Logic Pro #25 - Mixer Overview & Channel Strip Components

hey everyone this is music tech help guy and in this video I'm going to give you an overview of using the mixer in logic pro and I'll also break down each of the main Channel strip components in the mixer and I'll also touch on topics including Channel strip settings and how to save and recall these adding EQ with the EQ display adding and using midi effects plugins loading software instruments manually rather than using Library presets loading audio effects inserts and plugins loading third-party plugins in the mixer I'll give an explanation of how panning works for both stereo and mono channels and I'll explain how digital audio signals are metered so there's definitely a lot to unpack in this video and this is going to be a long one so buckle in and as always I've left time stamps and chapters below if you want to skip around but before I get into the tutorial I want to quickly tell you about the sponsor of this video Boombox are you a music producer or mixing engineer looking for a 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you're sending to the mixer are actually going to the mixer you want to make sure that there's blue box this blue border is around the mixer that's showing that the mixer is in Focus so for example if I'm working with both the mixer and the tracks area if I click up here now the tracks area is in Focus any key commands are going to go to this area whereas now when I click back down here this brings the mixer back in Focus another way to bring up the mixer is to press Command 2 this will bring the mixer up in a separate window this is really helpful if you have a dual display setup and you want to have the tracks area on One display and the mixer on another display and then to close this out you can just click up here or press command W to close the window I also want to point out that there's a divider column here in my project just ignore this this is here because I built this project using live Loops we'll come back to live Loops way way later in this series so for now just ignore this divider column if you don't see it in your project now one thing you'll notice is when I open up the mixer each track in the mixer has a color and for the most part right now the track color in the mixer is matching the region color out here in the tracks area but I do want to show you that you can actually show your track colors in the tracks area and make them match up with your mixer track colors if you right click or control click on any of your tracks in the tracks area then go down to track header components you can select track color bars and this will show you the color of each track and you'll see that these now match the mixer and if you want to change the track color you simply right click and select assign track color and then choose a color so if I choose this dark orange here now when I go back into the mixer you'll see that that track is shown in dark orange so it's just a way to set your track colors and make them match the color of the tracks in the mixer additionally if you want to get to those options without right clicking or control clicking you can also just select a track and press option T and this will bring up the track options and I can hide and show the color bars here along with many other options okay so let's go into the mixer here and I want to point out which ones of these are software instruments or drummer tracks I actually don't have any drummer tracks in this project but software instruments and drummer tracks look pretty similar in the mixer and which ones are audio tracks the way you can tell which ones are audio and which ones are software instrument tracks is if you look at the input tab here the ones that have software instruments for the input like this one has quick sampler loaded on it these are software instrument tracks this one has DMD or drum machine designer on it so when the input is a software instrument you're working with a midi based track so you're working with a software instrument track when the input of a track is simply a microphone or line level input from your interface then you're working with an audio track so with this track you can see here there's no input it's in Stereo and I can assign an input of input one and two up to input 9 and 10 on my audio interface and If This Were mono I can only select one input at a time so we've already talked about that a bit when we were talking about recording with a microphone another thing you can change in here are the icons that are used for each track so you can see the icons for each track but you can actually change this out here in the tracks area so I have this track called Big Tom Loops if I right click on this or control click I can choose the icon that I want for this track so if I go to Drums then I can select a Tom icon and then if I press X to open the mixer you'll see that that icon is also shown in the mixer now on the far right you'll see a stereo output track and a master VCA the stereo output track is essentially like a master volume output on a mixing console all of the other tracks in your project are going to be routed to the stereo output they're all summed together on the stereo output unless you change the routing of the output of the tracks but we'll talk about that in the next video so the stereo output will show you the signal level of your entire mix it'll also show you if you're clipping or peaking so for example if I play Maybe This section here [Music] you can see that the peak signal level there is negative 2.4 DB and if I maybe play this section [Music] it's a little louder but if I were to maybe pull up some of these a bit you'll see that the stereo output actually clips and goes into the positive now we'll talk about dbfs and how these values work toward the end of this video but if your stereo output is clipping it's generally a good idea to pull down the volume of all of your other tracks to compensate to make sure that your stereo output doesn't clip now this is just best mixing practice there are other