Logic Pro #35 - Logic Remote (Turn Your iPad into a Control Surface!)

hey what's up everyone this is music tech help guy and uh wait a minute something's not right here oh I forgot to hit record there we go hey everyone this is music tech help guy and in this video I'm going to show you how to use logic remote logic remote is a free IOS app available in the App Store that allows you to turn your iPhone or iPad into a wireless remote control or control surface for Logic Pro logic remote can be used as a remote control for recording and Playback key commands so if you're recording yourself and there's some considerable distance between your microphone and your computer it's fantastic for that you can also use it as a mixing control surface or a control surface for smart controls you can build patterns with the step sequencer the chord strips function is really helpful for composing and building chord progressions and you can also use it as a live Loops controller so this video is what I believe to be the most comprehensive single video tutorial on logic remote I don't cover absolutely everything but I touch on what I believe to be the six main features of logic remote the ones that I use the the most this video is a longer one so as always I've provided time stamps below if you want to jump around in the video but before we get into the tutorial I want to quickly tell you about the sponsor of this video Boombox boombox.io is a brand new audiophile collaboration tool that's perfect for musicians bands producers mixing Engineers really anyone who needs to work on music or audio projects in a collaborative way boombox.io allows you to upload your tracks and receive time stamped feedback from collaborators on your project and all of this is handled securely on the Boombox website only collaborators you invite to your project can listen to your tracks and leave feedback if you're ready to give Dropbox the boot head over to boombox.io and sign up today to get four gigabytes of free storage so for this video I'm going to be using a sixth generation iPad to demonstrate these came out in 2018 so it's not exactly a new iPad but logic remote is a really cool way to extend the life of an old iPad or an old iPhone that you're not using anymore so what I'm going to do at this point is switch over to screen capture so you can see logic and logic remote on screen okay so first let me show you how to set up logic remote and it's super easy to do so the first thing you want to do is you want to make sure that your computer running logic pro and your iOS device are on the same Wi-Fi network this is how logic will communicate Control Data back and forth with logic remote so I've got my iPad here I'm going to click on logic remote to open it up and then what you're going to see is that your iOS device is trying to connect to logic pro so you just click connect and that's it it's that easy now if you need to check and see which device logic remote is connected to you can click on the settings button in the upper right corner here and then down here you can scroll down you'll see what device it's connected to so you can see it's connected to my Mac Studio and if you click on that if you have other devices on the same network work you'll see them here and you can select another device maybe switch over to your laptop so here I'm just going to reconnect to my Mac Studio now it defaults to the mixer screen and in my project you can see that I have all of my tracks and track Stacks so I'm going to go ahead and open these all up and if you don't see the mixer on your iOS device you can click on this down arrow in the upper left corner and you can select what view you're using so we're on mixer right now now if you want to scroll between the different channels you can just scroll left and right and you can just swipe left and right you can see all of the channels in your mix you can scroll and swipe on the faders themselves if you want to navigate around in the mixer however if you don't want to accidentally move any of the faders by mistake I recommend using the navigation bar at the top and then you can swipe around without accidentally moving any of your faders just to sort of simplify things I'm going to go ahead and collapse all of my track Stacks so now I just have six main faders to work with I got my synth Group which is a track stack I've got my classic synth base my kicks my main beat all of my effects my pads and then two more for my stereo output and master VCA so you have touch control of each of the faders in your mix just like so if you want control over pan and volume over here on the right you can select which channel strip options you want to see so I can click on pan and volume and I can drag up and down with my finger to adjust the pan and if you want to reset it you just double click on a control the same goes for the faders if you want to reset a fader you just simply double click on it you've got control for mute for solo record enable and you can also change your automation mode as well if you want to turn your automation off you can totally do that if you have sends on any of your tracks you can control the send levels as well so just for a quick demonstration here I will bring in Ascend here on bus 7 and then I can just swipe up and down with my finger to control the send amount and double click to set it to zero you can also see the audio effects that are on each Channel you can click on each of these and you can bypass the plugin and you can also open up the plugin and you can have control of the plugin inside of logic remote now once you're done working with a plug-in after you make any adjustments you just click the back arrow in the upper left corner that'll take you back to the mixer however third-party plugins you're not going to be able to open these up in a graphic view it's just going to give you the controls so this is the fresh air plug-in from Slate the plugin actually looks like this but in logic remote it just gives me sort of a controls view so you can still control third-party plugins it's just that the UI is not going to