Film Scoring Masterclass with Logic Pro X

hi I'm Mike Roberts head of the electronic music department here at the Guildhall school the other day we all decanter LSO sent Luke's the impressive home of the London Symphony Orchestra to deliver two master classes in film scoring and filmmaking we're particularly excited at this time to deliver these master classes because they highlight the fact that we now offer film music as a principal study degree discipline so that's electronic music game audio live electronics sonic arts music production and film music that can now be studied in the artistically rich environment of a music Conservatoire here in the heart of London presenting our master class in film scoring is one of our long-standing professors Johnny Buchanan last year John who explained his production workflow in a masterclass that's gone on to receive over 320,000 views online and I know that his expertise is worth sharing more widely than that so if you enjoy this masterclass please do like share and hit subscribe for now I know you can enjoy it as Johnny delivers a true master class in film scoring would you join me in welcoming to the stage professor and composer Jenna Buchanan thank you so much Paul much appreciated thanks a lot okay welcome so nice to see so many people here thank you so much for giving up the Wednesday lunchtime to come and learn a little more about film scoring in Logic Pro 10 I appreciate you probably all rather beating sandwiches so thank you for being here as Paul mentioned this is effectively the second episode in our Logic Pro 10 masterclass series a year ago I was standing on a stage at Milton Court just down the road taking you through logics workflow and obviously today the subject will be going through is film scoring instead but the reason why I'm mentioning that masterclass apart from you know a little bit of narcissism perhaps is because that video is as Paul mentioned online and it may well prove to be a really useful additional learning resource last year I started by saying that we were going to be going through tips for beginner intermediate and more advanced logic users and that's true again today but it is fair to be saying we've got a lot to cover and we're going to be going on and a fair old clip so definitely go back to that video if you haven't had a chance to look at it already okay on with the show so we have a film to work on today which has been made specially for us this afternoon it's called Just In Time and the first thing we're going to do long before we even think about opening up logic is just to view it in QuickTime I'm just going to back the volume down a little bit because it's quite noisy and I'm just going to press play and we should be all ready to go so this is just in time guess what she said yes do you never make it on time yeah not one myselfi won't come on let's go hey I made it yeah it's been time okay so just your classic boy gets text from girl boy does parkour boy-meets-girl story okay so we've all been there maybe not all of us okay so there we are we've watched that in QuickTime now the reason for that is because of course the temptation whenever you're about to start working on a new film scoring project is just to get the video into logic and immediately just start throwing sounds around and just beginning to see what sticks but we're going to be a little bit more strategic than that and the reason that we've watched the film sort of outside of logic is because what we really need to do I think whenever we're starting a new film scoring project is to identify a theme something which can get it up and running and maybe instruct us in terms of the sounds that we might then go on to use in terms of building the project that we're working to and I think it's fair to say that the sort of principle theme of this film is time from the moment the guy looks at his watch all the way through this kind of raced the whole way through until the moment that the girl says okay you've made it just in time we've got time as this concept is he going to make it and I think really from a film scoring point of view it's that that is going to be the sort of seed of the sort of creative foundation of what we want to go on and build so now that we have actually identified our theme what we're going to do is to open logic and then what we're going to do is to think about starting a project but actually just before I go to the farm menu let's just have a think about that too I could of course start with a brand new logic project and I can start populating that with sound and again as I say beginning to see what sticks and what feels right but the vast majority of film composers don't work that way what they'll do instead is to open what's called a template now let's suppose for a moment that I was the sort of film composer who worked every single day with strings and woodwinds and brass and percussion samples I could spend the first two hours of every day of my life setting up exactly the same instruments that I set up yesterday morning but that of course be a real waste of time so what templates do is to allow you to configure a group of sounds effects all sorts of other things that will go on to see which you can then use as a starting point for a brand new project and I've made a template for today's session just to give us some sounds to get up and running so I'm going to come to new from template I'm going to come to my templates and here is a template that I've made for this film called just in time now just before I press choose and we actually open this project we can see that there are a number things that we can configure within a template down at the bottom of the screen for start I've identified that at least for the beginning of the film I feel like a tempo of about 116 BPM is going to be about right something nice and Pacey nevertheless not too far so that's going to just get us started we'll come back to tempo in due course I've also identified that I want to work in G minor I'm working at 48 kilohertz which is pretty standard for music to picture projects and also I'm working a frame rate of 30 frames per second which is just displayed here as 29.97 so having drawn your attention to those elements I'm then going to just press choose and logic will load the project now you can see straight away even though it's taking a little longer than it might be to open a brand-new project not really that much longer and now suddenly I've got a group of sounds which are going to allow us to get up and running and as I say identify our theme of time and how we might just start working but of course I don't have a film yet so let's go to file and let's go to movie and let's go and find it the film was on the desktop we've seen it there already so I'm just going to click there I'm going to bring it in here and then I'm going to press open now what I do that logic is going to ask me whether or not in addition to opening the film I also want to extract the audio track which contains our sound effects in our dialogue I definitely want that I'm going to need that so that I can write to it so I press ok in comes the film and in comes that audio file on a brand new audio track here at the top ok what I'm actually going to do is to rename this this is obviously taking the name of the film at the moment but I want to be called I want this to be called dialogue and sound effect I'm just going to type this in and we're going to learn our first key command of the afternoon which is shift + option + N and what that does is to rename the track based on the track name so in other words where I've labeled that it's now applied that to the region and actually that's going to be really useful in a number of contexts this afternoon ok so in a moment what I'm going to do is watch the film with you again I'm just gonna back the volume down again in here because I obviously don't want that going to be sort of dwarfing what we're going to be doing from a musical point of view but I'm really aware of the fact that you guys have only seen this film once and normally what would happen at the very beginning of a project where you'd sit down with an editor or a director is that you'd have a creative conversation about what he or she might want you to bring to the project it's called a spotting session it's really common you'll sit down and particularly with longer films it's a great opportunity to identify themes that might recur later on or talk about instrument groups or maybe someone would have written some temp music and what you'll be looking to do is just sort of find out what works well of the temp and what maybe doesn't work quite so well so a spotting session is a really good creative sort of kickoff place for the ideas that you might work through with the director now we're going to have a spotting session right now partly so that you get a chance to watch the film again but also just so we can identify a few really crucial moments including perhaps the most important lesson of the entire afternoon which is when to write music and when not to write music it feels to me at the very beginning of this film that these two guys get together and we don't know yet that they're capable of these remarkable physical achievements so at the moment they could just be - any eyes just hanging out one guy excitedly saying that he might have got a date with this girl it's only when they start moving that we become aware of the fact they might not be like the rest of you obviously I'm one of these guys to say obviously so I've deliberately said you there so let's just watch it through again we're gonna have a bit of a spotting session and we'll just begin to identify some crucial moments within the film so I've muted the dialogue let's just watch this through go to turn the click traffic off as well so at the moment we're just in a place where they've come together this could be any two guys they're just sitting out there just beginning to go to work and just thinking about what they might do next and then we have our crucial moment they jump down and they begin to move and straightaway we're into some of their tricks so that definitely feels like we should have music up and running by this point at this stage we're just beginning to understand a little bit what they're capable of so this definitely feels like an opening theme and we're running through this section all the way to the point here where they run up the stairs and we get our first slow-motion shot that feels important to me that moment then the pace picks up again we're in a different background now we're in this stadium and the guys have separated they're working independently and now they're back together again at this point that this definitely feels like we're trying to push things on a bit now we're into a third landscape where it's surrounded by trees and leaves in a much more natural environment and then we're into the maze this also feels like a sort of third segment of the film overall and then we get our first glimpse of the girl here the pace actually continues despite that skid all the way through to that jump and now everything changes all of the action has stopped we have this slightly awkward little interchange there's a little bit of romance it's a bit shy it's a bit tender it's a bit fragile and certainly all of the pace has gone out of the film at this stage and I think we'll need to reflect that in the music as well so this idea of a spotting session this idea that we might just go through and begin to understand structurally what the film is doing feels like a good place for us to start now as I identified at the very beginning I don't think we need any music we just want to have those guys meet up and begin to chat so what we do need to do is to find the moment where the music might start and then make a musical decision about how we're going to make that work for us as the sort of composition Department of the project so I'm going to zoom in a little bit and we're just gonna watch the beginning one more time and see if we can find a useful place to act as what we call an endpoint here we go guess what she said yes do you never make your time yeah not one myselfi won't come on let's go okay now this is the moment the guy jumps down and this is where I think we're going to start work and if I use the playhead within logic I can actually scroll over this point make this guy jump up and down which is quite nice but in particular what I want to do is to find the moment where he really hits the ground and I think that's this bit of waveform here let's just watch that again yeah right there now this is the moment where I really want the music to start and by holding down control at the same time as moving the playhead I can really identify that moment quite closely so in terms of identifying this cut fine but from a musical point of view we're in no-man's land I'm halfway between bar seven and eight this isn't the most helpful place for me to say yep that's where I want the music to start so what I need to do is to move the film so that I can identify this moment as a place where musically I'm in better shape in other words I want to move the film to a downbeat so that I can start writing from that point so what I'm going to do is to copy the timecode position which logic is identified here in the transport bar command + C to copy and then what I'm going to do is to move over here to the tempo list and what I can do now is to taste of that time code position right here now what I price what I do that the film is now moved and it's placed fat in point at the beginning of bar one that's not ideal there's loads of film now therefore that's actually before the timeline starts with my project what I want to do is to shift it late so I'm actually going to put it at bar eight and what that should now mean is the moment where the guy jumped down coincides with the beginning of here you can see that within my templates just so you guys know where we are within the film I've identified a few key moments here that I've put in with markers and this one here should be our music starts so I'm gonna put the click back in and we should see as we run through now that the click coincides with him jumping down and that should put us in good shape in terms of actually writing some music come on let's go okay we're in good shape now so suddenly we've got a useful musical end point which is going to allow us to begin the process of writing music so let's close down the tempo list and now we can actually get to the template and find out how I've put some sounds together within here and to find some sounds that I think would be useful I'm going to just make the film a little bit