ways to handle this equally as well in fact there are some easier ways of dealing with this that we'll talk about very soon [Music] so now we're not clipping but again the stereo output is the sum of all of the channels all of the tracks in your project we'll talk more about how to work with the stereo output and master VCA in a future video but for now just keep them both at Unity gain which means you're not adding any volume or reducing any volume so you just option click on both of these faders to set them to 0.0 DB when it comes to selecting tracks in the mixer there are a few different ways you can do this if you want to select a whole range of tracks you can select the first track hold shift and then select the last track in that range and then you can actually control all of the volume faders of the selection all at the same time you can also control all of the panning of those channels at the same time likewise if you want to move around you can use the left and right arrow keys to select the track and move around or if you just want to select certain tracks you can select the track and then hold command and select just certain other tracks and then you can have linked controls for just these selected tracks as well or you can skip all of that and just drag up here to select tracks with your mouse at the top there are three options here single tracks and all most of the time I just have this on the tracks option all this does is it shows you all of the tracks in the tracks area but down in the mixer however if I select single this will just show you the selected track along with the stereo out in master VCA so that's what I was saying before typically I just keep this on tracks however the all option can be helpful in some situations essentially what this does is it shows you all tracks in your project regardless of whether they're inside of a track stack like the drum machine designer kits are so drum machine designer as we talked about before is sort of enclosed in a folder called a track stack and inside of that folder there are multiple channels one for each of the drum pads in drum machine designer so even if these are closed if you're in all tracks mode you'll see all of those drum tracks within the drum machine designer kit here you'll see things like the Click track you'll see an actual volume control for the click track here but most of the time I'm just working in tracks mode here so I only see the tracks that are shown in the tracks area in the mixer on the right here you can also hide and show certain types of tracks so if I want to hide my audio tracks I can do that if I want to hide my instrument tracks I can do that if you're using any auxiliary or other routing tracks you can hide these as well you can hide the stereo output hide the master VCA and on the far right here you can switch between a narrow and wide Channel Strip view just by selecting between these two different options one other thing I want to point out here is that your mute and solo shortcuts also work in the mixer so if you select a track or multiple tracks you can press M to mute those tracks or press s to solo those tracks [Music] next I'll break down each of the channel strip components in the mixer I'll just start at the top of the channel strips and work my way down now if any point you notice that some of the channel strip components are missing or not shown you can go up to view go down to channel strip components and you can hide and show each of the channel strip components here you can also access this by right-clicking or control clicking here going to channel strip components and then you can hide and show the channel strip components from here so at the very top you have the channel strip settings Channel strip settings are a way to save presets on a channel so for example this track is a Tom fills track it sounds like this right now [Music] and it sounds that way because I have quick sampler loaded up with some samples loaded in I'm using the channel EQ to boost the mid-range a little bit I have a third party plugin called decapitator on here for some saturation and drive and I also have the Vintage verb from Valhalla also a third-party plug-in if I wanted to save this as a channel strip setting for later I can click on the setting Tab and I could select save Channel strip setting as this will bring up a dialog where I can create a channel strip setting for this so I'll call this like big Toms or something like that and even if I reset this entire Channel strip so if I click here and go to reset Channel strip now it's just a blank software instrument there's nothing on it but if I click on the channel strip setting my Big Tom's Channel strip setting will show up here and I can reload that not only does this reload all of the audio effects plugins on the channel it also saves the software instrument that it's on the channel and now I have my sound back [Music] the channel strip settings are particularly helpful for saving mixing presets on audio tracks and also for saving particular instrument settings because the channel strip setting not only saves the instrument and plugins it also saves all of the plug-in settings as well as all of the software instrument settings the next Channel strip component is the gain reduction meter this is only going to show up on tracks where you have a compatible compressor plug-in like Logix compressor loaded up now I don't want to go into great detail about what compressors do we'll talk about that later on but as gain reduction is applied in the compressor you will also see that gain reduction shown on the channel strip without even having to open up the compressor plugin [Music] so I've got a bit of like a ducking effect on my base there and as you see the gain reduction being applied in the compressor you also see it out here on the channel strip next up is the EQ display the EQ display is a way to see a visual of what's going on in the channel EQ or linear phase EQ plug-ins which are stock plugins and logic but you could also add the channel EQ with the EQ display so for example