Logic Pro #29 - Track Stacks & Bus Processing

hey what's up everyone this is music tech help guy and in this video I'm going to show you how to use track Stacks in logic pro track Stacks are a really helpful tool for folder organization you can use them as a summing bus to combine signals together and now in logic 10.7.5 and higher you can also put summing Stacks inside of other summing Stacks so you can create some fairly complex mixing hierarchies but before we get into the tutorial I want to quickly tell you about the sponsor of this video Boombox if you're a beat maker producer songwriter or you're in a band you've got to check out boombox.io and their incredible new music storage and audio file commenting tools I use Boombox just about every day for my work I use it to upload tracks that I've produced or mixed I invite my clients or co-writers to be collaborators on the project and they can add time stamped feedback on each track then I take this feedback make revisions and upload a new version this helps helps me streamline my project management and helps me get the boring parts of my job done quicker and easier head over to boombox.io and sign up for a free account today and get four gigabytes of free storage okay so to get started I'm continuing on with the same project I've used in the previous videos so if you want to follow along with me there's a link to download this project in the video description below so let's move on to track Stacks there are two types of track Stacks folder stacks and summing Stacks let me show you how to create a track stack what you do is you select the tracks that you want to add to the stack and you want to make sure that the tracks are right next to each other in the tracks area like this so if I want to create a stack with my vocals I'll select all of my vocals go up to track and select create track stack or you can press shift command D here you can select your two different types of stacks a folder stack or a summing stack let's start with the folder stack folder Stacks are mainly an organizational thing so you can hide and show all of the tracks within that folder stack I can rename it maybe I'll call this vocals and you do get some basic mix controls like you can mute or solo all of the tracks within that stack and you also have volume control over all of the tracks inside of that stack so let's try that out [Music] now one of the things you might notice is that when I mute the vocal stack that you can still hear the effects coming through the effects channels the aux tracks the reason for that is because I have some of these sends here that are in pre-fader mode when you use pre-fader sends within summing or folder Stacks they will be immune to the muting of the stack so if you want the time-based effects to also mute if you want these sends to also be muted when you mute you're going to want to change these back to one of the post fader modes so now if I mute the vocals it's also going to mute the sends sending signal over to my effects tracks foreign you're getting here is actually from another instrument from the acoustic guitars or if I just want to use this as a simple volume control for all of my vocals I can do that too [Music] so folder Stacks essentially function like vcas in the mixer so these do not affect the routing of the tracks within the stack note that the output of all of the tracks in the stack are still going to the stereo output over here so the volume control on the stack is essentially a VCA control if you don't know what a VCA is don't worry about it for now we'll come back to vcas in just a few videos down the road now if you want to get rid of a stack you have to flatten the stack so what you do is you just select the stack go up to track again and then go down to flatten stack or you can press shift command U so what this will do is it'll return those tracks back to their normal state but there is one more thing you want to do because the folder Stacks function as vcas the folder stack VCA will still be left over here in the mixer so you want to go ahead and just delete that then click delete anyway and now you're back to where you originally started now 99 of the time when I use Stacks I'm not using folder Stacks I prefer to use summing stacks for several reasons and I'll explain why in just a bit but first let's create some summing Stacks let's create a summing stack for my vocals so I'll go up to track create track stack and then select summing stack it looks very similar I'll just name this vocals let's do the same with the electric guitars you can choose to leave your you know lead guitars in a separate stack or just leave them outside of the stack but for this example I'm going to combine all of my electric guitars together so I'll go ahead and do that as well and I'll just call this e guitars I'll leave the bass out of a stack but I do want to put my acoustic guitars in a track stack and again to do this a little quicker you can use the shortcut shift command D let's add a summing stack for these two I'll just call this ACC guitars and lastly for the drums only the main track of the drums is shown out in the tracks area but since we split this to multi-output you can actually add all of these aux tracks for the kick snare Toms and hi-hat into the tracks area and I in a previous video I also created a gated Reverb aux track for the snare and toms so what I'm going to do is select all of these and I'm going to press Ctrl T and this will create tracks for them out here in the tracks area and now I can put all these aux tracks inside of a summing stack so I can quickly solo and mute the drums pull up the volume pull down the volume so I'm going to go ahead and do that as well let's create a summing stack for the drums so it's no problem at all to put aux tracks within summing Stacks the only reason I'm not doing it with these time based effects up here is that these are actually used by the vocals electric guitar and the acoustic guitars so these are sort of shared effects although if I wanted to I could put these in their own summing stack to sort of organize all of the time-based effects but instead I'm just going to sort of put these up at the top for now so now you can see I have very quick sort of organizational access to all of the different groups of instruments in my mix but the real advantage of summing Stacks is if you look at any of these summing Stacks they look just like an AUX track in the mixer you can assign the input you can add audio effects you can assign sends you can assign the output routing you can group them together you can add automation there's pan control and volume control so let's just give our drums a