Logic Pro #08 - MIDI Fundamentals & Software Instruments

hey everyone this is music tech help guy and welcome back to my Ultimate Guide to Logic Pro in this video I'm going to show you how to work with midi and software instruments and logic so that you can compose your own beats drum patterns bass lines chords Etc with software instruments or what are sometimes called virtual instruments but first there's a little background information that is really important to know about midi before we get started midi stands for musical instrument digital interface and it was originally released to the public in 1983. MIDI is a Communications protocol so it's a digital system of sending and receiving musical instrument messages in order to send these musical messages to logic or any Daw you need a midi controller of some kind these come in a wide array of shapes and forms and price points midi keyboard controllers are the most common here I have an Alesis v25 which is a more budget-friendly option with 25 key and here I have a Novation launch key 61 which is a larger 61 key option now not all of these are keyboard controllers this is a Novation launch pad Pro basically what this does is it converts all of the keyboard Keys into more drum pad style buttons for finger drumming and things like that however these can still be used for playing in Melodies bass lines and chords it's just that the format is a bit different now on some midi controllers you'll see that they have knobs and faders and other controls so there are midi controllers out there that are just focused on knobs and faders like this monogram creative console there is no keyboard here so there's no note entry with this but you can control parameters within synthesizers using the knobs and faders next let's talk a bit about midi messages there are many different types of midi messages that we'll explore later on in this series but the main type of midi message is called a note on mess message so when I play a key or multiple keys on my MIDI controller this will send a note on message or multiple note on messages to logic which includes two different types of information the pitch information so this is what pitch I'm playing what note I'm playing so I'm playing C am I playing G am I playing F sharp each pitch on the keyboard from lowest to highest is assigned a note number that is defined by the midi protocol these numbers range from 0 to 127 with lower notes being closer to zero and higher notes being closer to 127. if middle C is C4 in traditional music notation in most Daws it's C3 middle C is typically denoted by midi note number 60. so if you were to go up from middle C to C sharp now you've gone up to 61. if you go up to D now you're on 62 and so forth and so on so pitch or note numbers are a midi value between 0 and 1 127 and this 0 to 127 range is a range that you're going to see a lot in MIDI messages because almost all midi messages conform to this 0 to 127 structure another type of midi information that is sent by a note on message is called velocity so velocity is another value between 0 and 127 that has to do with how fast you play the keys on your midi control and I don't mean how fast are you are you playing like 16th notes eighth notes it has to do with how fast you press the keys do you press them quickly or do you press them more slowly and more gently so it really doesn't have anything to do with how hard you press the keys it actually has more to do with how fast you press the keys now velocity will generally control volume or some Dynamic of your software instrument but not always sometimes velocity can be paired to other parameters like filter controls or some sort of modulation effect for example but in general General velocity is generally paired to volume and controls the dynamic of the instrument so those are the two types of information that is sent in a note on message the pitch or note number and velocity now there are additional types of midi messages you'll see many midi controllers like I said before have knobs and faders on them these are different controls that are typically called continuous controllers or control change messages there's also pitch Bend which is its own independent midi message we'll come back to these types of midi messages later on in the series but I just want you to be aware there are more types of midi messages than just no on messages now most midi controllers are Universal you can just plug them in over USB and they will just work with logic however some will require certain drivers to work so check with your manufacturer for specific details on that now if you don't have a midi controller you can actually use your typing keyboard to enter midi notes and logic as well I'll show you how to do that as well when we jump into logic in just a bit but first I want to tell you about the sponsor for this video that has helped me make this series possible Boombox as a producer and mixing engineer who primarily Works remotely from my home studio I really appreciate boombox.io for keeping my projects and client feedback organized and all in one place I can batch upload uncompressed audio files I can invite collaborators to listen and leave time stamped feedback on my tracks and create different versions of a project and ultimately helps me get the annoying parts of my job done quicker so I can spend more time on being creative as a music producer but don't take my word for it try it out for yourself you can sign up today at boombox.io and