smaller and put it down in the bottom right hand corner and we'll just make the display a bit smaller too okay so the first sound I've got within here is a sound that I like without question but I've also included it within the template because I'm sure like you if you're a logic user I'm not that fond of the sound of the metronome don't about you is kind of annoying so what I want to do is to be in a position where I can replace that as soon as possible with something musically there's going to be a more inspiring sound so this first sound is effectively a sort of a propulsive percussive sound which I'm just going to use as a starting point for building some ideas based around our theme of time it sounds like this okay let's record two bars of that come on let's go okay one note film scoring great let's just mute the dialogue and go back to this region now even though I've played this in live I need to make sure that if I'm going to use this as a sort of loop something that's going to repeat it needs to be absolutely in time so the first thing I'm going to do is to quantize it so I'm going to select a quarter note there so that the know absolutely starts at the beginning of this region and then I'm going to press E to open the editor for it and we're going to learn our second key command of the afternoon and a really useful one we get one we're gonna come back to a lot let's suppose for a moments that I had only recorded a really short note within this region I want to make sure that every time it repeats I get a really smooth loop the key come on I'm going to teach you is shift and backslash and that produces what's called a force legato it makes every note last until the next note takes over or in the case of a region where we only have one note in a region it will last until the very end of that and that's going to be really useful it's gonna give me a smoother loop every time this region repeats so that's force legato we'll come back to it I've played this note quite strongly I'm actually gonna just take its velocity down a little bit which I can do within this editor here as well and we're in good shape so we've got our first sound except that I think we could do more with it in addition to being able to populate a template with sounds we can also use other things including effects and you can see that the first of these is waiting for me right here it's bypassed at the moment but this gives me an opportunity to introduce logics step effects plug-in which is a modular plug in a modular plugin means lots of separate bits which you can turn on and use the bits of that you want to use so you can see that around the edges here I've got power lights for a whole bunch of different types of module and the two that I'm using a little bit of distortion but also this filter and this one in particular is the one that I want to draw your attention to because the moment I take this effect out of bypass you can begin to see that what we've actually done or what I've done here is to create a running sequence of steps sixteen steps and what they're doing is they're being routed through to the filter section of the sound which means that every single sixteenth note has its own tone offset it's are going to be brighter or so when I run that we should hear it you'll hear that the loop suddenly has a lot more purpose here's the original ok so suddenly it's a little bit more up and running and we're just beginning to pick up on this theme of time that I've identified ok let's have a look at the second sound within our project I'm going to copy the first loop down to this second sound and then I'm going to press this one and it's fair to say even before I press play please don't leave I don't like this noise here it comes [Music] okay sort of mid 80s Depeche Mode ok now what I've done here is to identify this sound not because I want to use it in its current form but because I want to show you one of logics most powerful plugins which is alchemy now alchemy is an absolutely remarkable place where I can combine up to four separate layers of sound I can then modulate them in all sorts of ways I can add effects I can add sequences all kinds of stuff in fact we can hear the sequences running through this sound it contains over 2000 sounds in its preset banks and you can begin to see how I've selected this one I've come to our page rated sounds drums perhaps surprisingly it's not very drumming sound this one is in the sound track list and that threw up these six choices and I've chosen this one now all of that functionality I just mentioned a moment ago is available within the Advanced tab and if you are an advanced logic user this is definitely a plug-in that you should spend more time with because it's capable of the most remarkable sounds if however all of that feels a bit complicated for now there was a useful simple tab too and the reason why I've selected this sound is to show off one of Alchemy's most useful features which is this area here which is called the morph pad now what happens as I move these target points around as you can see within the display is that various parameters associated with this sound are changing so maybe the reverb balance change and the sound gets a little bit wetter or maybe we strip out a couple of the layers of the sound so that the sound becomes thinner overall and the area of the sound that I'm particularly interested in is this one down here where it says heartbeat and now when I press play we're going to hear a radically different sound but it is based on the same noise okay so why have I chosen this well first of all it's helping us mark time again but it also feels useful II like the sort of heartbeat element not only does it sort of represent the physical effort the guys are putting in to their run but it also maybe just allows us to kind of get into the territory of romance later on in the film as well see what I've done there clever isn't it okay so there we are we've got our heartbeat now running through we've got time being marked as well now remember our first key command shift option in because I copied that pattern down I'm going to use it again so that the region that we've created there represents or is named after the track that's created it okay one more loop we're going to add from alchemy to now of course I could play this party and I'm gonna just audition it for you on the keyboard it goes like this I sort of couldn't resist this sound in a super contemporary film the idea that we're gonna have lots of anachronistic old clock mechanisms really appeal to me and of course I could add this as a new file in it so write and just record it but this is a little tip that I'm going to show you now if you're a film scorer who maybe sits on the train as much as he or she does in their own studio what we're gonna do is just copy this pattern down one more time again open the editor and this time what I'm gonna do is to select this notes and I'm going to use option and arrow up and I can step through to trigger the key that I've just played now if you use shift option up and down you'll jump in octaves and as I say if you just use option up and down we're moving in semitones so if you're somebody who doesn't have a full range keyboard in front of them and you're working on your laptop then actually this is a nice way of being able to move MIDI around so we've now got three loops all of which have been triggered from the first one again we're just gonna rename that one and so far this is all too easy I've played one note and we've got three loops I think it's time from a rhythmic point of view that we took a slightly more involved look at how we might develop the beats further I'm going to do that by creating a brand-new region for the Nick sound now this sound is from drum machine designer which is logics kind of flagship electronic drum machine and what I'm going to do is to press edit and what I'll see now is the names of the sounds down the left hand side which I want to use within this project - all of the sounds that are available to me and there are couple in here that I like the first one is this sound called click which is down here at the bottom and i ron't want a running sequence of notes here which I'm going to add using logics brush tool now I've selected that just from a tool bar here and brush tool is great it allows me just to draw a line of notes all of which just seamlessly go into the project very neatly the only problem is they're all the same color which means that they're all the same velocity I don't want that I want more variation in this sound so what I'm going to do is to lassu all of these notes together I'm then going to come to functions into MIDI transform and then I'm going to specify random velocity now what this box allows me to do is as you would expect from its name randomize the velocity the strength of each of these individual notes and I can set a range for those here I actually want this sound to be quite low in the mix and from a velocity points of view therefore I'm going to rain these in I'm going to set a range between 15 and maybe about 40 and then while I press select and operates will see that change has taken place if I come back out now here they have different colors and they've been randomized and they're all a little bit lower in the mix so that's great that's what I want and then what I'm going to do is to add the second sound from this kit but I want to use as well which is this sound called noise impact game's going to make this a little bit shorter which I can do within this region too and this sound I've selected because every time we get a jump down or every time we get a strong impact and there are lots of cut points and hits within this film where that happens I wanted to be underpinning that so I'll show you what I mean if I solo this sound I'm gonna run it from just before my loop we'll see this is the moment where the guy jumps down this sound is going to give us a nice impact which I think will feel quite good in the context of the rhythm section overall okay and you can hear the clicks are sort of marking time in a slightly less old-school clock way okay so I've got my first bar of drums here I'm going to repeat that that's command + R to repeat I'm gonna select them both into the tool button into the toolbox again I'm going to glue these two regions together and actually I don't want this impact to happen every bar so having made it a two bar loop what I'm actually going to do is to come back to this second impact and just knock that out and when I come back I'll see I've now got a 2 bar rhythm based on the one that I created for bar 1 okay we're gonna do the same thing again with one more drum machine this one is from ultra beat a different drum machine I've selected this sound I really like this kits called it's full of really small sort of techie noises and Here I am gonna build something a bit more like a sort of conventional rhythm gonna come into here again just double click on the region to open it I'm gonna pick up on the sort of heartbeat pattern that I used from alchemy I'm going to create this little syncopated rhythm which goes like this we've already seen that command and I'll will repeat and that will happen with MIDI as well as it will with entire regions so I'm just gonna repeat that first two beats into the second TB to the bar as well we've also already seen the brush tool going to use it again now for the closed hi-hat and just put a sort of running series of sixteenth notes across here and then I'm going to turn the velocity right down I don't want these to be too strong and I'm also going to put in a little bit of a backbeat just on beats two and four so that we've got something more like a conventional rhythm that sounds like this EDM film scoring okay what I'm then going to do is to repeat that whole rhythm so it becomes two bars long I'm going to select both of these I need to change tool alright let's get rid of those I'm going to just grab the glue and glue these two together and now we've got five parts making up the rhythm section of the track and we'll just hear those all together okay now in our spotting session I identified that this moment from the moment the guide jumps down all the way through to that first set of runs and jumps that they do he then runs up the stairs and then we hit the somersault and that feels like the first moment where we want a change so what I'm actually going to do is to specify all of these loops and I'm going to have to adjust them continue through in two bar loops until we get to that section that you see I've marked it here as a break so I'm just gonna repeat these phrases all the way through to this point however it's going to be a little bit boring if we just have one two bar loop playing the whole way through I actually want to introduce the sort of kick drum and the backbeat that I've put into this most recent sound at bar 12 so it comes in a little bit later so having glued these two two bar regions together I'm going to open this up I'm going to just laugh ooh the notes that I don't want I'm just going to move the film for a moment I'm going to close this button here which is going to Park it up here in the top left hand corner so we'll still be able to see it but it's just occupying less screens I'm going to take these notes out and remove them and I'm going to do the same thing a little bit with this impactful sound as well at the moment where he jumps down we get a nice impact and I think there's another one here I think there's a hand grab where he climbs the wall but there isn't really a strong moment here so it doesn't feel like we're going to need this second impact sound here I'm just gonna take that out and that will now take us through with a slight development through this opening section let's just watch that [Music] okay and we're actually hitting that moment where he does his job really nicely so that feels like it's working well I definitely however don't want these rhythms to continue through that moment where he does his jump but I think we are going to use them again from the moment that the pace picks up so again for now I'm just going to grab these two bars I'm going to copy them across into this section and for now I'm just going to repeat them a few times just to fill in as a sort of placeholder the next section of the film because we're going to move on to the next collection of sounds that I've put in the template now as we can see every time I record something in logic remember the first sound that we put in I record it in live and every time you make a recording in logic by default any new software instrument will be green okay this is the slight OCD part of my personality