How To Record Vocals In Logic Pro X [For Beginners]

how to record vocals in logic pro x for beginners so if you are like a blank slate you don't know how to record vocals with logic products this video is probably right for you i promise to you it by the end of the video you'll know how to get set up with your microphone and start singing over your track or over other tracks you have the video is quite straightforward section one will talk about what equipment you need to get started and then section two is how to record vocals in logic what equipment do you need you're gonna need logic on your computer and you're going to need an audio interface and a microphone so let's start with audio interface you can get any audio interface it doesn't matter what an audio interface does it exchanges the signal the audio signal from the microphone into a digital signal so logic can understand some audio interface examples would be like mine which is the apigee one you can also look into the scarlet or the apollo i would spend around a hundred dollars if you're just beginning with an audio interface the second thing you'll need is a microphone i would recommend getting a condenser microphone because this is going to give you the quality for vocals that you need you can go out and buy a usb microphone you can actually skip the audio interface section if you don't if you have a usb microphone because it can go directly into your computer the disadvantage of those things are you're not going to get the highest quality audio once you have these things let's get set up now in logic and start recording our vocals this is a song i'm working on in logic and we'll use this as a reference as we go through so to start recording vocals in logic you will need to start an audio track and to do that you go up to the top here where it says track and then click on new audio track this is going to create an audio track under wherever track you had highlighted so i had the keys highlighted and it created a new audio track for me here i'm going to scroll this up the top just so you can see it a bit better i'm going to unclick these buttons right now and explain what that means in a little bit with this empty audio track here i can now start recording my vocals but before i just go and press record i'm going to need to make sure a couple things are set up for example i'm going to need to make sure that my microphone is plugged into my audio interface and that the interface is plugged into my computer and once the interface is plugged into my computer logic should recognize right away that you have something plugged in and it might ask you do you want this to be your audio output and do you want this to be your audio input you can go ahead and press yes if those notifications don't come up don't worry what we're going to do is go to logic products at the top and go to preferences audio you can also get to these preferences by clicking command comma this is a shortcut here we're going to focus on the output and input device we want our output device to be our headphones and we want it to be our headphones wherever our headphones are plugged in so whether that's the computer your monitors or your interface they can be plugged into all those three things so if your headphones are plugged into your computer make your output device your built-in output we want them to be plugged into our computer because while we're singing we want to be hearing the track we're singing over only in our headphones and not out of any speakers that we have because that will bleed into our microphone and we don't want that the input device will be our audio interface so whatever interface you have the name of that interface will be here for example mine is the app g1 so my input would be one and that means that my microphone is plugged in there and i should be set up to go last quick thing to do before we start singing is to make sure that our inputs are set up correctly on the channel and what i mean by the channel is i mean this track here so we have audio one and we can call this our vocal and then we can actually right click here and put a nice little icon if we'd like to so we want to make sure this vocal tract and the inspector window here has the right input to our interface because sometimes it can happen that your interface has more than one input maybe two maybe up to six or even eight inputs and then if you have an input one here but you plugged your microphone into the input 2 on your audio interface logic is not going to line those two up and then your vocal recording won't work you won't get any signal so we just want to make sure whatever input we plugged into our audio interface that number needs to show up in this inspector window for example i put my microphone in the first input in my interface that's usually goes from the left to right side of the interface so the plugs on the left side of the interface usually start at one so mine is one and then it's one here if i did it in the second input i can still do that if i want to but i just need to make sure that it says input two here instead of one so just make sure those inputs line up now we're actually ready to record our vocals get into a comfortable singing position stand up to mic if you have an acoustically dry room probably better to record vocals in a dry room this room is very echoey and not always gives you the greatest vocal recording doesn't really matter though because we can do a lot of things in post-production with effects so we will press the r on this track which means that the track is armed and ready to record and then we can go and press record all we have to do is press r on a keyboard or press this red circle here and now on this track we are recording our vocals and you can see here on while i'm speaking you will notice that this sound is coming through on the microphone so let's talk now about a few things we can do on our audio interface and a few things that we can do in our settings inside logic pro to make sure we're getting the proper vocal recording let's talk about the first thing to make a proper vocal recording in logic you'll notice here that the signal of my voice if i zoom in isn't very big right compared to this main guitar track