get 10 gigabytes of free storage okay so I have both my launch pad and my v25 connected over USB and in order to input notes into logic you first need to create a software instrument track so that's what I'm going to do I'm just going to create a new software instrument track and before you click create down here there's a menu that says instrument you can choose a specific starting instrument here but by default if you just use this default patch logic will create an electric piano for you so I'm just going to go ahead and keep it on that you can choose to open the library or not open the library and then I'll just click create so you can see here it's created a classic electric piano instrument and to test this out just to make sure that I'm getting midi input with both of my midi controllers I'm just going to record enable this track and then play a few notes on each of my midi controllers [Music] so that one's working and then uh my launch pad [Music] so they're both working and that's what's really cool about midi is because it's sort of a generic protocol you can connect multiple midi controllers to the same machine at the same time and they'll work you can even play them at the same time oh [Music] so they'll work together in tandem over USB now before we get into recording anything we want to set up logic for recording to minimize latency so what I'm going to do is go up to logic pro settings and I'm going to go to audio and remember this is preferences if you're on an older version of logic and we're going to change the buffer size from this higher setting to a much lower setting now it's still showing I'm getting a ton of latency here that's just because I'm running a screen capture software at the same time your latency should be much lower than what's showing here and then just click apply to apply the lower buffer size now I O buffer is not quite as important with midi recordings as it is with audio recordings but it does still have an effect on the latency while recording so I like to keep this around 32 or 64 anytime I'm recording okay so if you open up the library remember you can open up the library by pressing y on your keyboard you can select any software instrument and then you can select a new patch from the left here so let's say maybe I want something else like some strings like some synth strings so I can go to synthesizer then I'll go to Strings and then I'll choose one of these presets and it'll load up a different preset [Music] [Applause] or I can play it over here [Music] now if you want to create a second software instrument you can use the shortcut option command n to bring up the new tracks dialog and you can just create a new software instrument but another cool way to do this is if you have a software instrument selected just double click below that software instrument in the track headers area and it'll automatically create a brand new blank software instrument so this is what a blank software instrument looks like if you go over to the channel strip in the inspector and this here says just instrument and there's nothing loaded up there you're not going to hear any sound like we're still inputting midi to this track but there's no instrument to interpret the midi and then convert it to an audio output so just be aware of that you have to choose an instrument in order to hear any sound so what I'm going to do is build a basic four instrument arrangement with drums bass chords and maybe a synthesizer so what I'm going to do is just select my current software instrument track I'm going to go over to the library I'm going to go to electronic drum kit and I'm just going to choose one of these electronic kits I'll use this one called Analog Drive and this will load up that drum kit for me and then I can either figure out what the notes are here on my keyboard controller or I can do it from my launch pad now typically with drum kits your Kick Drum is going to be on C1 and then the rest of the kit is going to go up from there foreign okay so I'm gonna start with that just kick and snare and a couple little I don't know what those are little side sticks or something so I'm going to lower the tempo to say 108 BPM I'm also going to go ahead and save my project which is always a good idea and what you want to do before you start recording is you want to make sure that your metronome is turned on you can do that by going up here you can just click and hold on it and make sure that click while recording is turned on so what that means is when you press play you won't get a metronome but if I press r on my keyboard to record you'll get a metronome you can choose to have the count off turned on or turned off I'm going to go ahead and turn it off so the recording will start right here at bar one and I am not a fan of starting my recordings right on bar one I typically start on bar two I do this for a reason to make sure that no notes are cut off on that first beat on that first bar there is a way to fix that with midi it's called midi Chase but we'll talk about that in a future video so I'm actually going to start my recording at bar two foreign [Music] space bar when you're done now if I double click on this and open it up in the piano roll editor you will see that some of these notes are a bit off of the grid and what you can do is you can actually quantize your midi notes to correct any timing issues that you might have now we're going to get into midi quantization and editing in the piano roll later pretty soon but I