look the same then I'll just click back to go back to my mixer you can also set up your i o so if you want to change the input of a track or change the output of a track and you can also add midi effects so if I click on midi effects software instruments will show their midi effects in insert slots and then I can just click choose plugin maybe I want to add the arpeggiator here I can do that I can click on the arpeggiator open up the arpeggiator and you have full control over the arpeggiator in logic remote then if I want to remove the arpeggiator I just click on it again and select remove plugin now typically I don't use most of these upper controls I'm mainly just using volume and pan maybe the sends like if I'm doing a recording with like a q mix for headphones I may have the Q mix on a send but I find it's really most helpful just as a tactile volume and pan control now at the top you'll see playback controls so you have back to beginning if you've already started playback which will turn into a stop a button after you go back to the beginning you have play and record and if you have a cycle range selected you can turn on or off your cycle mode here and then I'll just press play and I'll bring in some of these faders foreign [Music] mix with the master VCA or the stereo output [Music] you can mute all of your playback and you can also dim the playback [Music] now if you have a clip or a peak you want to clear you just click on that and it'll clear the clip now one of the cool things about logic remote is if you don't have a midi controller you can actually use logic remote to draw in automation so for example let's say that on my synth group here let's say I want to draw in some volume automation so hit a to bring up my automation now for demonstration purposes I'm just going to clear the volume automation on this track so I'll just go up to mix delete automation delete visible automation on selected track but now let's say I wanted to write in some volume automation on this track it's as simple as clicking on the automation mode I can switch this over to touch or latch or write let's go ahead and put it on latch and now while I'm in latch mode all I have to do is press play and I can write in my automation so let's start this really low and let's fade this in at the beginning [Music] foreign [Music] click on the automation mode put it back on read mode and I'm good to go now I know we haven't talked about remix effects much but if you like using remix effects you can click the effects button in the upper right corner and what this will do is it'll automatically add an instance of remix effects to your stereo output remix effects is sort of a cool multi-effects plug-in that allows you to add things like filters repeaters wobble Reverb orbit delay orbits sort of like a like a modulation type effect so let's play around with this a bit foreign [Music] [Music] foreign Now when using remix effects you obviously have to be tasteful about it I was just sort of playing around there but any of these effects and remix effects can be written onto your stereo output as automation if you like so we'll come back to remix effects in a later video and I'll do a deep dive on all the remix effects controls but that's the basics of how to use logic remote as a mixing control surface there's obviously a lot of deeper functionality in here but mainly what I find myself using it for here is just as a fader control so I have a bit more tactile control over my mix another way to use logic remote as a control surface is to use Smart controls and this also gives you a playable midi keyboard if you have a software instrument selected now personally I don't use Smart controls very much but they can be very useful and a lot of logic users really love them essentially smart controls are pre-mapped controls for instruments and effects plugins that don't require you to open up the actual plug-in window to adjust the controls you can do all of this from the smart controls editor at the bottom of the tracks area you can access these in logic by pressing B so this will toggle the smart controls and in logic remote you can click the down arrow in the upper left corner and you can switch over to Smart controls and keyboard so when you load up a software instrument track you will by default see the smart controls for the instrument so for this track the instrument is alchemy and the smart controls are the transform pad this is an XY pad that can be used as a macro control for multiple different effects but you'll also see that there's options for other controls if I click controls here so how do I see these in logic remote well if you click this arrow on the right side here it'll move over to the next panel of smart controls and you can see I have two different XY pads I can control here along with a number of other controls so if I just solo this track let me hit play and move around this X Y pad and let's see what this does [Music] foreign [Music] so for instruments this is really cool because it gives you more tactile control over your software instruments so if I move down to another software instrument this one's using the es2 and this is giving me some macro controls from the es2 now if you select an audio track and the audio track does not have any effects on it logic remote is going to tell you that you can insert a plug-in on the Trex Channel strip to use Smart controls so let's say for example I want to add the auto filter so I'll go down to filter Auto filter stereo now instead of having to open up the auto filter itself I can simply use some of these pre-mapped smart controls foreign [Music] or maybe I want to add like a Reverb or a delay or some sort of time-based effect here I'll use chroma verb and again instead of going into chroma verb and messing with its controls in the plugin I can do this from the smart controls [Music] foreign [Music] now if you select a track stack this will also tap into any effects that are on that track stack but if you have software instruments going into the track stack it'll also give you a midi keyboard to record so here