coming through now I'm a real believer in the idea that it's really useful to you to make the different groups of sounds that you put together color coded separately if you come to a project you've got a hundred tracks and they're all green identifying the sound that you want is really hard so what I'm going to do is to select all of these I'm going to hit option C to bring up the color pane and I'm going to choose this sort of gold color for my drums and that way when I start looking at synthesizers which is the next group of sounds I want to bring in they'll be a different color to the drums that I'm using so far okay so the next sound within my project is called growl big bass and it sounds like this okay not that growl a quite big though I think in order to make this sound justify the name that I've given it we need to record a bar of it and then begin to see how we can bring it to life a little bit let's just put that in now [Music] okay so I'm using this sound because I really like this moment we've got this some slow-motion cut he jumps over the fence and we've got a lot of power in the shot and I want to reflect that in the score as well so again just like before I'm going to quantize that I'm going to open the editor and make sure that the notes is exactly as long as I need it to be using force legato now so far we've seen that not only can I put instruments in a template I can also put effects as we've seen and I can also put lanes of automation now automation is logics way of being allowed you to make changes over time to specific parameters so what does that mean well I'll show you if I press a we're going to open up the automation tab and what that then does is to give me a lane of automation that I've already added to my template now this one is the cutoff frequency for the filter in the synthesizer that I'm using and by drawing a couple of automation points here we're going to begin to get that sort of growl what I want to bring in to this sound as I draw a rise here what's gonna happen is that the toll of the sound will just solo it so we can hear it clearly is going to grow it's going to go from being very muted to just a little bit brighter let's hear that okay so that's starting to happen and that feels good it feels like we could take it further forward though so what we've done there is to add a lane of automation but what I want to do now is to start thinking about effect in more depth than we've seen already again I've got a group of effects waiting to go on this sounds to help shape it and to help it become the sound I really want it to be so the first one of those is called bit crusher this is a sort of digital Distortion what I'm going to do is to unmute it so we can hear it but what I'm also going to do is to draw your attention to there's a little link button here I don't about you if your logic user all the time I end up with 15 logic plug-in windows open at the same time and I'm sort of wading through them and wondering which ones to close by using the link button next time I open a plug-in this one will close and the next window will open which means that I get a much smoother workflow so now when I press play we're going to hear this sound again that's just solo it and this time it's got a bit of digital distortion on it [Music] okay so we're getting somewhere I'm they're gonna bring in a more sort of analog form of distortion sounds like this I don't know where you are but I've got subs behind me here this is great okay fantastic okay we're going to go next I'm gonna go into channel EQ maybe black Eggman it looks like the sub days are over because I've rolled out some of the bass from there sound now and push the top end a little bit so it's going to get a bit fizzy er good I don't want the base to become overwhelming which is why I've done that and then I'm going to introduce tape delay now what this gives me is echo but the reason I like tape delay so much is because what I can do is to introduce random pitch variation like old tape machines used to so what I can now do is to be in a position where I can add what we call flutter pitch variation to those echoes okay it's definitely starting to feel like a growl big base so it's justifying its name so we've got more inserts but what I'm also going to do now is to bring in some auxiliaries that I've also prepared for this project if you work in a template and even if you were working with a sort of orchestral lineup that I mentioned at the very beginning you would want reverbs delays spatial effects to be added to your project it'd be definitely worth making those part of your template I've done that here we've got a reverb on bus number one and what I'm going to do is just push that a little bit louder so this is going to give us a sense of space around this sound there it is okay a little bit more symphonic in character now generally speaking auxiliaries do tend to be spatial effects reverbs and delays as I mentioned but actually any effect can be on an auxilary and the one that I've prepared for this second effect is a much less conventional auxilary effect this one is parallel distortion this is a distortion channel which I want to make available to other sounds within my mix as well which is why I've put it on an auxilary but this is definitely gonna give us a lot more power okay so I think we're there remember where that sound was five minutes ago a really low subby bass sound so in terms of using effects to shape sounds that's a really powerful way of being able to build your own noises and feel like you're sort of in control of the sounds that you're working with okay so let's come out of solo mode because I want to use this sound more than once I'm going to turn off the loop for a second and we'll just see how this sort of second section of the film is going to shape up I definitely want to use it again here and I want to use it one more time as well but before I do copy it a second time up has popped a box with logic asking me if I want to copy the automation data that I've created which I do and I also want to copy it another time when I put the third iteration of this region here so I'm going to press copy again now we've already got one break here and I think there's another one coming in the film as well yeah sure enough I can see from the markers that I've created that I've got another break coming so if I again just roll over the film this is the moment where the guy jumps up into the tree and then he's going to jump back down again and I want to pause the music at this point so I definitely don't need these drums I'm gonna get rid of those remember we just copied a few regions at the beginning but what I also want to do is to manage these loops so that they stop at this point so I'm going to select the scissors tool I'm going to last through them all first then select the lizard the scissors tool and then I'm going to click on this moment right here now when I let go logic pops up with this box which says okay what do you want to do with the notes at the moment that you're about to cut them I could keep them which means that the regions would get shorter but all of those notes would keep playing definitely not what I want I could split them which means that the notes would be retried at the point where I'm cutting them or I can shorten them which is exactly what I want to do here when I press ok we can now see that those MIDI regions stopped at that point which means it's very easy for me to last see these little bits that I don't need anymore and they're gone so we're now hitting that cut too which is great but I do want however is to make sure that this notes lasts all the way through so edit force legato and then what I'm going to do is to open up automation again and just make an adjustment here so that that growl lasts all the way through that slightly longer region so we've got our first synth part running through what I've identified is what I call the action section in this middle bit of the film let's have a look at the next sound this one is from logic Oh since this is a really friendly instrument to get to know if you're new to synthesis so we're going to be using a sound from it here and we're going to see that the brush tool which we've used in terms of programming beats is also a really useful tool if you want to program since I'm going to come in here grab the brush tool and just create a running sequence of notes here I don't think they're going to be loud enough I'm going to push their velocity up a little bit and what we'll do is just solo its parts so we can hear it I'm going to put a loop around it here it comes okay that's fine but I actually want that to be an octave lower so I can use the editor here in the top left hand corner I'm going to use a transposition offset of 12 so it drops down an octave what I'm also going to do is to fix the dynamic so they're all exactly the same a MIDI 64 velocity is measured from 1 to 127 and by selecting fixed in the middle I'm fixing all of these at 64 and then I can create the velocity offset that I want just here and what I'm also going to do is to use a gate time offset gate time literally means note length so by separating or taking that down to 50% these notes will be more punchy and there it is now down at the bottom now if I wanted to make those a permanent these changes that I've made here a permanent part of this region I can press ctrl + N and that's what's called normalizing sequence parameters which is a posh way of saying that anything I put in that box is made a permanent part of that region okay let's come out of solo mode and just have that part also play through to this moment we know that that is our out point there so I'm just going to use the scissors to cut at that point and then we can throw away that part there and then it's high time that I actually recorded something again so I'm going to do that for this next sound which sounds like this this is also from alchemy okay let's just put this part in that I've got in mind here [Music] okay so let's sort out timing as well again I'm going to use quantize to put that in time I'm going to again fix my dynamics I'm going to put a little velocity offset here this sound velocity triggers how bright it is how much it bites and I want it to bite quite a lot here so I'm using quite a big velocity offset there and again I'm going to fix those parameters so they're made permanent it's time we picked a color I think for our since I'm going to go for something a little bit more purple I warned you that I was going to be hot on color there it is again it won't be the last time I mention it either I don't suppose okay so we've got our since beginning to come together and we're in good shape now as you can probably tell from my template I hadn't sort of joyous process with this film because unlike usually my director said I want you to work with sounds that you want to use with two caveats there were two instrument groups that I'd like you to consider when it comes to writing the score and those are brass and strings and this synth part this growl big bass part feels like it might be a good time for Institue introduce one of those instrument groups specifically brass I think that sound might double really nicely with some raspy brass okay we've still got four sounds which we haven't even identified or looked at yet but just from looking at their names you should be able to see that actually none of them are brass so what I need to do is to be in a position where I can somehow go and find those sounds and bring them in now of course I could set them up from scratch but as I said at the beginning actually that takes time and somehow you want to work at your the pace of your creative workflow and suddenly having to stop and set these sounds up from scratch isn't really ideal so what I want to be able to do is to browse somewhere else go and find those sounds if I know they exist in another project and bring them into this one and we're gonna do that in just a second but what I'm also going to do is to draw your attention to anyone working in the template be careful so far we haven't actually saved this project because we started from a template logic is effectively using this as an untitled new document feels like a good time that we should save it I'm just going to call it just in time and then we're good to go so now we've actually got a new document here and which obviously we could recall at any stage so I'm going to come up to the browser's area which is up here in the top right hand corner and within these browsers I can use all files to go anywhere on my computer to go and find another logic project one which maybe contains the sounds that I want to use I've got a little bookmark here I'm going to go into here and into logic projects and I've got a project cook brass and strings which uses two trombones and two horns which are the instruments that I want to add to this project now I only want to bring in the plug-in which is hosting these samples so I'm selecting that option we're going to be using contact for the samples that I'm running this afternoon and I'm then going to press add and they're going to be added to my project now you might be thinking is that quicker than setting those sounds up from scratch well hopefully we'll just answer that question because they're already in the project they've come in already so if I close this down what I can then do is to grab these four parts I'm just gonna bring them down to the bottom of my arrangement underneath everything else just as a group so the brass is down here okay now we are using Spitfire audio symphonic brass for this collection of sounds there are loads of third party orchestral libraries available definitely do your research before making purchases if you want to go and buy third-party libraries I like these ones which is why we're using them this afternoon okay so the trombone sound that I've identified here sounds like this big and fruity and I think you can begin to see that it might be a nice accompaniment to that synth part that I created before so what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab that synth part and just drag it down to here and put it on the trombone track too logic is going to ask me if I want to copy the automation data of course this time I don't there isn't a filter on these sounds in the same way so I'm not going to copy that and we should now find that we've got a nice big growly trombone noise at the beginning or the underpinning this synth part good I think that's gonna work well I'm gonna just take the film and put it over there for a moment as well so we've now got some brass I think I warned you they need a brassy color too don't