you're going to go into the track at the start you're going to right click and select paste for pasting that midi pattern now we'll delete the one that was there now this is going to play back exactly as our loop was [Music] here's where it gets fun because this is just a hi-hat pattern it doesn't really matter which note happens which is just a bunch of hi-hats and percussion sounds so i can take this region and i can use the midi transform tool in logic to generate a whole different pattern from this one pattern so we'll go to functions we'll go to midi transform and we're going to do we'll do random we'll do random pitch you don't want to change the length because these notes are a very specific length so they play back the exact pattern so now i'm going to we'll do c1 to c5 take a quick look at the range this this goes a little bit higher set to c7 and now we're going to go to select and operate so it's going to move and fan out the pitches for all those notes but it's going to keep the length of everything the same so now i've made a new hi-hat pattern and if i play this with my drum loop [Music] right it's actually pretty cool it might need a little bit of tweaking but it's a very easy way to generate new ideas from loops that you already have all right so who out there has ever played a really cool melody baseline chord progression only to realize you weren't recording it happens too i feel like everyone well thankfully logic as well as a lot of other daws they have this thing that basically brings back something you didn't even record and in logic it is called capture recording so that's why i said up like probably 30 minutes ago in this video when we talked about customizing the control bar and the transport window up here at the top that you would want to add something to your to your transport bar so if it's not there if you didn't do that you're slacking let's go back there and you're going to go to the transport and you want to make sure you have you want to make sure that you have capture recording on that's that second little record icon with the line around it so what this will allow me to do is let's say i'm just messing around with this instrument like i pulled up one of our panel libraries for contact and i'm just dinking around right unless i'm like oh i played something really cool there i can hit stop while it's playing and just click this button and it will bring it [Music] back this isn't an advanced feature so much as it is a slept on feature it's notepads there's a really cool notepad function in logic you can write to-do lists you can you know if you're collaborating with other producers or artists you can use this to communicate ideas you can put links to youtube videos to be like oh i need i want to watch a tutorial on this or i got an idea from this video you can put links to spotify songs for references i use this all the time and you can do it on a project base or a track base so let's say with this track i i wanted to you know write myself a to-do list i could i could just you just click edit and you can start typing right and you can actually drag in pictures so i'm going to drag in a picture here and drag in just a flat image of serum so yeah there's so many cool features you could use the notepads for it all right so again this is not an advanced feature i would say so much this is a hidden feature and a lot of people just don't use it maybe they don't know about it logic's browser for when you're browsing for samples and loops isn't great i'm not talking about the apple loops i'm talking about samples that you've downloaded you know sample packs from online splice whatever it might be so you can click your browser tab here or you can hit f to bring this up and then there's a bookmark folder here and you can bookmark folders on your hard drive so you could get really organized with this and then all you ever have to do to access your favorite samples from within logic is just hit f and hit the bookmark tab and you're there alright so that's going to sum up this video if you guys have any questions or comments you can post those below and we'll get back to you as soon as we can if you guys aren't subscribed to our channel you know the drill hit that subscribe button the support really does mean a lot to us and if you guys haven't ever checked out our website echosoundworks.com definitely head on over there's a ton of free content samples loops and presets and of course there's some premium sound sets and sample packs as well and lastly if you guys use instagram consider giving us a follow we run a lot of contests giveaways and promotions on that platform and i think you guys will like what we're doing over there alright thank you for watching i'll see you next time

Channel: Echo Sound Works

Views: 121,087

Rating: 4.979816 out of 5

Keywords: logic pro x, logic pro x tutorial, logic pro x tips, logic pro x hacks, home studio, nathan larsen tutorial, logic pro x beginner tutorial, best logic pro x tutorial, advanced tips in logic pro x, logic pro x 10.5, using logic pro x, logic pro 10.5, logic pro x beat making, logic pro x masterclass, logic pro x hidden features, logic x tips and tricks, logic 10.5 pro tips, logic 10.5, logic pro tips and hacks, echo sound works, echo sound works logic x

Id: 7ihLr7B8Hfc

Length: 54min 41sec (3281 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020