you can see on this track stack I have three software instruments going into the track stack and I'm recording my midi data on the track stack rather than the individual tracks but I also have control over the tremolo plug-in which is on this track [Music] foreign and again all of these smart controls are pre-mapped to controls within the plug-in so again this is just another way to give you more tactile control over your mix and over your sound design of your effects and software instruments I find myself using logic remote as a control for remote recording so for example if your laptop or your computer is far away from your microphone or maybe in a completely different room you can use logic remote to control the playback and recording as well as control things like turning on or off the click or turning on or off the counten remember earlier I said you can even set inputs so I'm going to record just a simple test voice recording here and I'm going to set the input and I'm going to do everything from logic remote I'm not even going to use my mouse in logic pro so the first thing I'm going to do is go to the i o page I'm going to set my input on my first channel here I'll set it to input 1 which is my current microphone I can arm that track for recording or record enable the track for recording so you can see signals coming through on the track now and then from here I'm going to go to the down arrow and I'm going to switch to key commands View and what this does is it gives you a whole bunch of different available key commands the bottom row are your most common key commands for playback recording and navigation forward and Rewind stop play record toggle cycle mode but up top there's a whole bunch of other ones and they're sort of organized in a logical way but if you want to see other key commands you can just simply swipe over and there's multiple pages of different key commands that you can select from so I'm going to go back to the very first page I'm going to go ahead and toggle off my count in and then you can also at the top you can turn on or off your metronome the only thing you can't do is you can't click and hold on it to change the metronome settings so if you have this click while recording option turned on you may want to turn that off first with your mouse and then you can just simply use the control in logic remote to turn on or off the click and now to make a test recording all I need to do is hit the record button test check one two test check one two checking one two three this is a test recording made with logic remote I'm clipping a little bit there but no big deal I'll just hit stop to stop the recording I can back up the playhead I can go back to the mixer turn off record enable on that track if I want go back to the key commands and hit play test check one two test check one two checking one two three I can navigate backward or forward if I want to record at a certain spot and I found this really helpful if you're in a different room and you're trying to record a certain section of your song and you need multiple takes you can use the cycle range and then just hit record and it'll only record at that spot check one two three test one two three and then if I need to make another recording on top of this I just hit record again check one check one two three and then it'll automatically pack all of your takes into a take folder so you can do all of this recording remotely with logic remote and you don't necessarily have to have another person operating logic another really cool use of logic remote is to use it as a way to input notes for patterns and beats in your step sequencer this is especially helpful when building drum patterns so what I'm going to do is right click and create a new pattern region on my Analog Drive kit here this is just a drum machine designer kit and if you're in the smart controls you'll see that you have control over some of the pads as well as some of the sound design parameters of each Pad but if you have a drum machine designer track selected there's also a separate drum pads view where you can see all of the drum pads but what I want to use this for is for the step sequencer so I'm going to go to step sequencer View and here you'll see that you can simply just type in your notes using your fingers you can click on swipe to enter in multiple notes you can click and swipe back to delete multiple notes and if you can't see all of the rows in the step sequencer you can simply just swipe down here to see more rows so what I'm going to do is press play and program in a beat using only the step sequencer remote in logic remote [Music] [Music] and whatever pattern region you have selected will automatically show up in logic remote so if I right click and create a new pattern region over here now it gives me a blank step sequencer in logic remote where I can start entering in notes again and if I want to go back to my previous one I just click on it and it shows up automatically in logic remote so again incredibly helpful for programming and beats and patterns in a more tactile way the chord strips are another really helpful feature for composing and building chord progressions especially if you are not that great with music theory and maybe you're not you know that great of a keyboard player so using a keyboard style MIDI controller doesn't really help you out that much so if you just select the chord strips view what this will do is it'll give you eight different chords that you can pick from and these chords are based on the key of your song that you set in logic so right now the key is set to C major and these are not listed in order they're actually listed in ascending four so the one chord is the c chord right here and from an interval standpoint they move up in fourths with the exception of the chord on the far right which is a diminished seven chord so if I select another key like a minor you'll see that all of the chords change again with the a minor chord shown here the one chord or the tonic chord shown here it's also worth noting that when you select a minor key the dominant or