say I didn't warn you okay shift option and in I'm just gonna rename those trombones okay fine so we've got the first of our brass sounds in it in a minute we're going to populate this whole brass sort of setup with some of these other sounds too but I haven't just bought in brass because I wants to underpin some synth parts I also want to take the brass further and create something a bit more dynamic now again going back to our spotting section the next section of the film is what I've identified as what I call the superhero section now the reason I call it that is if we look through this section of the film again the guys come back together they start moving through the trees they jump down here within suddenly heading towards the maze and we've got these shots where the guys running towards us and this kind of reminded me of sort of watching a superhero TV shows when I was a kid these days superheroes make billions of dollars and we've got the whole Marvel Universe but when I was a child though superheroes sort of wore their pants outside their tights and these are the sorts of superheroes we're talking about here I want to find a way of making sure that we get a sort of really big stompy old-school superhero theme happening underneath this section of the film so again what I'm going to do is Park the film for a moment I'm going to take this little to bar region that I've created and I'm going to repeat it again through this point up to the next moment where the break happens which I think is here for now we won't worry we'll make that cuts in a little while so I've now got something that I'm going to record too but what I need to do is to introduce you to the theme that I'm going to write it goes a bit like this so we get this big arcing shape now you might already have spotted that we've got a bit of a problem with this sound but we're going to address that problem in just a moment let me put the tune in first [Applause] [Music] okay so it stops at that point that this definitely feels like a good moment to break those drums so that we're also stopping at this moment at this point okay again I'm going to shorten these and throw away the regions that I don't need okay let's just solo this brass part again for a second so that we can address the fact that whilst some of these notes kind of sound okay some of them really don't again I'm going to just make sure that from a MIDI point of view everything is as it should be I'm going to fix the dynamics so that again we're at MIDI 64 and I'm going to create an offset so that the notes are pushed a little bit louder and I'm also going to select quantize to make up for my poor timing in any performance issues that I might have had from that perspective let's just hear this tune again okay so the long notes kind of sound okay the short ones really don't because before they've really had a chance to speak we've moved on to the next notes and so there's no power there's no emphasis on those notes and that really shouldn't come as a surprise effectively I'm sort of asking a sample brass player to somehow know that I want emphasis on the short notes but I'm happy for him or her disarmed Paul really to produce a smoother note on the more legato notes and of course one patch one articulation as we call them is never going to give me that expression what I need is a way of being able to switch from one type of articulation to another so I can move from long smooth notes to short punchy ones and logic has got a fantastic feature which allows me to do this which I'm going to introduce you now which is called articulation mapping going to close down the region inspector I'm going to open up the one for this particular track and down here I have the option to create what's called a new articulation set so when I do that up pops a dialog box and the first articulation that I'm going to create is called Long's long notes okay we are working on really channel one so I'm going to tell logic that as well and then going to create another articulation for the short or what we call staccato notes again I want to tell logic and we're still working on ready channel one for those sounds too and also what I can do here is to add a symbol to these notes this is the staccato symbol that players would be used to seeing if they were working with scores and we're gonna see that that's going to be useful a bit later on I'm going to just click the staccato option here and we'll see it again later then what I'm going to do is to come into the output tab because I need to tell Logic exactly what I'm trying to do here so how do I normally switch articulations well the way that sample libraries work is they present you with a playable range for you to program the notes that you want to work with but what they tend to then do is to give you also a series of what we call key switches ways of being able to switch from one articulation to another on keys outside of that playable range and these samples are no different what I've got a key switch is right down at the bottom of my keyboard in octave C - - in fact is the first one right down off the end which allow me to switch between these articulations and in the articulation mapper I can set those up here so firstly I need to tell logic that we're going to use what's called a MIDI note on message a key switch in other words for both of these articulations again I can just specify the channel that I want to work with and then what I'm going to do is to say okay yep the long notes are on C - - and the staccato z' are on f - t which is here so what I can then do is to close this box down and then I'm going to save it I'm going to save it as trombones and this adds it to my articulation list and now when I press play on this sound or should hear those two articulations [Music] okay that's kind of alright but actually I think I might have missed the right articulation for the staccato is that I want so I'm going to edit that go to come back into here I'm going to specify that actually I want to use F sharp to form ice to car so let's try that instead [Music] okay that's giving me a little bit more power so that's great I'm going to just keep that exactly where it is and what I can then do is to map this across some other sounds as well so I'm going to make sure that all of these sounds are labeled those trombone and what I can then do is to copy them down to the second instrument where I can also specify that I want to use the trombones here now I'm also going to drag them down to the horns which I've brought in as well but these use a slightly different articulation which I've made already which is horns just here and we're going to put the same thing on this second group of horns too and now we should have a nice big master brass section [Music] okay good so we've begun to see how articulation switching can work but that's not the only way in which it's possible to drive samples within logic and it's a hugely important feature that we're gonna look at next which allows me to work with what we call midi control now then what MIDI controllers do is they allow you to very different ways of approaching different sample groups and in particular we're going to focus on two separate MIDI controllers today now I've got a pair of faders in front of me which I've mapped the first one of which is controlling what we call MIDI expression that is basically just the volume of the samples that we're using and that's on MIDI controller 11 which is this fader here the other one controls something a little bit more nuanced this is the modulation wheel you'll find a modulation wheel on most controller keyboards I've mapped it to a slider but what it's doing here is to allow us to move through different velocity groups now what does that mean okay well let's just first of all explore MIDI expression just see how easily that can work so here's one note and here is MIDI expression controlling its volume okay so that's pretty straightforward I can turn it up and down in terms of its volume but if I use the modulation wheel we get a slightly different effect let me explain this once we've heard it [Music] okay so if you're making sample libraries what you want to be able to do isn't just to have one dynamic layer one layer of sound which is either recorded loudly or quietly what you want to be able to do is to fade crossfade between those layers so that if you want to produce let's say a crescendo for instance you're in a position to do that by moving from quiet sample layers through to loud ones as we just did with that slider and in particular what I want to make sure that I can do is to reset the controllers on these samples so that every time logic comes through to this collection of brass samples those two sliders are reset I'll show you what I mean I'm gonna just record a bar here just for MIDI controller information here it comes that was exciting wasn't it in many ways I think that's been the best bit of the master class so far okay if we open up the editor let's just have a quick look at what we've actually done there obviously no notes data but what we're actually looking for here a two lanes of automation data which I can see within MIDI draw as I say there are no notes so we're not going to see any velocities but if I come down to the bottom we should see a modulation reset so this is the velocity cross-fading it drops down and it comes back up to maximum because I want only to trigger the loudest samples and also if I look at MIDI expression that is also being reset now it doesn't matter that I've got all of these individual points the crucial point is that the last one is at maximum and that means that every time logic goes back to the beginning of the project and plays through it will get to this point reset those two controllers and therefore I'll have the volume and the velocity switching that I want across those instruments so again I'm just gonna copy this down to the others so that we're resetting those parameters for the brass as well again that's right it's color time which make the brass all the color we want it to be and then we've got brass within our project okay so that's working nicely so we've got our brass theme we've got our superhero theme that's working within here but I think it's time we checked back in with the film to find out whether or not our synchronization is as it should be we saw at the beginning that we had nice impacts that we're hitting particular cuts within the film and what I want to do is to check that we're still doing that at this point in particular when we get to this moment here where the superhero theme starts I want to make sure that that really is arriving at a moment in the film where I want it to be again if I just move the playhead we're moving through the various frames of the film and as he jumps down just like he did at the beginning I want the music to start okay so we're missing it okay so here is the moment of impact and by the time we actually get to the point where my theme is starting he's already sort of down and just thinking about getting back up again so I actually want to come to this moment here and set this as the moment where the music picks up so we're going to need a tempo change I need to be in a position where by speeding up the music a little bit we maybe arrive at this moment sooner which means that we'll hit this moment a little bit quicker so where do I want my tempo change to start well I've got a break so I suppose I could put it right here but I think again we're going to be a little bit more strategic than that and think back taking a slightly more sort of overview of the whole film and coming back through here and recognizing that after our opening section and after this nice somersault shot maybe this next section of the film this action section of the film might be a nice time just to take the tempo up a little bit and as we see the end of this somersault and as we get through to here it's actually on beat four of this bar that suddenly would get a shot where we get action as he runs towards us again so this feels like a good time potentially or a good place to put in a tempo change I'm gonna do that by coming back to the tempo list and this time rather than doing that from a timecode position I'm actually going to enter one manually because I put the playhead in the position where I want that to happen logic knows instantly that this is where I want to add the tempo change and then what I'm going to do is to push it up one whole beat per minute because that's how generous I'm feeling okay now why my name's only doing that by one BPM it's not going to make that much difference is it well I'm trying to hit a sync point and if you think about it I was only missing it by a couple of frames so a really dramatic tempo change isn't going to get us where we need let's see whether or not one BPM does it if we run back through here I'm now on my downbeat and look yeah we are much closer to the moment here where he lands that feels to me like that's going to be better so we've got a tempo change in the project now which hopefully is going to allow us to hit that moment a bit more clearly than we have been good okay so when we hear that through and we see that we've now got the music picking up at that moment okay again I'm just gonna put the film away for just a second and I'm going to use logic studio strings just to explain a little bit about what I want to do next from a musical point of view so I've got a tune which goes up and we've heard it now then what am I going to do to harmonize this tune so far I told you we're in G minor and in fact we've only been in G that only chord with an RP so far the only underpinning from a bass point of view is a series of G's at this point I want something much more melodic and harmonic and something which feels a bit more expensive so what I want to do as the melody makes its way up is that I want the Harmony to drop down so that effectively we're moving in contry motion and we get something quite filmic and quite big let's demonstrate what I mean okay so this is going to be the overall shape of our tune now I'm just going to dwell on this for one moment because there's a really important chord here that from a scoring point of view feels like we should be paying it some attention I'm in G minor the second chord is f major the next one is e flat major now within the chord of G minor the next chord that would make most musical sense would be to use C minor but that's quite classical and it also feels quite sad I think if we use C minor it's guaranteed that this would be the worst date of all time I'll show you what I mean that's not gonna go well is it okay so instead what we're going to do is