on my base here maybe I want a bit more of like a mid-range presence I can double click on the EQ display and what it does is adds the channel EQ plugin after my final plugin in my plugin chain I can open this up and dial in a setting that I like foreign [Music] once I create that setting you can then see that in the EQ display next up are the MIDI effects midi effects inserts are only going to be displayed for compatible software instrument tracks so with drum kit designer tracks these aren't going to work on the DMD Channel itself but they will work within the DMD track stack folder and you can see I'm using a couple of midi effects here on these two synthesizers in particular I'm using the arpeggiator midi effects plugin now what midi FX plugins do is they affect and transform the midi signal before the midi signal hits the software instrument so I've got these plucked cords right now they just sound like this [Music] and if I were to click here to bypass the arpeggiator on that channel you can also do it right here within the arpeggiator plugin you'll hear that the midi notes that are going to my software instrument are actually quite simple [Music] but what I've done is I've loaded up the arpeggiator I've selected a preset this one's called Simple cord Groove one and this is giving my chords a rhythmic chord motion foreign [Music] midi effects plugins the ones I find myself using the most in particular are the arpeggiator the chord trigger the modulator the transposer and the velocity processor now I will give an individual tutorial on each of these midi effects plugins at some point in the future but for now just play around with them and each one of these has its own set of presets in them that you can load from the top in fact all of the audio effects plugins and instrument plugins and logic have presets you can load from within the plug-in window up here in the top left okay so next up is the input section and for audio tracks as I said before this is where you can select your microphone or line level inputs and for software instruments this is where you can select your software instrument plugin so on this track here you can see I have the contact 7 instrument pulled up this is a third-party sample based instrument and inside I've selected the Stray light instrument you're not going to have this instrument unless you've purchased it from Native Instruments so let me try swapping this out for another instrument so there's a couple little controls up here on the insert I want to show you though you can bypass the instrument here you can click on the middle part of the plug-in insert to open the instrument and you can also click on the right side to change the instrument and also view your recent instruments or you can select no plugin so that's what I'm going to do and you can see it's removed the instrument and instead of using contacts let's use something from logic I'll go ahead and use the Alchemy instrument click on it to open it up and inside I can search for a preset I'll just search for pad let's try this 70s space pad [Music] yeah I think I like this 70s synth strings better now in some instruments you can load the presets from up here but in certain instruments like Alchemy you can actually load the preset from within the plug-in window the plugin itself has its own preset browser foreign next up we have the audio effects inserts this is where you can load up audio effects plugins so for example on my synth pad here maybe I want to change the tone of the pad a bit maybe I want to give it some more mid-range or maybe reduce the top end a bit I can simply click on one of these available insert slots you'll see your most recent plugins at the top and then down here you'll see all of logic's stock plugins sorted into different categories so for example if I want some EQ I could go to EQ I could open up the channel EQ click on the plugin to open up the plugin window and I'll just press play and move around some of these controls and dial in a tone that I like foreign you can also resize most of these plug-in windows by dragging on the lower left or right corner you can bypass the effect within the plug-in window by clicking here and just like with the instrument plugins you can also bypass the plugin by clicking on the left side of the insert you can click in the middle of the plugin to hide and show the plug-in window and if you click on the right side it brings up a similar menu where you can select no plugin to remove the Plugin or select a new effect maybe I want to make this more of like a rhythmic sound so after my EQ I'm going to add another effect this time I'll go down to modulation and I'm going to load up the tremolo plugin and I'll choose a preset from within the plugin window so even your effects plugins will have presets you can choose up here in the upper left I'm going to use this mono tremolo and I'm going to sync this to an eighth note foreign if I wanted to add some additional Reverb after the tremolo plug-in to give it a bit of Ambience I could do that as well I can just add another effects insert here go down to reverb and I'll select the chromaverb Reverb let's open that up and once again I'll just choose a preset from up here there are different types of reverbs here I'm just going to use the synth hall and then I'll blend the dry and wet signal now when it comes to using effects plugins you can move these around you can duplicate them so for example if I wanted this chromaverb effect on another Channel I could just click and drag it over to move it I can click and drag to move it back if I want to duplicate it I can hold option and drag it over and I can just keep dragging as many times as I like and I can duplicate that plug-in as many times as I like if I want to bypass all of the instances of a plug-in on multiple channels you can simply select those channels and then bypass one of the plugins and it bypasses all of them likewise if I wanted to remove these three chroma verbs I could select all three of those channels click here and select no plugin and all three of them will