major alteration of the five chord is shown on the far right now the way these chord strips work is the white part of the chord strip will give you five different inversions of that chord foreign if I switch over to a bass instrument here the bottom part of each strip the gray part will give you three notes for the Baseline just a single note so the top gray note is just the root note if you go to the middle one this is the fifth and then if we go down to the bottom one this is a low octave root note foreign is monophonic so we're not going to hear chords now you can record with this if you like let's go ahead and do this with the bass I'll just play in a really basic Baseline [Music] yeah there's definitely a little latency with it but it's a pretty quick and easy way to enter in notes especially if you're not that familiar with the keyboard or you're not a great keyboard player I can just go ahead and quantize my bass line there and then I can move up to my pad here and I can play in some chords that follow the bass line foreign [Music] I was able to build in a basic musical idea just using the chord strips with no MIDI controller [Music] another really cool use of this is for step input so if I create just a blank midi region here and I open this up and I click here to turn on step input I can use the chord strips without having to play with the metronome and play in time to the rest of the track just to enter in chords foreign and you can see all five inversions of that chord and you can just sort of move these around edit them in any way you like and use them as a compositional tool the last feature I want to show you in logic remote is using it as a remote control for live Loops live Loops is a new feature in logic that was added in version 10.5 it's essentially very similar to using the session view in Ableton Live where instead of loading regions and loops on a timeline like the tracks area you load them into cells and you can independently trigger each of these cells or you can trigger a whole scene of cells so a vertical arrangement of cells like this is called a scene now I know we haven't talked about live Loops really at all yet in this series I eventually will do a complete section of this course dedicated to live Loops at some point but if you're brand new to live Loops you can play around with this feature by going up to file new from template and and you can load up a demo starter project the one I've loaded up here is called neon dreams if you want to follow along now if you use logic remote you can load up the live Loops View and you can scroll up or down to see all of your different tracks here on the left side and you can trigger individual cells just by clicking on them and you can stop the playback of a particular cell by clicking on it again but you'll see that the playback is still rolling so you have to press stop to stop the playback you can also trigger cells in a sequence and they'll always stay synced up [Music] foreign [Music] and then you can just press the stop button to stop playback but you'll notice that a lot of these cells are still flashing like this this means that the cells are still queued for playback to reset all of the cells in your live Loops grid you can click this stop button in the lower right corner of logic remote and this will reset all of those cells now generally when using live Loops you use it to build whole sections of a song so this is done by using scenes so down at the bottom of live Loops you'll see individual scene triggers for each group of cells within a scene you can also control these scene triggers at the bottom of logic remote so let me just play a few of these in order to sort of build out a basic song arrangement [Music] thank you foreign and then to stop playback I can just hit the stop button again and then I can reset all cells by hitting the button in the lower right now when I trigger cells and scenes I'm actually triggering them slightly before where I want them to come in because by default logic has a one bar quantize start so if I trigger a scene or a cell to play that scene or cell will start playback on the next bar so this just helps to keep everything perfectly in sync during playback now because live Loops is a very complex set of features and logic it's almost like learning a brand new Daw so I'm not going to go any further than that in this video but using logic remote can be extremely helpful if you use live Loops for triggering backing tracks when performing live or maybe you just use it as a quick way to put together different song sections so there's definitely a lot more to say about live Loops but I'll come back to live Loops in a more comprehensive way later on in the course so that's live logic remote in a nutshell this video also wraps up the logic pro Essentials portion of this course so if you've watched this entire Series so far from video one all the way up through video 35 you should have a pretty comprehensive working knowledge of how to operate and use logic pro starting with the next video we're going to move on to a completely new section of this course where we will explore more advanced midi recording and midi editing features we'll jump into some electronic music production topics like creative sound design synthesis and sampling techniques so stay tuned for those videos coming very soon so I hope you've enjoyed watching this series thus far these videos take a lot of effort to make so I would really appreciate it if you liked this video And subscribe to the channel to follow me and see more content like this as always thank you so much for the support and thanks for watching

Channel: MusicTechHelpGuy

Views: 14,483

Keywords: logic pro, Logic Pro x, logic 10, Logic Pro 10, logic x, logic 10.7.5, logic 10.5, logic remote, control surface, ipad, iphone, ios, Logic Remote app, app, mix, mixing, remote, record, step sequencer, chord strip, chord strips, smart controls, live loops, controller, musictechhelpguy, music tech help guy

Id: EszIcbH9rw0

Length: 29min 44sec (1784 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 18 2023