we're going to change that C chord to a C major and suddenly we get a totally different feel we're gonna get something which is a bit more optimistic something we can believe in a bit more so effectively are two crucial chords of G minor and C major okay now I'm drawing your attention to that because what we're going to do now is to harmonize this trombone line and the way that we're gonna do that is by grabbing one bar of our bass line which runs here I'm going to open up the editor for it we can see that we're starting in G good okay then what I'm going to do is to repeat it a few times through to the end of this phrase and again I'm gonna just pinch the end off it here and we're just going to throw away the bits that we don't need I'm then going to glue these together and what I'm doing good to do is to change these notes so they reflect that chord progression that I've just taken you through so by opening up the editor I can see the chords here I'm going to make the second bar F by simply assuming the notes in this second bar and taking them down and then going to take this next bar down to E flat as I describes again I'm just using the same key commands as we identified before this next bar is going to be C we're gonna go back up to G there and then just to really make the point we're going to go back to C major again on this chord and then back to G for the end so there is one synth part that hopefully now is giving us what we need in terms of harmony support for the melody let's just hear it [Music] okay fine we can't really hear it because it's being drowned by brass so let's give it some more support by copying it across to a couple of other sounds that might be able to give us a bit more power the next one is the next sound that I've got within my template which is a sub bass and again of course I could play this in but again this is another little laptop trick that I'm just gonna show you guys in case you're working mostly on laptops what I want to do is to create a smooth bass line out of this sequence that I've created full of running notes and the way that I'm going to do that is I'm gonna lasso all of the notes in every single bar except the first one I'm gonna do that simply by holding down shift while I draw this lasso around all of these notes and very soon we end up when I press delete with just one note at the start of every bar and if we then use force legato we've got a nice smooth bass line which has come out of sequence to one so that was straightforward let's also create one more bass line something nice and strong which is going to be used on this sound here which is also from alchemy again let's just make sure that its name reflects the track what I want to do this time is to grab the scissors from the toolbar and I'm going to do what's called a multiple divide okay normally when I click on a region you can see the scissors are here and waiting but if I hold down the option button at the same time they grab this little plus button which hopefully you can see up on the screen up there and if I then click on the sort of destination from a time point of view of where I want to make my first chop which is on the third sixteenth note or the first eighth or a quaver if you're a real musician I just say that out loud okay what we're gonna do is I'm going to chop here and then when I let go what happens is again logic asks me how I want to split this and this time what I want to do is to split it and what that means is that every single time logic creates a new region at an eighth note what I'm going to do is just be in a position where when I glue these back together and when we open them up what we should find is that we've now got a running series of eighth notes because all of those splits when I join them back together of course are separated by the distance that we specified in our multiple divide now this bassline I think is going to be an octave too low actually I'm just going to take it up an octave let's just hear it this is quite a strong industrial-based sound yeah sure enough okay that's really making the point let's hear all of these bases with the brass melody that we've written as well [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay good and again I'm going to make that a permanent part of that region now we're getting somewhere except that I want to start managing a couple of these moments where we have silence between our sections before we get into the superhero section you'll remember our guy comes towards the tree here he jumps up into the tree and then he jumps down and what I'm going to do here is to introduce it's a lot of technique that is quite common in trailer music which is the idea of what we call a sub drop this would definitely wake up anybody in the back I think so if you're sneezing away just give somebody a little bit of an elbow because this should do it okay so what I've got here is a copy of my sub bass sound and I've put it on its own instruments and the reason why I've done that is because on this version of the sound I've set up an extended pitch bin range in other words I've set up a pitch Bend range which actually runs across two separate octaves what I'm going to do is to create a region in this gap right here this is definitely a really good technique if you're writing music for trailers so what I'm going to do is to jump into this area this region we've just created this new region and I'm going to just draw a note at C sorry at g4 which is here I'm going to make sure that it lasts for the entire generation that the entire duration of that particular region and now it lasts a full bar I've just extended out the left-hand edge which we'll see the reason for that in just a moment what I then want to do is again come down to MIDI automation and this time I'm going to grab pitch Bend and this time I can create a ramp by creating one individual point right at the beginning and then what I'm going to do is to create another point at the end where the pitch Bend range drops all the way down to the bottom now you'll see if i zoom in on this that either let the note establish itself before the pitch Bend drop starts and it reaches the bottom just before it ends and that means that we'll hear the beginning of the pitch of the notes before the pitch starts to drop and it will get to the destination pitch we're heading for just before that bar line okay so by itself here it comes [Music] okay alright so let's have a listen to that in context this should take us through this moments where our guide jumps up into the tree and comes down the other side [Music] okay that's a really useful technique as I say the reason why I extended out the very beginning is also worth looking at as we've already seen the reason why I drew those midi changes on our brass parts and created those bars of reset data at the beginning is because I wanted to make sure that every time we go back to the beginning and press play they are pushed up to maximum before we hear a note now the most recent thing that's happened in my pitch Bend drop here is that we get all the way to the end of it's now two octaves below where I want it to be next climb logic comes back and plays so the reason why I've extended out this region is because what I'm actually going to do is to create a couple of points here just literally resetting that to zero before it starts so extend out the left hand edge draw a little bit of reset data there just so we get a nice smooth moment where that happens let's come out of the editor okay we're in good shape here now as well and it's definitely time for us to start thinking about the next group of instruments within our project now you will remember a little while ago I mentioned that my director likes brass sounds and he also likes string sounds and I think it would be a good time now to start thinking about strings for this individual project okay so what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to return to the project where the brass and strings are kept that are coming to here and this time in addition to loading the instruments which house the string samples I'm going to load their content too and I'm going to press add and what that means is that not only are we going to get the sounds that I identify that I wanted to use we're also going to get the string parts that I've put together for this project too now again don't throw tomatoes at me okay let's just identify why it's the case that I've prepared these in advance we have a little over 90 minutes together here today and to say that it took longer than that to write the string parts would be a gross sort of under exaggeration of how much time it takes to really finesse samples and sample groups now the caveat here is that everything that's gone into writing these string sounds we have looked at in brass I've used MIDI modulation to finesse and look at working through velocity sample groups I've used MIDI expression to control their volume I've used really carefully velocity to control the actual volume of those No and as we'll see by just opening up one of these parts there's a lot going on I'm just gonna move all of these string parts down to the bottom so they're out of the way and they're underneath the brass and if I open up the editor for just the opening eight bars of the first violin hopefully you'll forgive me the first thing to say is we've got more articulations the articulation set for the strings runs to many more we've got long shorts trills Pizza car toy pluck notes we've got tremolo and we've got muted console Dino notes as well you can see some of the staccato is here this is a trill and this is a long notes but it's when we start looking at the MIDI data that's been added to these projects there's the crescendo that we're going to hear in a moment this coincides with the somersault shots but it's in particular the expression data on this part which is controlling the contour of the volume of this part that you begin to see just how involved this is in short what I'm trying to say is that there's no way we all have been able to create these string parts even if that's all we did within 90 minutes and I think it's also really worth saying that an afternoon like this and a masterclass like this I don't want you to go away with the impression that it's possible to do it in Norma's amount in a short space of time you should take your time over all the creative decisions that you make so we're looking at the strings sort of after the effect so let's have a listen to them I will certainly play them to you that seems only fair and we'll have a listen to the way that the strings came together and we'll see what they sound like using these samples let's have a listen [Music] do you forgive me yet I'm not sure okay fair enough I'll soldier anyway okay now crucially we get to this moment of the film which we haven't seen for some time which is where everything changes we've had pace all the way through and you can hear the strings are really helping support that now suddenly as I said when we went through our spotting session in the beginning in all changes we get into a completely different section of the film where suddenly we've got no power no action and something a bit more soft and a little bit more fragile and this definitely feels like a place where we need to bring the tempo down I'm going to create another tempo change here just like before click plus at this particular moment the film we're going to come down to 102 beats per minute here what we've also got is a very different character in this film and I wanted to make sure that in this particular scene that the character of the string parts that I programmed here changed as well so what I'm doing here is I'm using console Dino on muted strings and articulation which is muted and what muted strings give you is a fragility a sort of softness which feels like it would be a good match for this particular scene but before we watch it what I'm going to do is to unmute the dialogue so we can actually see this with the film now I'm lucky in a way the way that this film was put together I haven't got to worry about dialogue too much it's a major consideration whenever you are writing music to picture you need to be careful words come first people don't like going to the cinema and not being able to hear what people say to one another and your job as a composer is to make sure that you stay out of the way of dialogue now that doesn't mean you can't write music under people talking to one another but it doesn't mean that you don't go and put a huge tune over those moments because generally speaking the editor would just turn round so right we can't have any music at this point because it's getting in the way so I've got the only other part of the film which contains dialogue running at this moment and the reason why we're going to watch this together was you can see how I began to approach this idea I wanted harmonically to have our two chords G minor and C major return at this point to give us a nice sort of optimistic end for this section but obviously what I wanted to do was the little tune that I've written I wants to have only emerge after these guys have spoken to each other so let's just watch this end section hey I made it yeah it's been time [Music] imagine if that was a seed miner call at the end disaster okay Halloween date okay so there we are we've got our strings there on the end and you can hear those muted strings they're just giving us this softness and this warm which I think is is helping them at this point now let's just park the film again for a second if you ask any film composer even those with the most extensive sample libraries known to man what they would most like or most enjoy about the process of writing music to picture they will tell you every time that it's working with live musicians what we can do in samples these days is remarkable I'm not going to deny that for a second and sometimes budgets prevent us being able to work with live musicians but when they're available it's always better to work the real thing and really if you think about it as a self-fulfilling prophecy what samples are trying to do is to get as close to the real thing as possible wouldn't it be better to actually have the real thing well we're lucky we do what we're going to do now is to welcome out the guild hall session Orchestra who going to come and play this piece for us give them a round of applause please that's right and some a little more here there we go okay that's actually enough let's not intimidate them that we awful okay now then while they're taking their seats and just getting plugged in I need to talk to you about a couple of things because you might be