disappear you can also bypass these quickly by clicking and swiping up or down so you can see I bypassed all three of them just by clicking and swiping down likewise I can click and swipe down again and it reactivates all three of those plugins now if you have some third-party effects plugins or software instruments installed you can also load these from the same menu so for example instead of using chromaverb maybe I want to use a third-party Reverb so I'll just click here and instead of choosing one of these pre-sorted ones that are all stock plugins go down to audio units and you'll see all of your third-party effects plug-in manufacturers in this list so for example maybe I want to load up the Shimmer Reverb from Valhalla I can open that up and that's how you can open up third-party effects it's very simple likewise with third-party instruments if I wanted to change this Alchemy instrument over to a third-party instrument it works the same way you just go down to Au instruments so you're just going to skip all of these stock instruments in the list go down to Au instruments and you'll see all of your manufacturers here so maybe I want to load up ana2 from Sonic Academy I can open up that plugin and now I've loaded my third party instrument and I can tweak the settings in here but one thing that's worth mentioning is not all third party plugins will have presets up here in the upper left menu so you may have to use the built-in menu within the instrument so I'm going to go ahead and just choose a sort of ambient pad here [Music] foreign next I want to show you two important plug-in settings go up to logic pro settings display and from here you're going to go to mixer and here there are two really important plug-in window settings the first one is open plugin window on insertion so if you're wondering why when I load up plugins they're not automatically opening up it's because I had that option turned off if I turn it on now if I load up a plug-in you'll see that it automatically opens up the plugin window for me personally I like to turn this option off but it's completely up to you most people actually prefer to keep this on and second you can show the recent plugin list in the plugin menu so if you have this option turned off you will no longer see your recent plugins in both the software instrument menu along with the audio effects inserts menu so I like to keep this on because there are certain plugins that I use more than others and I like to see them here in the recent plugin list for easy access okay we're going to skip a few Channel strip components here including the sends the outputs the group assignments and settings and the automation modes each one of these will have a dedicated video in the near future and we'll be talking about sends and routing in the very next video so let's move down to the pan knobs and the volume faders and meters now pan might seem really simple it just has to do with the position of an instrument or track in your mix so you drag this over to the left you hear it more on the left you drag it over to the right you hear it more in the right and while that is true it's actually a bit deeper topic than it seems all of the tracks I'm working with here right now are all stereo tracks so if I right click or control click on any of these pan knobs you'll see that there's three options stereo pan balance and binaural Panner the binaural painters we're going to skip for now because they're not really relevant to the conversation at this point but by default stereo panners are actually not stereo panners they're stereo balancers so what's the difference well when you use a balancer when you pull a stereo balancer over to the left really what you're doing is you're reducing the volume of the right channel to make the instrument or track appear like it's more on the left side of the mix likewise if I pull this over to the right all it's really doing is just lowering the volume of the Left Channel to make it appear like it's more on the right side of the mix foreign of course I can option click on this to set it back to the center so the problem with using stereo balancers is that if you hard pan anything you're actually losing content from one of the channels if I hard pan to the left I'm actually losing content in the right channel if I hard pan to the right I'm losing content in the Left Channel it doesn't compensate for the channel that's being reduced so typically with stereo channels I'll use the stereo pan option instead because what this does is it actually independently pans each of the channels so now if I pan this over to the left what it's doing is it's keeping the Left Channel on the left but it's actually moving the pan of the right channel over to the left channel so we're not losing stereo information another added bonus of using the stereo pan is you can click on this green bar that surrounds the Panner and drag up or down and you can narrow or add width to the stereo image of the track so if I narrow this I can actually position this instrument and sort of localize it better in the stereo field in a more specific way whereas you can't really do this with a stereo balancer so if I want this track to seem like it's kind of in the center kind of narrow and off to the left side I can be very specific with the location of that track in the stereo field foreign pad like this I'm probably just going to leave it on balance and I'm just going to leave it Center so it's not really an issue but maybe something like this Baseline where it's got this Big Wide Stereo effect on it but I want the base to be more Center focused I can use that control to Center the focus of the bass foreign [Music] [Music] last cool feature of the stereo pan that I want to show you is if you hold command and click on the stereo Panner this will turn it orange and essentially what this is doing is it's just swapping the left and right channels so this can be really helpful if you're working with stereo recordings that were made with two microphones like drum overheads or acoustic guitar and you need to swap