Logic Pro #37 - MIDI Recording, Take Folders, Comping & Sustain Pedal Automation

hey everyone this is music tech help guy and welcome to part 37 of my Ultimate Guide to Logic Pro in this video I'm going to touch on four main topics midi recording techniques with take folders comping midi recordings with those take folders and then I'll jump down into midi Automation and show you some interesting velocity functions and how to adjust sustain pedal CC automation before I get into the tutorial I want to quickly tell you about the sponsor of this video Boombox if you're a musician songwriter or producer and you work with collaborators on a regular basis you've got to check out boombox.io Boombox is an incredible new service that allows you to upload your tracks and then invite collaborators to view download and leave time stamped feedback on your tracks or if you're a mixing engineer like me you can give your mixed clients viewer access which means that they can listen to and comment on the files but they cannot download edit or delete the files once the client is happy with my mix and they've paid the final balance I change change their access to editor and they now have access to download their track this is an incredibly helpful safety for me when working with my mixing and production clients boombox.io is absolutely free to get started so sign up for an account today and get four gigabytes of free storage so from my musical example I'm going to play some piano I'm just using the Steinway Grand Library preset here I'm using a Novation launch key 61 with a sustain pedal to sustain the chords I'm going to start by turning off the count in because I actually want my recording to start at bar two so I'm just going to start at bar one hit record and then I'll jump in at bar two and the reason for that is if I play a note that comes in before bar once like if I play something on bar one and the note comes in slightly before bar one that note is going to get cut off so I don't want that to happen so this is another reason why I like to start my recordings at bar 2 rather than bar one okay so I'm just going to play in some chords so let me give this a go foreign okay so that's a good take of some Chords it's not perfect or anything but let's say I want to record a few more takes and play around with some different chord positions different voicings or maybe play around with some different extended harmonies but I don't want to lose this original take and sometimes it's just best to play around and improvise on the fly so I might want to record additional midi recordings inside of a take folder as I demonstrated in a previous video with audio recordings so to do that you're going to go up to logic pro settings or preferences go to recording and then you'll see your midi overlapping track recordings here you might have this set to merge which is going to merge any midi recordings together and you may want to change this to create a take folder so if you change cycle off and cycle on both to create take folder this will do the same thing as overlapping audio recordings as I demonstrated in a previous video it'll put them in a take folder so let's do this again I'm going to hit record and just play in the same same thing but I'm going to play around with some different voicings and some different hand positions [Music] okay so that take was okay but there were a couple mistakes in there so let's try doing one more [Music] thank you [Music] okay so I like elements of all three of these takes there's some weirdness going on with the sustain pedal here I missed uh one of the sustained pedal points here so we'll fix that in just a bit and that's what these gray bars on the region are they're sustain pedal events anytime you record with a midi CC the CC events or the CC data will show up as these gray bars on the region but first let's just tackle choosing the correct it takes now one of the tricky things about using midi intake folders is that the quick swipe feature does not work with midi it only works with audio however you can double click to open up a take folder and then select any of the takes inside the only thing again that's tricky here is you have to sort of go through manually and split the take folder and choose the take that you want for each section so usually what I'll do is I'll grab the Marquee tool or I'll grab the scissors tool and I'll use these to split the take folder and choose different takes at different points in the recording so there's already a mistake in that one so I don't want that one so let's jump up to take two foreign okay so let's say maybe right here at bar Forum maybe I'll try this take instead what you can do is turn off your bar snap and then again use your Marquee tool or your scissors tool and cut out the area where you think you may want to choose a different take so here I'm just separating the take folder and now I can freely select a different take for this area so I could do take two here then I could do take three here if I wanted to thank you yeah so here's a spot where I think maybe take three or take two is better here and by the way some of the sustained pedal messages are going to get kind of messed up when we split these into different take folders don't worry about that for now we'll fix it in just a bit let's go take three here yeah maybe I want to use take one here so again I'll split it select take one [Music] okay so once you've chosen the takes that you want all you need to do is flatten each of these track Stacks now you can do that by clicking on the take number and then selecting flatten or you can just select all of these and press option shift U which is what I'm going to do so option shift u i flattened all of them drag over all of them again and just press J to join them together as a single midi region okay so with all those regions joined together I'm going to double click to open it up in the piano roll editor and one quick thing I want to show you here is it's pretty common with midi recordings if you haven't quantized anything for the midi notes to be slightly ahead of the grid and you may want it this way on purpose just to maintain a natural you know feel especially with instruments like piano this is a synthesizer or something you might quantize it right to the grid but one of the problems with this especially if you're using cycle mode to sort of loop the region is this very first chord here won't play now it's playing for me because I have this option turned on but there is an option that you have to turn on for each logic project that you open it's not a global setting and it's called midi Chase so what you do is you go up to file go to Project settings you go to MIDI and then under Chase here you turn on Chase notes Let me just show you what this does when you have this turned off and it's turned off by default so when I hit play there right at bar 2 what this is going to do is it's going to skip all of these notes because the