wondering how they've actually got notes in front of them bearing in mind their music stands are sitting there and they're really well we're lucky what we've got within logic is not only obviously an extraordinary set of editors what we've also got a chance to do is to create really extended scores and if I just take for instance something like this this horn part for instance let's just take these regions here and glue them together what I have a chance to see when I open the editor is that I don't have to just look at them within this sort of piano roll display let's just roll this down I can look at these as a score as well so here is the horn part for instance II I can see that I'm in the key of G minor and if I wanted to make changes to scores then of course I can do that too let's suppose for instance I wanted to put this tune in the treble clef I could come to my clefts option here and just simply drag that in here and instantly the tune that we've just heard the superhero theme suddenly gets transferred into become our tune at this point okay so what we did was to create a score for every single part and then what we've done is to zip those across to the iPads that these guys are using as their music stands for today and they're viewing those in iBooks so that explains how we ended up being able to look at the scores and on screen they look like this so there's the first violin part sitting on an iPad okay that's fine so that deals with how we actually get the notes in front of the players now what we need to think about is how we're actually going to go about the process of recording them and before I go any further I'm going to drop the level to the PA system before we get howling feedback obviously at this point I need a whole bunch of audio tracks because what I need to do is to move and think about the fact that we're recording here to this iMac Pro that's in front of me now we are extremely lucky that what we've been able to do today is to partner with DPA microphones who produce wonderful orchestral tools or microphones for recording orchestras now all of our players have got their own individual microphones some of those are clip-ons on the violins and violas and then we've got mics on stands for some of the other instruments as well there's also a stereo pair of microphones above James I'm just going to draw your attention to James he's not gonna like this but going to say it anyway James is a current electronic music student on our film scoring program so a little round of applause for our conductor please the drapes you don't just get applause James you get whooping as well there was some whooping I heard some whoo okay so we've got that stereo pan we've got another stereo pair on either side of the stage hanging from the ceiling which you may not be able to see in this light but you can certainly see at the end of the session as well so we've got two stereo pairs of mics capturing a sense of the stage and then we've got a whole bunch of closed mics which are all being sent through to three apogee symphony interfaces all of which can contain or give me eight and analog inputs and we've got 24 channels of sound all coming through to the computer at the same time what could possibly go wrong I'm glad you see the funny side okay so what we're gonna do is we're going to bring those tracks in and what we're going to see is that they're down here ready to go here is my stereo pair for the front of the stage here are the ones on the side and then we've got our closed mics to and in due course we will make a recording but what I want to do is just check that we've got some level coming through and actually just before I do completely kill the PA system I think what I'm going to do is to give you a note guys to tune up to let's just come into our studio strings instrument again I'm just going to grab something that's a little bit more sustained and give you an A [Music] okay so what I want to do is to just check that I've got level coming through to the computer now what I've done is I've put our instrumentalists on groups within logic if I click on the first audio track you can see in the bottom left-hand corner there's a group they're called strings and what that means is that when I press the record button for this particular track anything that is on the string group will highlight you can see suddenly I've got a whole bunch of red recording lights and if we come into logics mixer we should be able to see those two if I scroll across to the right-hand side here is the first group of those those instruments so fine I should be able to monitor those levels as they come in and that should give us a good sort of starting point okay so what we're going to do next is just give these guides a chance to play it through so what you're going to hear guys is you're going to hear music from bar eight and you're in at ten and four now we're going to just hear the whole ensemble playing together we're not making a recording just yet so you can still cough but don't listen to them instead okay here it comes everyone ready [Music] [Music] yeah okay they haven't actually recording yet though so let's not be too generous just yet okay sorry what we're gonna do is go back to the same place you guys are going again going to here click from bar eight this time we are going to make a recording but brass if you could stand down for now we're going to record these guys in two separate blocks so this is just going to be the strings this time again music from bar eight everyone happy everyone got level everyone happy with where they're at okay fantastic James all good brilliant okay so this is going to be again music from eight and let's make a recording this time [Music] [Music] okay never be too much of a hurry to press stop I want to make sure that the ambience and the room is captured as part of that recording which is why I've let it run on I've also stopped it at this point we need to record the own section but the instrumentalists here need to put on mutes if you haven't already string players please do that for me before we go into this final section so this time I'm afraid you can have a much shorter count in just two beats into bar 37 which is where your first violin pickup will be please violinists and then we get to play our big slushee chin is everyone happy great okay let's make a recording just two beats in this time so you'll hear music from bar 36 [Music] thank you everyone perfect okay great so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to turn the record lights off for the string players and we're going to switch to brass instead so we'll leave those parts in just exactly as they are I've got another group here and you can see when I click on this first track here this one is labeled brass now of course I'm still going to be using the stereo pair of mics at the front and on the sides so again what I need to do is just depress and record light and we've got a smaller group of tracks this time now the brass aren't playing quite as many notes as the strings so we're in a position to start recording a little bit later so what we're going to do here guys is you will hear music from bar 18 and we're playing at 20 okay fantastic here we go this is the brass recording you guys can play all the way through to the end of the superhero-themed please here we go [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] fantastic okay so we are in this very odd place where despite the fact that I've got this amount of talent and these musicians on stage they've actually done what I need them to so even though they've over now here for five minutes we're gonna give them a round of applause and say thank you so much for being part of this thanks a lot okay so as they just unplug a few things what we're going to do is just look at this sort of stack of audio files that we've created and you guessed it the first thing I'm going to do is to make sure that from the color coding point of view where we need where we need to be these are our strings and these are going to be our brass part so I just be able to see at a glance what is what the next thing I'm also going to do is just to dive into here I'm just going to make sure that at the beginning of all of these individual recordings remember these are grouped together what I want to do is just add a little bit of an audio fade to this group so that at the very beginning we have a chance just to fade in just so that where I've pressed record doesn't come in as a sort of really hard pinging starts we're just going to make sure that we've got a sort of half second fade on the front and then maybe something more like a second on the end a thousand milliseconds I'm going to do the same thing with the other string parts that we've recorded was gonna back these out just a little bit on the left-hand side because remember we had a really hard start into that bar there so I'm going to just add a little bit of a fade in at that point and then we've got another second on the end there on the outro I'm gonna do the same thing with the brass as well just to make sure again we don't get any clicks on the way in or out he wants to hear what they sound like me I definitely do okay so your formal asleep okay good so I'm going to come back to here and we can see within our mixer area that we've had those groups they've worked really nicely for us but what I want to do now is to decouple those groups this is shift angie is going to turn them off and the reason why i want to do that is because i want to hear these microphones individually these are the string mics on the the front of the stage so this is the main pair that was above James the conductor's head let's just hear the superhero section for the strings at this point oh yes PA system there we are nice okay what were then going to do is to put in the other stereo pair which are on the sides of the stadium we're going to begin to build a much bigger sort of impression of the orchestra that was in front of us [Music] okay good now what I'm going to do is I'm going to last see all of the close mics for the violins now what's really interesting is that generally speaking until people have done recording sessions for orchestras you would think that those close mics are going to be the main part of the sound that we're going to want to use today right because that's where all the detail and all the precision is well actually that's generally not how we hear Orchestra it's most of the time we are they go to concert so we'll go to recording sessions we're sitting where you guys are right now in other words at a removed from the orchestra so you're hearing the interaction of all those players as a group as a whole series of players an ensemble group together and you're hearing the way that the sound interacts with the building that you're listening to those sounds in as well and actually close mics sometimes sound a little bit unfamiliar to people who haven't heard groups of closed mic recordings on strings before I'll show what I mean here are the strings a lot of power here but also quite a lot of abrasiveness to [Music] okay so you can hear that they're actually really sort of I don't want to use the word Scratchy but they're certainly hard and really harsh and actually it's really interesting when whenever you do a recording and you're lucky enough to work with an orchestra it's worth really walking around the ensemble group as they're rehearsing and just getting a sense of what Orchestra sound like when you're closer you can make decisions about where to put microphones so what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to select all of these close mics here I'm going to come into the mixer having selected them they should it will be available to me and as a group I'm going to take the closed mics down most of the sound that I want to use is going to be from the stereo pairs but these are definitely going to be providing some really useful extra detail for me as well and then I'm going to do something similar with the brass keep these two stereo pairs as they are lassu the rest right here and then what we're going to do is to drop down the level a little bit on these close mics and just keep the main stereo group here altogether so what I've suddenly got now by bringing those tracks together and last seen them in that way is controlled from a mixer point of view over a number of tracks at the same time now you might be thinking okay fine that means right that I can now mute off the samples that were being used at the beginning well actually no the samples that I've chosen the symphonic samples that I've chosen are actually recordings of a much bigger ensemble set so the strings in particular which are from the symphonic series again from spitfyre audio are actually 16 players in the violin sections and a much bigger ensemble group than we've actually had it out on stage today and what generally speaking composers will do if they're working for a really big sound is they'll go for what's called a hybrid approach a balance between the real thing and the samples which are being used to trigger them as well I definitely need them to be quieter but I don't want to get rid of them altogether so what I'm going to do is to select my four sampled brass section which is here these four tracks again because I've last sued them they should all be highlighted together sure enough they are I'm going to take five or so DB off these so that the Poussin balls come down and we're going to do the same things with the strings as well just so we've got a balance now between the original strings that we've just record and those samples too now that should give us an enormous amount of power let's have a listen through this sort of superhero section now with all of those parts playing together [Music] okay so it is a shame that we lost the top note on the brass but we'll forgive them okay there we are not to worry now the next thing we want to do is to get this mix under control now you can see that I've got parts all over the place and actually bearing in mind we started from zero we're doing pretty well that we're now at a track count of 70 already okay with that in mind what I really want to do is just simplify this arrangement a little bit so that I've got more control over it what I'm going to do is to grab first of all my live brass recordings but I'm gonna put them up here with the samples so that they are together you can just see that I can move those up to here very easily but really what I want to do at this point is get my mix more under control and to do that what I'm going to do is to use a process called track stacking I wanted to create stacks or groups of instruments or