the left and right channels for some reason so this is just a really quick and easy way to do this now when you're working with mono channels there's only two options pan or binaural Panner which as I said before we're skipping binaural panning for now so you really just have a mono pan option here which positions the single channel in the stereo field so no need to deal with any of that balancer versus stereo pan stuff with mono channels last I want to talk a bit about digital audio metering and metering digital audio signals in your Daw this pretty much applies to all Daws not just logic just about everyone knows that audio levels or sound levels are measured in decibels or DB for short depending on what situation you're working with you may see various different ways that decibels are represented so for example sound pressure in the air is represented by DB SPL SPL stands for sound pressure level metering sound and acoustical situations is often shown is DBA or DBC these are different weightings of SPL or in audio Electronics you'll see things like dbv or DBU so because the decibel is a relative unit it requires a reference value so the decibel is a meaningless unit unless you have a reference value to compare it to and all of these options I've just mentioned all have different reference values now in digital systems like Daws signal levels are measured in meters in dbfs decibels relative to full scale this means that the maximum volume of a digital audio signal starts at zero and the signal level goes down from there so let's check this out on the stereo output since that's sort of the sum of all of my other instruments I'm just going to press play and view the meter and I'll talk about what's going on here with the volume fader in the meter as it's playing okay so like I said the volume starts at zero that's the peak level and then it goes down from there the value you're seeing here on the right is the peak volume level that's being metered coming through the stereo output so we're at negative three dbfs now you don't have to say dbfs every single time most people just say negative 3 DB if I were to pull up my instruments you'll see that the signal level gets higher and higher and eventually we get into the positive now once we're in the positive we're clipping or peaking so it means that the signal level is higher than the maximum signal level can be and if I were to go and Export this track right now parts of the audio are just going to be truncated or sort of cut off to only hit the 0.0 DB ceiling so you can kind of think of 0.0 DB as like a ceiling where you can't go any higher now the great thing about modern Daws is that the resolution of the mixing engine of the Daw is actually much higher than the resolution of the audio file that you'll eventually export or bounce out of logic so this allows you to clip or Peak but you can easily recover these peaks in most situations as long as you haven't clipped a recorded signal which is why it's possible to have positive peaking values like this without getting a bunch of nasty distortion on the stereo output when you use your volume fader you can get positive values because this is representing added gain or added volume so if I option click on this it's called Unity gain because there's no added gain it's just at 0.0 if I pull this down I start to reduce the volume so the peak volume was negative 2.2 before but if I pull this down by say 5 DB and I click on this to reset it now you can see that my Peak value is around negative seven so we've reduced the volume by 5 DB or likewise if I pull this up you'll see this creeps closer and closer to peaking and eventually it will clip or Peak and go into the positive you can just click on these little clip lights to reset them now when you're working in post fader metering mode when you pull a fader down on a Channel or multiple channels you'll see the signal level reflected in the meters so if I pull this up you can actually see the signal level goes up pull it down signal level goes down and that's probably what makes the most sense however as I demonstrated in a previous video if you switch over to pre-fader metering the meter now comes before the volume fader so if I pull the volume down on these channels you're not going to hear them but you're still going to see the signal level coming into the meter because the meter is before the fader at this point so just be very aware of that if you're working in pre-fader mode you're not going to see any volume changes on the meter and in some situations that may be what you want for me in particular I always use pre-fader metering mode when I'm trying to set my signal levels for recording with a microphone because it lets me see the signal level before any volume adjustments now one last thing I want to mention here is that while this signal flow from the top of the channel to the bottom of the channel seems pretty self-explanatory there's actually one thing here that I want to point out that is really important to remember and it'll be even more important as we start working with sends the pan knobs actually come after the volume fader so even though it looks like the pan comes first then volume second it's actually volume first then pan second so this will come into play as we start talking about post pan post fader and pre-fader sends down the road when we get into mixing okay so that's an overview of using the mixer and channel strip components in Logic Pro in the next video I'll move on to using sends and buses and explain how these are used for routing time-based effects like reverbs and delays 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: 20,436

Keywords: logic pro, Logic Pro x, logic x, mixer, channel, channel strip, components, channel strip setting, gain reduction, meter, input, software instrument, plugin, audio fx, audio insert, insert, using plugins in logic, mixing, pan, stereo, mono, stereo pan, balancer, dbfs, metering, volume, levels, dB, decibel

Id: iHwUCy8VSSo

Length: 36min 2sec (2162 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 12 2023