want to show you a quick way to quantize that doesn't even require you to go down into the midi editor in the piano roll editor all you do is you select the midi region that you just played and then you open up the region inspector here and there's an option here that says quantize and from this menu you can choose the quantization value so the quantization value is going to be the fastest or quickest rhythmic value that you played in your musical idea so for me that was a 16th note in this specific exam so Watch What Happens I'm going to open this Up in piano roll just so you can see how this works see how none of these are perfectly on the grid if I select that region and then change the quantization to 16th note all of those notes snap to the nearest 16th note on the grid so now when I play this back I should have just a perfectly in time drum beat [Music] thank you okay so now let's say I wanted to layer up some hi-hats on top of this something like that something real simple I could create another track and put the hi-hats on a separate track if I wanted to or I could layer up another midi recording on top of this existing midi region so the way you set that up is you go under logic pro settings and then you go to recording and then down here where it says overlapping track recordings midi there's cycle off cycle on replace for cycle off and cycle on make sure this is set to merge and what that will do is it'll merge any midi recording you make on top of an existing region it'll merge that midi data into the existing region so let's give that a shot I'm going to play this from my keyboard controller this time thank you okay so I can go back into that midi region and once again we can see my hi-hats are a bit off so I can just sort of re-quantize that midi data and everything should let's turn that off and then go ahead and turn it back on and there we go so all the midi data is quantized to the nearest 16th note so now I'm ready to add another instrument let's add some chords this time so I'm going to go ahead and just double click below this track to create a new blank midi instrument this time I'll go over here and select a synthesizer let's go with synth strings and yeah I'll use the authentic strings the same ones I did before I'll just play a really simple like a minor chord progression [Music] now if you don't have a midi controller one I recommend you get one at some point in the future two there is a workaround if you press command K on your typing keyboard this will bring up the musical typing keyboard what this does is it converts your home row keys and some of the keys above the home row Keys into a musical typing keyboard so what you can do is you can play those corresponding notes on your typing keyboard and you can play notes in with your typing keyboard you can control the octave here so if I want to go up or down an octave I can do that [Music] and there are several other controls in here as well just be aware that your typing keyboard cannot sense velocity so if you want to change the velocity you'll have to do that here by clicking the plus button or clicking the minus button to increase or decrease the input velocity [Music] so those notes were much longer those were like more like whole notes so what I'm going to do is quantize that midi region to a 1 1 Note which is a whole note we'll come back to all of these quantization values in more detail in a future video and you'll see that they all lock into the nearest whole note and now I'm going to create a base so I'm just going to double click and create a new software instrument track let's go to synthesizer we'll go to base I'll try out this agile synth base [Music] foreign [Music] again I can go ahead and quantize this midi data I'm going to use a 16th note again there we go and then we are clipping so let's go ahead and just pull down the level and all these tracks let's repeat this once remember you can just drag over regions hit command R to repeat and remember to set your cycle range around the selected regions you can just drag over the regions and hit command U so now I can just Loop these 16 bars over and over if I like but let's add one more instrument to this I'm going to go into synthesizer and I'll go to lead and yeah let's use the 70s analog lead [Music] thank you yeah so it's not a masterpiece or anything but it works so if you're new to working with midi take some time experiment with software instruments experiment with making midi recordings get used to the process of making video recordings and quantizing midi recordings because we're going to be doing a lot of work with midi in future videos I hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did please leave it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel to see more content like this as always thank you so much for the support and thanks for watching

Channel: MusicTechHelpGuy

Views: 44,702

Keywords: logic, logic pro, Logic Pro x, logic 10, logic x, logic studio, studio, recording, audio, music, production, beats, midi, musictechhelpguy, music tech help guy, logic tutorial, tutorial, logic beginner tutorial, Logic Pro tutorial, apple logic, apple logic pro, ultimate guide to logic, ultimate guide, ultimate guide to logic pro, editing, region, beat, how to make a beat, MIDI recording, MIDI region, overlap, MIDI Merge, MIDI Controllers, What is MIDI, Velocity, How to record MIDI

Id: ocC3TTk0Wq4

Length: 18min 52sec (1132 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 24 2022