listen right here I'll just solo that stack [Music] and because you can pan your track Stacks I also find track Stacks really helpful for multi-channel recordings like if you're recording an acoustic guitar with two mics instead of one and you have two different mono audio channels inside of the stack you can then pan that whole instrument over to the left or over to the right using stereo pan so there's a lot of really cool sort of practical mixing and routing uses for these the other big difference between a summing stack and a folder stack is in the name it sums all of the channels in the stack into the summing stack so the summing stack actually receives and inputs an audio signal whereas the folder Stacks do not you can see this on the output routing of each of the tracks that are inside of the stack you can see it's automatically assigned these to bus 8 and the input of the drum track stack is bus 8. so all of these tracks the out put of all these tracks are being summed together and being combined together and routed into the drum track stack now another really awesome thing about this is because you can add effects you can apply bus processing to hold groups of instruments or multiple channels at a time so let's say that I wanted to brighten up my drums a bit maybe I'll go ahead and just add the channel EQ here [Music] so I've brightened up the top end and mid-range a bit just to kind of bring up the snare drum and and some of the brightness and the symbols as well and then maybe I'll add some bust compression to this as well so go ahead and add the compressor for this I think I'm going to use the Vintage VCA circuit which is like an SSL bus compressor and what I'm going to do is I'm going to really hit the drums pretty hard with compression and then I'm going to pull back the mix blend to blend together the slammed over compressed signal with the dry signal and I find this results in a really nice sound on the drums [Music] foreign [Music] but now if I blend that sound in with the dry signal using the mix blend knob [Music] it gives me a drum sound that's just a bit more lively you hear a bit more of like the natural room tone from some of these samples along with some of the effects from the Gated Reverb so bus processing is another really helpful use of using track Stacks let's check out our acoustic guitars here [Music] foreign so maybe instead of compressing the individual channels maybe what I want to do is compress both of the guitars together so they're sort of glued together as a more cohesive unit and I could even change the sends here if I wanted the sends to be on the summing stack rather than on the individual tracks I could do that too so maybe I'll add bus 1 here so it comes after the compression and then I'll add the compressor to the summing stack rather than the individual tracks and I can compress both of these guitars together [Music] foreign [Music] Stacks are absolutely incredible for mixing and mix routing and bus compression these are also great for grouping big stacks of vocals or backing vocals together often I'll end up with mixed sessions where I have like eight or ten different vocals all stacked up in different harmonies and different voices you can throw all these in a summing stack EQ them together compress them together add Reverb on Ascend together it helps with taking projects that have tons of tracks and sort of summing them down and consolidating them down into more manageable elements now if you want to flatten a summing stack this is very easy to do as well you can use the shift command U shortcut so it'll flatten the stack but once again you'll find that the leftover track from the track stack is there here so whereas the folder Stacks are kind of like vcas summing Stacks are kind of like aux tracks so when you take those tracks out of the track stack you're going to have to select them in the mixer and change their output back to the stereo output because they're still going to be routed to the track stack and then you'll have to delete that aux track in the mixer that's a leftover of the track stack and now we're back to where we were before outside of mixing another really great use for summing Stacks is for layering up multiple software instruments so let's say for example I want to layer up a synth pad some synth strings along with an arpeggiator instrument so instead of just recording my notes or my chords on one of these channels and then just copying those midi regions down I could actually put all three of these software instruments inside of a summing stack so let's go ahead and do that so I'll just call this pads Plus ARP and essentially what I can do now is treat this summing stack like a single instrument with three different layers you can actually record your midi data directly to the track stack so let's go ahead and do that [Music] okay so off screen I quantized all the notes and got rid of the gaps in between each of the chords now the thing is you didn't really hear the different layers very well because they weren't really mixed very well so what I'm going to do is pull up the arpeggiator a bit and I'm going to pull down these pads quite a bit I've also panned these left and right to give them a little space let's go ahead and do that a bit more [Music] foreign [Music] and you can still add individual midi effects individual effects to each of the channels within the track stack or you can apply effects to the entire track stack as a whole maybe I want to bring down this synth pad by an octave I'll throw in the transposer plug-in here and I'll just transpose this down by 12 semitones which is a whole octave and maybe what I want to do is add a bit of I don't know like a tremolo effect or like a pulsing effect on the main channel so go to modulation I'll add the tremolo plug-in and I'll go ahead and just pull up one of these presets here let's sync it to maybe like a eighth note thank you so there's all sorts of really creative things you can do with track Stacks including combining together multiple instruments to sort of make this multi-tambral or multi-textured instrument rather than just three separate instruments all doing their own thing so that wraps up track Stacks that wraps up this video I hope you guys enjoyed the 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: 17,403

Keywords: logic, logic x, Logic Pro x, logic pro, mix, mixing, stack, stacks, track, track stacks, folder, folder stack, sum, summing, summing stack, bus, buss, bus processing, buss processing, bus compression, buss compression, compression, compressor, group, VCA

Id: WVR7bTOseME

Length: 17min 35sec (1055 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 30 2023