Automation Tutorial in Logic Pro X [For Beginners]

using automation with logic pro x this is a short tutorial on how to use automation what it is and some basic automation that you can get started with today for beginners how i will structure this video is quickly show you what automation is why you would want to use it and then we'll get into some basic automation and walk through the process this is a song example that i do have complete and it is available for sale if you want to release it on spotify or sing on it you need beats to make music this song is available for sale automation is strictly it automates different things inside logic and what that means is um you can automatically change for example the volume throughout your track um let's say we were listening to my track here and at some points of the song i didn't want the kick drum to be so loud or some parts of the song i wanted it to be louder so without me having to like sit here every time the song is playing and change this volume filter or this sorry this volume fader without having to go like up at the certain points of the song or down um i can just automate that and i can program it into logic so it knows okay at the chorus make the kick louder or um at this part of the song make the vocal reverb shine brighter and longer why you want to use automation is because it makes your song more exciting and it makes your song more dynamic without automation your song is the same from start to finish and so nothing changes of course progressions change the dynamic of your session player will change hopefully to view our automations we press a on the keyboard and so this expands for every single track this little drop-down um kind of space here where it has these different drop downs and then it kind of grays out our tracks and then you can see all these lines here like what the heck is all the lines right let's just make this a bit smaller so you can kind of see this a bit better and that's what i mean by dynamics in the song and so you can see here it gets a little quieter it's a little louder things are changing and it makes things exciting so pressing a and closing opens and closes your automations let's start adding these automations from scratch we're going to look at adding a volume automation a reverb automation and channel eq of filter automation to change the eq of the song as it goes over time so let's first take a look at the most basic automation you can add which is volume automation i have our main keys here and we're going to add a rise volume automation to add some excitement here so i'm going to press a to open that up and we're just going to zoom in on the track here and to add an automation you go underneath where it has the drop down we have other areas where we can add automation we have smart controls that are available with this keys instrument and we have these plugins here one two three four are the four plug-ins that we have on the track and we can go into these plug-ins and automate anything available within that plug-in for example let's take the compressor these are all elements of a compressor right attack autogain which are all available within this compressor okay but not to worry let's focus on volume and so how we want to add this volume automation is we can right away go to our little grayed out area here and click in and this will have a generate this yellow line for us which is at the negative 12.2 db which is what the current volume was at and so we can be clicking in here again and adding different dots and start drawing our automation in so let's say from this bar to bar 2 we wanted to go up you know maybe not that much but maybe this much and then over time we want it to rise slowly up and then we want to end really loud i mean this is kind of too loud to think of it but probably more do an automation like it's just slowly a nice slow build so we would go up here and maybe end it now you can also click these white dots and delete them so if we solve this track and hear what that listens to it's like this look at the fader here it's slowly going up that's one way to add automation you can go and kind of paint it as you will with the mouse let's do another way which is maybe more easier uh depending on how you like to do things so let's right click on this box and disable sorry delete visible automation that's just going to delete that automation for us and we're going to do the same thing but we're going to actually use this volume fader as the track is being played and we do that by going here and then we're going to switch from read to latch and latch is basically means like hey when you press play and the track is going and you're touching the volume fader that's going to program that in for you so you'll see exactly when i press play and play with this volume fader it's going to draw the automation in for me so you can see i kind of had a little fun there and kind of went down and back up and that's exactly what it did as soon as you're done with um latch make sure sure you're about to read because if you press play again and press something else it's going to program that in for you so this is what we have and we if we like it like this we can just go with it if we don't we can also be clicking in and i can drag across and re-edit that you know clean it clean it up if i made a mistake and do do my thing if you're just beginning with automation don't worry about right that overwrites everything that you've done so not a smart um thing to do unless you are real pro which you will be soon i hope and then touch is the same thing as latch and i'll