no off message came before the playhead see how that skips those notes I would actually have to set the playhead over here in order to catch the no on message so anytime you're working with midi data like this that's slightly ahead of the region you're going to want to go into your project settings midi Chase and turn on Chase notes what that'll do is it'll start up the playback regardless of where the playhead is on the grid even if it's like in the middle of a chord foreign bring these velocities down a touch and another thing you may want to do here is quantize so let me just select all of these I'm going to quantize to an eighth note but I'm not going to quantize a hundred percent I'll do like maybe 40 45 percent there just so I can maintain a level of realism and make it sound like a human recording not something that's perfectly quantized to the grid foreign okay so next let's take a look at some midi Automation in this video we're really just going to cover velocity and sustain pedal so while you're in the piano roll editor you can click here to show your automation you can also just press a to hide and show your midi automation Now by default this will probably pop up with Note velocity not sustain so before we get into the sustain pedal let me show you some velocity functions down here now just like up here in the piano roll editor you can also edit your velocities down here this gives you more of like a visual Recreation of your velocities with zero being at the bottom and 127 being up at the top so if I were to select all the notes and use the velocity slider to move these around you'll see that the velocity moves up or moves down one thing you can do down here is with your main tool with your pointer tool you can click and drag and this will bring up the line tool what the line tool does is it allows you to create sort of these velocity ramps so if I want to start quiet and then maybe work up to something louder you can absolutely do that now something like that where they're all sort of the same velocity at the same time that's not really going to work well for piano because it sounds a little fake but if you do this with like a synthesizer or something it should work out just fine another function you can use down here if you want all of the notes to sort of maintain their relative velocity is you can select any of the secondary tools except for the automation select or Zoom tool so I'll just go to the pencil tool and instead of just clicking and dragging you hold command and then click and drag and what this will do is it'll create these velocity ramps but it'll do it in a way where it sort of exponentially makes more out of the velocities or makes less out of the velocities so you can do things like this where the notes kind of still keep their their relative um you know position like if I want just the dynamic to get a little bit louder I could do something like this and now the dynamic gets a bit louder but all of the notes kind of still maintain their their relative position as opposed to conforming all to one velocity setting and again that works with any of the secondary tools you can just hold command to access that except for the automation select and zoom tools next up let's play around with the sustain pedal so I'm going to click right here this is the automation parameter and you can choose what automation parameter you want to edit the ones that are actually being used will be shown at the bottom so sustain pedal is one of the ones that's being used and remember because sustain pedal is a switch controller there's really just two positions all the way down zero means that the pedal is not being pressed and all the way up at 127 means that the sustained pedal is being pressed so I like to think of this as everything under the 127 as being sustained so for example if I grab this and maybe pull this over like this Watch What Happens see how that note was not sustained it wasn't smooth and fluid so typically the way that piano players will pedal is if they need to release the pedal they'll release the pedal right after the next chord is played some people think it's right before the chord is played but for the smoothest sound you're actually going to release the pedal right after the chord is played and that just makes sure that these notes Here carry over to the front end of this chord so everything here is going to be sustained here's a little mistake where I release the pedal a little too early so I'm going to go ahead and pull that back so I just like to go through and check my pedaling because you know I think I'm a pretty good piano player but you know I do make mistakes and sometimes my my pedaling is what's causing you know the midi recording to not sound as smooth as it could and here's another one here if I want all three of these notes to be sustained I want to make sure that the sustain pedal is pressed before these notes are released thank you foreign now if some of these notes feel like they're kind of causing some dissonance you can write in some new pedal automation so to do this you just click on the line and you just pull down to release the pedal and then pull up to 127 to press the pedal and don't worry if this doesn't go all the way up to 127 basically the way this works is at least in logic I think anything above zero is going to give you a pedal on so it doesn't necessarily have to be up at 127. here even at eight the uh the pedaling is is happening so don't worry that if it doesn't go all the way up to 127 but what I may do here is for some of these notes where we've got some of these like kind of dissonant tones what I'll do is just pull down the pedal for a moment then bring it back up and then this one to B down to a that's a second going down to the tonic note so let's just do this I'm going to pull this over here so I release the pedal on that very last note and then bring it back in so it sustains [Music] and yeah even if you don't have a sustain pedal you can still draw in sustained pedal automation it's just a matter of choosing the sustain pedal as your CC controller and or your switch controller and then come through here and draw in your sustain pedal automation so that's an overview of midi recording with take folders midi comping and how to adjust the velocity and sustain pedal midi Automation in the next video we'll continue on with midi recording techniques where I'll show you how to use midi merge how to use Auto punch with midi recordings and replace mode I hope you 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: 10,679

Keywords: logic, logic pro, Logic Pro x, logic 10, Logic Pro 10, logic 10.7.5, Logic Pro 10.7.5, midi, messages, status byte, data byte, midi 1.0, midi 2.0, tutorial, lecture, what is midi, midi controller, control change, continuous controller, pitch bend, aftertouch, velocity, note, pitch, musictechhelpguy, music tech help guy

Id: b6UIbKUfhoI

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 04 2023