Logic Pro #38 - MIDI Merge, Autopunch & Replace Mode

hey everyone this is music tech help guy and welcome to part 38 of my Ultimate Guide to Logic Pro in this video I'll continue on with midi recording techniques including midi merge using Auto punch with midi recordings along with replace mode but 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 changed 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 okay so I've got the same recording here that I made in the previous video it's just piano and let's say that there's a spot where you're struggling to play something hands together and maybe you just want to play the right hand separately from the left hand so maybe perhaps this part here at the end what I'll do is just delete all of these notes I'm going to go ahead and just delete the pedal automation at the end there and let's say I want to punch in a new part here I'm not actually going to use the auto punch function for this but I will show you how to use that in just a bit really what I want to tap into here is midi merge I want to be able to merge another midi recording into the existing midi recording to do that you're going to go up to logic pro settings or preferences recording and then you're going to change the overlapping track recordings for Midi from create take folder to merge now there are multiple options here there's merge overlap overlap and merge selected regions create different tracks create track Alternatives same thing down here with cycle on there's different options I'm just going to set this to merge and to be honest 99 of the time I use create take folder or merge for these I almost never use the others and we'll come back to replace mode in just a bit as well so with midi merge on all I need to do is play in those right hand parts starting at bar 8 you don't have to play in the sustain pedal along with this because the sustain pedal events are already there in fact you don't want to play in the sustain pedal because then you'll have two different sets of sustain pedal going on at the same time and that'll just mess everything up so with my playhead a bit before bar 8 I'm just going to hit R to record and play in my right hand part thank you [Music] and you can hear there even on that very last little Melody I played in that the sustain pedal is still holding out all of those notes even though I played the notes you know in terms of their duration they were very short and then what I can do is just come back into the midi region here and I can quantize these notes separately if I like so go ahead and just drag over those I'll go ahead and quantize to an eighth note and adjust the strength and I can do the same thing over here as well just clean those up a bit now I think I demonstrated this in a previous video already but I'll just recap it here another really useful thing that midi merge is good for is working with drums so for example if I just pull up another software instrument here and you know I'll just pull up a drum kit let's pull up the Manchester kit and let's say that I can't play the entire drum kit all at once maybe I want to separate it into different recording passes so what I'm going to do is I'm going to play the kick and snare on one pass and then I'll go back and play the hi-hats the symbols and the toms and on another pass but you could actually break this up into as many passes as you like you could play each drum individually if you prefer you just have to make sure that that midi merge function is turned on [Music] foreign [Music] so now with the kick and snare recorded I can go back in with the hi-hats and the Crash symbols and the toms and add in another layer [Music] thank you [Music] and again you can go into your drum recording here you can quantize it in any way you like I'll go ahead and quantize to an eighth note maybe pull back the strength a bit just so it sounds a bit more human and there you go that's how you can use midi merge another thing I find helpful is to set two different functions for when the cycle range is turned on versus when it's turned off so here I've got cycle offset to create take folder and then cycle on is set to merge so perhaps what I might want to do is set a range out here like maybe six bars in length and then what I'm going to do is give myself one bar of sort of lead-in I'm going to play in four bars of a beat and then give myself one bar of Lead Out and because I have cycle arrange on I'm sort of loop recording and entering in each kit piece of my drum kit here so I'm just using an electronic drum kit and if you want to take this another step further you can also turn on input quantize so what you do is you just deselect all regions by clicking on the background somewhere and then select a quantization value so maybe I'll select the 16th note and now what will happen is every single note I play in is going to be automatically quantized to a 16th note while simultaneously merging all of my midi recordings that I make together foreign next I'll do some claps [Music] next I'll do some little snare additions [Music] now if you make a mistake like I didn't really like the the placement of those all you need to do is stop the recording hit command Z to undo and then go back to the beginning and restart the recording with cycle mode on and then just carry on as if you didn't even make a mistake [Music] next up I'll do the hi-hats foreign [Music] and then just keep going with as many layers as you want to add [Music] now if I go into this region you'll see all of those notes are there and they've all been quantized to the Grid at a 16th note because I turned on my input quantization before I started recording now when you use input quantize just make sure to turn it off once you're done so just select the background to deselect everything and then go over to your quantization settings in the region inspector and just set this to off so midi merge along with cycle recording along with input quantization you can sort of take your pick with these three techniques use maybe one of them at a time two of them at a time or all three of them at a time to suit your workflow okay the last thing I want to show you is replace mode replace mode is right here up on the control bar if you don't see this here you can right click or control click up here customize your control bar and then make sure that replace mode is here I'm also going to add Auto punch because this is really helpful when using Auto punch for Midi so in previous videos we've talked about using Auto punch but we've only used it for audio let's say for example I want to redo the first two bars or maybe redo a couple of bars in my midi recording somewhere what you do is you just turn on auto punch and then you just set the range of Auto punch so I'm going to set it right here and you have to be really careful if you have notes that are off of the grid you don't want these to get cut off and replace mode is going to get rid of anything within the auto punch range so you want to make sure that the auto punch range doesn't overlap any notes that you might want to preserve so let's say I just want to punch in this area and nothing else what you can do is then turn on replace mode and if you click and hold down replace mode there's actually four modes there's a region erase region punch content erase and content punch it's a little misleading because you'd think that you want to use region punch or content punch with punch mode with auto punch mode but really region of race is the best option I almost never use these other three options what region erase does is when you select that replace mode and then hit R to punch in a recording you'll see that it actually deletes the region in the range of the auto punch range if you want to get it back you can always just press command Z to get it back but the reason why it does that is when you're punching in MIDI recordings you don't want to hear the previous recording playing while you're playing in a new part so that's the whole purpose of using replace mode when punching in MIDI now these other modes are I don't know really what they're used for I'm sure there's a use for them but if you use region punch this will essentially do the same thing when you hit record but what will happen is it'll only replace this if you actually Place something in but you're also going to hear the previous take at the same time it's kind of weird let me go ahead and demonstrate it [Music] so I was actually hearing both parts at the same time but you can see what it's done is it's Auto trimmed or Auto deleted everything within the auto punch range whereas if I use the region erase mode it's just going to erase the region before I start recording so I don't hear both parts at the same time [Music] so I was able to punch in that new part there without hearing the previous take okay next up let's talk about these last two modes you have content erase and content punch these essentially work the same as region erase and region punch except instead of deleting the region itself or a part of a region it just deletes the content from the region without deleting the region itself so with an auto punch range selected if I hit R right now to punch in you'll see instead of deleting the region it just deletes the notes and then the same goes for Content punch it's going to play what's currently there when I punch this in but then it's going to erase the content within the region after I'm done recording so again to be honest I I pretty much only use region erase I don't find the other three modes very helpful although content erase could be helpful if you want to save yourself a step and you don't want to have to join your new punched in recording with the existing midi regions you just have to make sure that midi merge is turned on in order to use content arrays so let me go ahead and just punch in a new part here [Music] thank you then I can just drag over all these hit J to join them together so in a lot of ways you really can record and edit midi in a similar way to recording and editing audio the only drawback is you can't use Quick swipe comping and by the way these replace modes that are here in the replace button are actually the same replace modes that are up in the recording settings so if you come here to replace you'll see all four of those replace modes are there as well 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 thanks for the support and thanks for watching

Channel: MusicTechHelpGuy

Views: 8,146

Keywords: logic, logic pro, Logic Pro x, logic x, midi, recording, merge, midi merge, cycle, cycle recording, loop, loop recording, autopunch, punch, replace, replace mode, input quantize

Id: 8iQBpJIqjQU

Length: 14min 21sec (861 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 06 2023