a fader at least for each of the instrument groups that I'm using now before I can do that I just need to make one little change this depth-charge patch which is coming from drum machine designer is effectively in a stack on its own already drum machine designer is so powerful that it gives me an individual channel for every single sound within a drum machine setup I'm barely scratching the surface of what it's capable of but because it's a stack I can't put a stack in another stack so what I'm going to do is just extend out this final hit so I don't clip off its length and then what I'm going to do is to select these regions I'm going to ctrl click this and I'm going to do what's called a bounce in place and I hit OK logics gonna sprint through and turn this MIDI region into an audio file it's going to put it on its own track it's going to meet the original and what that now means is that I can put all of these drums together in one stack I've selected them all here I'm then going to hit create track stack and I'm going to use what's called a summing stack now at the very beginning of the session today I mentioned last year's master class and this is definitely an area where if you're not used to the way that something stacks work I would urge you to look at the video for that in short what a summing stack is well we can see it actually down here it's easier to see than it is to explain almost I've now got a stereo fader and all of these sounds are being fed into what we call this sum or the summing stack here so in other words I'm going to end up with one fader which controls all of the drums and in fact I'm going to label it so that I know that that's what that one is I'm going to do the same thing with the since which are here so we're going to put this into a stack in its own right - this one is going to be cool since if I can type then we're going to have another one here for the brass you can begin to see what's happening which is that my arrangement is becoming more and more under control with every new stack I add this one is going to be the brass and every time I close them down suddenly everything's looking far more manageable and once I've done that for the strings as well what we've suddenly got is our entire mix effectively running on four faders okay that looks a whole lot more manageable I can now breathe a big sigh of relief I don't need this particular track because we don't need it anymore so now we've got our mix just running on four faders now one of the great things about working with track stacking is that what this allows me to do is to start thinking about applying effects those auxiliaries that we talked about before maybe two entire groups of sounds all together so for instance if I suddenly decided that I wanted to put the brass through the reverb that I set up and used on sounds earlier on I can and now because all those sounds have been folded down to this place they're all going to pick up that reverb I'm also going to send them through a little bit of delay and I'm going to do the same thing with the strings here as well now we know because we've just heard them a little while ago that some of the strings some of that quality in that string sound is just a little bit sort of pokey a little bit harsh so what I could also do would be to put an EQ on this entire stack and maybe take out a little bit of the harshness which I think probably going to be around the sort of two kilohertz mark maybe a little bit above that just to take out some scratchiness could even put a little bit more air into the sound here using this EQ as well and what I might also do is just roll out the bottom end just in case we've got any sort of noise from the stage again because we set up our recording session in order to do this so quickly there might just be a little bit of scuffle a little bit of noise I'm going to prepare for that by just putting a little what we call high pass filter roll off the bottom end just for super low frequencies down here so because I've put that EQ that tone change on that channel it will affect all of the sounds that are on the mix at this point now then there are a few things that we need to do I've only got my synths coming in in the second part of the track and I want them to happen a little bit earlier I'm going to bring them in with the drums so that they happen from the very beginning so the first thing I'm going to do is to take this first sound our little analog retrosynthesis to establish that we're running in G minor I'm also going to grab this and this art part from alchemy I'm going to chop that I only need two bars of it I've played G D and G so that's sort of spelling out most of the chord of G minor I'm going to shorten it for now because I don't need the notes that I went on to play later and what I'm going to do is to extend this region out to this point and again I'm going to use force legato let's come back to the piano roll this by force legato on all of those sounds and again they will fill up the whole of that region so suddenly we're just sort of populating the front with a couple of synth sounds you'll remember I did a huge sort of velocity boost on this sound after we recorded it here I want it to be a little bit more set back so I'm actually going to take the velocities down at the very beginning here about 30 units so that suddenly that's just a little bit less strong at the beginning let's just have a listen and see how that sounds good so we haven't just got drums now running at the top we've got some other sounds too so we've seen that in a template we can obviously bring in our software instruments we also had a whole bunch of audio tracks waiting for whenever we want to make a recording we've seen that we can assign inserts and auxiliaries as well but what we can also do is to prepare sounds maybe from logics loop browser a series of audio files so that we can pick out a couple of those to add to a project as well and we're going to do that next if I come back into the media browser area up here at the top we're back into the all files area I want to come into files specifically for this particular project now I've now got loads of audio files because we've just made a whole bunch of recordings if I control click on this arrow they'll all fold down so that I've got a much more manageable group of sounds to work to and the two sounds I'm interested in and this one this is a sort of suspended symbol and orchestral symbol which we'll come to in a moment and then I've got another little loop here which I've got something specific in mind for which we're going to use in a while I'm going to turn the volume of that one down because it's an absolute ear melter and I'm going to meet it as well okay we're going to come back to this cymbal and focus on this sound first now we're looking at this waveform you would be forgiven for thinking that the part of it that I'm interested in is this area here but actually sometimes small is beautiful we're going to use this little bit here at the end this tiny little bit of sound now I'm actually because I want it to be a bit louder than it is right now going to do what's called a region gain on it so that the whole thing comes up about 5 DB and I can control the gain within the inspector here on audio files and we're going to make it a little bit shorter as well just so we're working around the area that we're wanting to use now you can see even from the waveform display of this sound that it sort of builds and Peaks to a particular point and again this is a useful little exercise what I'm going to do is just grab my scissors tool and I'm going to chop this region at exactly the point where it builds to the top of this waveform which is right here and I'm going to then throw away this section so effectively what we've got now is a cymbal crash which sounds like this okay now I've just dragged this in from the Media Browser it's not actually in the location I want it to be the place where I wanted to go is right here I'm going to move the playhead to this point where the superheroes theme starts this is a great key command I'm going to press : and what happens is that that any region that's highlighted snaps to the playhead so that right there it's in the position where I want it to go what I can then do is to use exactly the same technique I'm just going to copy this again anywhere I'm not thinking about where I'm putting that then I'm gonna put the playhead exactly where I want this to go and again : to move it so very quickly and this is a really good technique not just for composers but if you're a sound designer and you're working to pictured you want to play sound effects at specific locations use that key command having done that I'm then going to in sort of move out the left-hand edge of that so I get my cymbal roll coming back in adjust the left-hand edge as well and I think again we might just put some fades on these half a second in maybe a second out just so we're contouring the shape of that sound as it plays through and then what I'm also going to do is just add some reverb to it so that it's sort of in the space of the rest of these sounds okay so here is our symbol roll which is just going to be used as a sort of transition sound between various sections of the film [Music] okay good but we've got a yawning gap in the film at this point we've got a nice string crescendo building up through the somersault but as I said earlier wrong we've then got a lot of action a lot of power which is then happening in this shot from the moment that the pace starts moving here is our super slow-mo shots and suddenly as we already know because we've got a tempo change there what we've then got is the action and the pace picking up again and in order to do that I'm going to do something a little bit silly I'm gonna be honest and I'm going to use this loop don't say you weren't warned [Music] sorry okay there we are now I don't like all of this loop I do like though the power and pace that comes at the very end in the last two beats so what I'm gonna do first of all is I'm gonna move it to this point here and then what I'm going to do just so it's in line with these two bars and then I'm going to snip the last two beats so we're just focused on a much smaller area I think the last two beats where are we we are here okay so I'm then gonna throw away this part of the loop I'm going to copy these last two beats back and back again now we don't want two beats here that would be halfway through this bar we know that the pace picks up on beat four so I'm going to just make that a bit smaller okay I don't this is gonna sound very good it's gonna sound very loop - lets just hear that okay I've also put it in the wrong place so let's just move it back a bar there we are let's try that again okay so that's taking us nicely through to this moment where he jumps over the fence however I don't like the fact that it sounds as looped as it does what I want to do is to put a sort of dedicated audio effect on this sound and the one that I'm going to use is logics Auto filter this is going to again give me tone control I'm going to take the envelope down I don't want any envelope of shaping on this sound I do want to use what's called a bandpass filter this is a narrow band of frequencies right in the middle of the sound we're going to lose bass at the bottom and treble at the top and we're going to focus on this area in the middle and I'm also going to just turn resonance up so it bites a little bit harder and then I think we'll be in good shape so what I want to do is to automate that filter I'm going to come into automation again I don't have a lane ready for this sound so I'm going to come into the auto filter and go and find the parameter that I want to use which is here and here I can then create a sort of starting point for the shape of this filter moves that I want to make I'm gonna have it rise up to this point here and then drop down through the following bar and we should just be able to hear that again I'm going to smear that with a little bit of reverb and again a little bit of delay and you will also remember right at the very beginning I talked about this unusual auxilary that I had created which was a parallel distortion treatment I'm going to add that to this sound to sort of justifying the the setting up of that treatment on an auxilary again let's just hit that sound by itself now okay good so now we've got a bit of tonal change and it sounds much less looped and we've got this nice little transition running through this section let's just watch that with the film [Music] great okay so these are both sort of percussion elements as well so I want to make sure that I'm adding them into my drum stack so that they become controlled by those drum regions I'm going to just again make sure they're the right color and then I'm going to make sure that I just simply drag them up and place them within this drum stack and then they can become part of that group overall okay there was one more sound but I wanted to put into here and this project coming back to the superhero section let's just come here for a second what I really want to do in addition to all of the power that's coming from the brass in the strings is I want to add some drums all of the drums and percussive elements we've had within the piece so far have been these kind of slightly more electronic techy sounds and now what I really want is a big drum kit to come through and drive this section forward a bit more and we're going to do that by using logics drummer instruments then a press Plus and select drummer and then I have a chance to choose what type of genre of drums I'm going to use and rock is going to get a started I think I'm going to press create and what I do we get to see the interface for this particular instrument which is a bit unusual first of all I get this overview waveform display here sort of demonstrating or showing where the hits within this drum part are going to fall we'll come back to that in just a moment what I also get in the bottom of the screen is this interface which allows me to set whether or not I want to use a simple or a complicated rhythm and whether or not I want to use soft playing or loud heavy playing well I want a sort of simple rhythm which nevertheless is nice and strong and what I'm then going to do is to move this region to the point where I want the drums to start which is here where the superhero section starts now what I want to do is to make this a bit smaller I'm going to work in two bar loops and the reason for that is I want to keep the core pattern the same but every time the next two bar region takes over I'm pushing the fills up now what these are doing