show you what that is because it can be valuable with volume automation so let's delete this automation again we'll go touch and touch the same thing with latch so i'm gonna just um use the volume fader here and then as soon as i'm done it's gonna it's gonna go right back to where the volume started and that is helpful because let's say you want your piano keys these main keys here you want it to be at negative six and then when the kind of first chorus drop happens or whatever when the verse starts you want it back at negative 6.6 and that's exactly what touch is going to do so let's program this in so you can see that's what latch did as soon as i stopped the automation i'm just gonna go back to read here i went right back down to negative six let's look at the next automation type which is reverb automation why you might want to use reverb automation is some sections in the song you want the reverb to have a longer decay or you know it sounds like it's really echoing and but you don't always want that to happen all the time throughout the song so for example let's use these vocal candies left and right so we have a stereo kind of vocal candy here and it sounds normal like this [Music] let's say we want the first little one here to have normal reverb but then we want the second one here to have a bigger reverb so let's do this from scratch now and add a reverb so you can see what i do from scratch so we have our vocal candy here let's add a new send um let's find an empty send bus 14 to aux 12 and add a space designer reverb to get something really big here large outdoor spaces soccer field a massive reverb okay x that go to our drop down here and we'll under um our sends are under main and you can see our five cents here one two three four five those are the same those are what these are one two three four five down here those are five cents so we have our last send our fifth send going to aux 12 which would be uh main send five aux 12. we have absolute so now we have our automation loaded in to the thing we want to automate which is our huge soccer field space designer so we can we can always be going in and clicking in here and then drawing it in to what we want and sometimes that is great if you know exactly the levels you want but that also can be difficult sometimes because it you don't really know what you're doing so let's do it exactly let's do it as we hear the song and we'll play with the knobs so let's refresh this by doing delete visible automation making sure at the beginning because we're going to go now we're going to go latch and then we're going to play with this bus send as the track goes we're gonna pop that up and then come down with it so let's press play [Music] let's plus let's delete that and also do it again with uh unsold so you can hear the rest of the tracks [Music] all right so that that might be cool right the last type of automation i want to show you that can be good for beginners would be like a filter channel eq automation and a very popular one that you hear a lot is when like the sound kind of rises up and sounds like it's underwater and then comes above the surface again we will go and make sure we have a channel eq on our track so as we see here we do have this um i like to use fabfilter um eq and let's use this stock plug-in as an example because um if you if you don't have fat filter eqs will make well we'll be on the all the same level here so add a logic eq by just double clicking on that we'll bring up this eq box and we will go now to our drop down automation under where it says volume and we will look for our plug-in eq and then we are going to look for um we're going to do a low-cut frequency and so that's going to be like the underwater sound we want to make sure to in order to do the low-cut frequency on our channel eq plug-in window here that the low cut is clicked on and so now it's clicked on you can see it's cutting a little bit and again i can go in right away and edit with my mouse here and i can start at 2000 hertz or i can you know cut off everything and you can see the channel eq is already kind of making that for me you can also do it with latch and make and start here and press play and slowly drag it over so let's do with latch right now let's get a little more space i have the loop on here let's go to bar five here and do a longer automation so let me just delete that automation and go to my low cut frequency uh there we go i see you see what the problem was there i i was on latch still and i was like fooling around things so delete that automation press enter to go get my playhead back to 1 and now we will press play and [Music] start so there's your automation for you there's your low-cut frequency automation and it's drawn it in and then go ahead and edit that if you'd like let me know in a comment if you are struggling with automation i i'll answer them all and please feel free to subscribe if you'd like some more logic tutorial videos hope to see you in the next one

Channel: Charles Cleyn

Views: 14,584

Keywords: automation tutorial logic pro x, logic pro automation tutorial, logic pro automation tips, logic pro automation volume, logic pro automation not working, logic pro automation shortcuts, logic pro automation quick access, logic pro automation multiple tracks, logic pro automation latch, logic pro automation midi, how to use automation in logic pro x, channel eq automation logic pro x, reverb automation logic pro x, volume automation logic pro x, cut off automation logic pro x

Id: xuCTA2uDCdk

Length: 13min 28sec (808 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 29 2020