down here i can barely see my vocal signal so why was that right i really want a more powerful vocal signal coming in at least not so powerful that it's going to clip but it's in this right sweet spot and so i'll show you how to do that now in order to get that sweet spot we're going to need to control the gain on our audio interface so as we're setting up our vocal track we will need to test how loud the gain is on our interface to make sure we're getting the right audio signal in play and so there will be a circle knob on your audio interface this is the gain knob you can think of the gain knob as it controls the amount of signal the microphone is taking in so the higher the gain the more power the microphone is grabbing that signal for example if i want to be really close and sing loud in the microphone i'm going to want to lower the gain if i want to be way back there and seeing you know normal volume i'm going to need to crank the gain so i can make sure i capture that signal over there so how do you test what gain is right and we can do this while we're recording to get used to the gain knob or we can actually do this um just by looking at our inspector window now the easiest way to check how much gain you need is just to press record like i'm recording my vocal right now so we can actually see how much gain is coming in visually and right now i just upped the gain a little bit so it's coming in likely you know you we wouldn't want a higher than that as we can see on the bottom left here we're peaking around negative seven right now and don't worry too much about the stereo out that's i'm taking all my other instruments into play so watch what happens now when i increase the gain you'll notice that my audio signal here really starts to increase so much so that it's going to get yellow you can see it's at negative 1.7 right now and i'm going to just go a little bit higher just so it starts to peak and you can see there it is peaked so i'm going to bring that down because you never want audio to peak and i'm going to bring it so far down that you can barely hear it anymore and then we'll never really be able to see it so i'm going to bring that all the way down and then you can really not even hear me anymore that would be my best way if you're a beginner to check how much gain you need on your audio interface for your vocal track the other way to do it without recording is just making sure your track is armed here per by pressing record and then looking at what signal is coming in down in your inspector window so we never want to get read you never really want to get yellow you want that green which is about you know and between a negative six and a negative eight should be fine to record a vocal because we're going to want to bump this up anyway in post-production the last thing to check inside logic pro to make sure that your audio system settings are correct we're going to want to look at the i o buffer size so we're going to want to open up command comma again with the audio preferences and look at the i o buffer size mine is set at 10 24 right now because lately i've been just mixing this track and i don't need a lot of um buffer size to record buffer size is helpful the lower you go the faster um less latency you're going to get in your audio signal so if you'd like to have your to hear your voice and like in your headphones while you're singing there's there's this thing called latency which means the time it takes for my voice to go through the microphone all the way through the wires the computer and back into my headphones there's latency there there's a leg so the smaller you go on the i o buffer size the less the leg will be for example i'm at 1024 right now and you can see it says 49.6 milliseconds round trip if i lower that to 32 it's going to be 8.2 milliseconds so you're going to want to play with your i o buffer size while you're recording your vocals to make sure there is no latency latency can be really distracting if you're recording vocals the only thing to keep in mind about io buffer size is it's very strenuous on your computer the lower you go the more your computer has to work so if you're not recording vocals bump that um if you're not we're doing any recording bump that up to save cpu power i did mention if you want to hear your vocals in your headphones while you're recording vocals and yes you can do that no problem in logic quite easily while we're in settings we're going to go to general and we're going to click on system software monitoring that's going to allow you to hear your voice as you're singing so once we click that on and then close our window here the only last thing we have to do to make sure we want to hear our vocals is to click this eye here and that's like a monitoring button so when we want to hear ourselves in our vocals we click that on and it's orange when we want don't want to hear us it's off 10 second wrap up to how to record vocals in logic is to start an audio track plug your microphone into your interface your interface into your computer set the right inputs and outputs and your i o buffer size get the gain level on your interface at the right level then click arm then if you want to hear yourself click i then click record there are many more things you can do with your vocals just after you record so let me know if you want more videos like what you would do for post-processing your vocals or editing your comps let me know in a comment i answer all those be happy to help out a bit more and feel free to listen to some of my own music as well hope to see you in the next video

Channel: Charles Cleyn

Views: 31,432

Rating: 4.9557738 out of 5

Keywords: how to record vocals logic, how to record vocals in logic pro x, how to record vocals in logic pro x beginners, how to record vocals in logic pro, how to record vocals in logic pro x 2020, logic tutorial vocal, recording my vocals in logic pro x, beginner tutorial on recording vocals in logic pro x, beginner guide to vocals in logic pro x, guide to recording vocals in logic pro x, logic pro x vocal recording, logic pro x recording vocals for beginners, vocals in logic

Id: f6m2ZQ0GFbs

Length: 11min 48sec (708 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2020