is making the ends of the regions different by producing a drum fill each time and will see every time I push it on the waveform display at the end changes but before it doesn't because the core pattern is the same and then basically right at the end we've got a 3/4 bar which we're going to take through to this break and I want that to be almost all fill ok what I'm then going to do is just slightly drop the volume because I think this might be a bit overwhelming otherwise and let's just hear how the drums sound now with the strings and the brass in the main section of the film at this point [Music] [Music] okay instant drums that's fantastic okay that's working really nicely so we're in good shape as far as that's concerned and again what I'm going to do is just to make sure that that new part is part of my drum stack so that it's being controlled by the same fader and again what we can do is just make sure that our drums retain their color okay good so we've got our drums sorted there as well and now we're in good shape now the power of having our mix on four faders should become really apparent when we start making final mix changes to this project what we're gonna do now is watch it all the way through I'm gonna put the film down here so you can see it against the picture but what I'm going to do is just to open up the automation lanes for these stacks so that I can make volume offsets to these instruments it could be that the synths are too loud at the beginning or they're not loud enough but I want to boost their level overall it could be that I want to make space for the brass melody or make other changes too so I've just selected volume as a parameter for all of these separate stacks and as we listen through I might make a few changes just based on what I can hear is we listen through here it comes [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so effectively in real time as we watch down through ninety seconds we can make these changes really quickly I have indeed made more room for the brass ability by taking the strings down at that point but there is one thing that I was tempted to do but didn't do while we watched through which I want to just take you through very quickly which is we've got loads of sort of decay and echo happening in the drums at exactly the moment that they come to an end just before we get into the final section if I run this through in a second we'll hear loads of those sort of little clockwork mechanisms just carrying on I don't really want that to happen what I'm going to do is to draw a volume change here so that the drum bus just drops in the volume before we get into that section we should hear them fade away more naturally now good okay so we're out of the way before we get into this fragile ending at this end point here good okay so what we've now got is our mix organized by instrument group and what I'm now in a position to do is to start thinking about a sort of final mix but final mixing in film scoring isn't the same as working in final mixing when you're working with pot records or if you're making dance music so instead of a sort of stereo file one that I can either put on the line or distribute in some sort of way what I really need to do when I'm thinking about film scoring is thinking about working with these stems that I've created at the track stack stage I'm really lucky in that I'm working with what we call locked picture this film is finished then it's not going to change but most of the time if you're hired as a composer you are part of the creative process and you're not just hired at the end of it and it could well be there the whole way through the writing process you're getting sent a new picture we're currently or with each new update you need to think about cutting particular moments out or extending others as scenes develop and change so your music will need to as well and what that will often mean is that an editor will ask you for the stems of your piece rather than one stereo mix which covers the entire duration of the piece and what we're going to do is precisely that we're going to give the editor or the director of this particular project a set of stems that he can work with so that he has independent level control and other control over these different groups so firstly what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to the reference file that came in with the film and I'm going to put Lieut markers around those because remember they represent the start and the end of the film and I want to make sure that when I record these stems and make them available to him they are absolutely synced the very beginning of his picture he can drop them at frame 1 at the beginning of his project and they will line up and he then has control over them what I'm then going to do is to come into the mixer and we're going to begin to see how we can configure logic to actually record these stems internally to create the tracks that we want I'm just going to put the picture out of the way so that I can see exactly what I'm doing and you can too so every time we create a new track stack logic creates a stereo output for it so that we can hear it but what I'm going to do is to overwrite these by selecting a bus channel for each of these instrument groups here is not a loo that I've created which I've called drums return now what that basically means is the sound of the drum stack is now going to get sent to this bus where I'm going to be able to record it and if I then specify the following three tracks as well and I hold down option while selecting the bus output I can then assign these three to their channels as well this one's going to go to boss 29 the since the brass are going to 30 and the strings are going to 31 what I'm then going to do is I'm going to LA Zoo all of the individual effects tracks - that's the parallel distortion and the reverb and the delay and these reverbs and delays over here as well and manually what I'm going to do is to route those through to another bus which I'm going to call effects return which is here so those sounds are now being sent through to their own dedicated outputs what I'm then going to do is to close the window down here and create five new tracks within logic these are going to be audio tracks because these are going to record each of those busses internally back onto new tracks and what I'm going to do is just specify that I want the first one of those to be on buss number 28 and then if I hit ascending here it means the next track that I add will be on 29 and the one after that on 30 so it stands to reason that if I make five of those what's going to happen is these five new audio tracks are going to be set up with buss 28 as the input then 29 then 30 then 31 and then 32 which means that effectively this is what we might call my drums return channel and it's going to receive the input coming from this track stack and it's going to record it the next one is going to be the since return the one after that is going to be for the brass the one after that is going to be for the strings and then I'm going to give my director the option of having a dedicated effects channel to that's going to take all the reverbs all the delays the parallel distortion and a reverb that came in with the drummer region that we added right at the ends and it's going to print those onto a separate file the reason I'm doing that is he he might suddenly decide that he wants more reverb and by having a separate stem for it he'll be able to boost the level of that track if he decides he doesn't like the reverb he can pull it down he's got even more flexibility what I'm going to do is to meet these channels we don't need to hear them as they go down but obviously what I do want to do is to make sure I'm recording all five of them now we've already specified that we want the recording to start here we put a cycle range around this so what that basically means is now that when I press record we're going to see hopefully all of these individual groups get recorded to their own audio tracks producing stems for us in the process here we go now remember that isn't going to start right away because the music doesn't start until bar ten [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so what we should now have if I take these record lights out and we unmute these tracks is we should have each of those individual sounds having imprinted to its own stem so in other words if I solo the drums this should just be drums good this should just be brass good and this should just be strings at this point too I'm sorry since and then down here we've got our effects returned this is going to sound a little bit odd this is just the ambience from those effects groups [Music] now just to make this point this hasn't actually required me to go through my Apogee interfaces in the same way that it did when we made our string recordings you can do this on a laptop take your outputs from your stems route them internally and record them back onto audio tracks and you'll get the stems that you need what I can then do of course is to come back put my loop back on and what I'm going to do is to specify that I won't seeing export these tracks so that I'm ready to give them to my director file export and then I can take these five tracks as audio files and up pops a dialog box that says ok fine where do you want to put these I'm going to put them on the desktop so I know exactly where they are I'm gonna create a folder here called just-in-time exports and then I can choose a few options I'm gonna export what's called the cycle range so from the beginning to the end so that we're only exporting the area where he's going to be expecting to hear sound I can choose the format's with the files he's going to want WAV files at 24-bit and you can see that the file names are taken from the track names that I've created so this one's gonna be called drums and it's gonna be one for since and brassed and so on and so forth as well and when I press export it's gonna take very long logic is gonna fly through those files and they're done they're sitting on the desktop ready for me to give to my director as a series of individual stems and there we are ok so we've gone from a completely empty document to a film school where we've actually recorded stems all the way through we've covered an absolutely enormous amount of content in a short period of time and I think it might be a good idea if we just summarized before we wrap up I promise I'll keep this brief so before we even started scoring we thought about film themes if you're looking for inspiration in terms of actually getting started make sure you identify a theme in the film that you'll work into at least one and make that your kickoff point for your creativity then choose whether or not you want to start with a brand new project and we've seen the power of templates working with a group of sounds that are get to get you up and running a bit more quickly and then think about tempo and time signature I had a tempo up and running but we've adapted that twice one push to make things a little faster and then we've pulled back towards the end we haven't really had a time today at all to talk about time signatures another really useful musical of device for managing sections between different areas particularly our breaks I've got a few little time signature changes look out for those and use them whenever you can to to manage transitions between scenes and we've also seen how powerful it is to select a timecode point and please place that a musically relevant point within your film I identified my in and I moved that to bar eight so that musically I was in good shape we then have spent so much of today working with the power of MIDI velocity of course we looked at force ligase one of the most useful key commands of the afternoon without question but we also then went onto articulation mapping and using that so that we can move between articulations between samples in in different libraries and then what we did as well was to bring sounds in from another project we browsed across to another project and brought those sounds in we use the brass and then the strings as well and we've seen how MIDI controllers work using MIDI modulation to move between velocity groups and MIDI expression to control volume overall then of course the ace-in-the-hole of the whole afternoon was that we had a chance to do a live recording which was thrilling for me I'm just so nice to work with players of this caliber we have spent some time looking briefly at logic scoring tools and we've begun to say see how we could get those across to the iPads for them to use and then what we did was to work with groups within logic to make the whole recording process really straightforward by pressing one record light they all came on for all of those groups together and all of those sounds can be recorded at once and then what we did using track stacks was to put the whole mix on four faders so that immediately each instrument group has got its own control from which I can send it to auxiliaries and add additional effects and then right at the end what we've done is we've recorded those stems onto their own individual groups so that they're ready to be given to the director and I've exported those and they're sitting on a desktop waiting for him okay the last thing I need to do is to thank all of you for giving up your afternoon one more time they go a little bit of brightness again get that into the eyes if you've enjoyed this and if you want to get involved in the conversation then there are a couple of hashtags that you can use on social media if you like but the most important thing to say is what I always say at the end of masterclass is which is back your own musical judgement go and find sounds that you like import films that you want to work on even if this is not the sort of soundtrack that you would have written take away from this the techniques that you might want to use think about for example articulation switching think about what we've done with MIDI controllers all of these techniques are going to be relevant to you regardless of the musical genres you favor so thanks so much for coming see you next time you

Channel: Guildhall School of Music & Drama

Views: 358,649

Rating: 4.9458652 out of 5

Keywords: logic pro, logic pro x, apple, guildhall school, music, drama, electronic music, film scoring, film music, recording, producing, workflow, editing, production, mixing, composing, arranging, music production, jono buchanan, orchestral recording, live recording, masterclass, tutorial

Id: _1XkBHT_6Nk

Length: 115min 37sec (6937 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 15 2019