Logic Pro - 5 Creative Arpeggiator Tricks

hey what's up everyone this is music techel guy and in this video I want to show you five creative arpeggiator tricks in logic pro I'm not talking about the most base function of an arpeggiator you play a chord you plop the arpeggiator on there and it arpeggiators the chord I'm talking about some more creative techniques that you can use to assist in your composition your Rhythm making uh creating motion your production so these are five arpeggiator tricks that I use all the time that I find are super useful outside of just the base function of arpeggiating chords before I get into that though I want to quickly tell you about the sponsor of today's video boom box if you want to take your workflow to the next level you've got to check out boombox.com our plugins software hardware and production techniques we use to make music why not optimize and streamline how you communicate with clients and collaborators so you can spend less time answering emails and spend more time actually making 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can change the pace of it the rate of it you can add variation to it you can add octave changes but all that is just sort of basic functionality this first tip I want to show you is creating baselines in particular creating synthesizer baselines so let me load up just any instrument here you can use any base instrument you want um one of the ones I really like in the es2 is the classic synth base and then what you can do here is you just create like a a really simple hole note Baseline cuz we're going to let the arpeggiator do the work for us so let's maybe start down here yeah maybe [Music] there and we'll make that two bars in length let's jump down to the sixth chord on F the five chord and then back up to G the seven chord so right now it's just really boring just individual hits because this is like a it's a Basse instrument that's been um you know the adsr in it is basically telling it that there's no sustain so I'm going to load up the arpeggiator on here and if you just play single notes the arpeggiator is really just going to function like a note repeater and that can work if if that's the kind of Baseline you want [Music] but you can also play around with different octave ranges and different variations the one I like is octave range two variation [Music] three gives you that sort of uh classic like synth wve 80s pop basine line if I do it that way um one thing I like to do is I like to find uh the kick drum in the drum kit so it's this right here it says kick 1 two 3 4.1 I'm just going to rename this and call it main kick and then if I add like a compressor to the Bas track go up to the side chain go to instrument and then choose that kick set the side chain to Max and Peak turn off the auto game and play around with the threshold and [Music] ratio so now the kick drum in my drum machine designer kit is ducking like the first note of the arpeggiated sequence creating this sort of like side chained pumping effect but also with this like 80s synthwave style Baseline another way to do this without the uh side chain it's a little different feel a little different sound is you can use the grid to create custom Baseline rhythms so if you go down to grid mode here you're going to be able to type in each step in the sequence so these are all 16th notes and then you can actually pull out certain notes if you want and for this one I like to use the second variation but again you can try different node orders and if you want to make this more comp uh complex you can do something like this where you change up the rhythm of the [Music] Baseline and you can do all of this in the step sequencer if you prefer but the thing is here you only have to establish the Rhythm once and you can change the notes in the piano roll editor um to any you know any chord you like or any Bas tone you like so if I decide to come up to C here it's going to apply that same Rhythm although you're going to see that the the grid here the grid sequencer is going to restart itself um at the beginning of of each new note but if you know if you have shorter notes like over here with these half notes it's going to restart itself so uh just keep that in mind so that's trick number two using grid mode to build rhythmic Bas sequences okay so trick number three is I really like using the arpeggiator to create rhythmic sequences for chords and I don't mean just arpeggiating the chord I mean playing the whole chord in a rhythmic way uh and then applying that to the entire track so what I did off screen is I added some chords here with a sampler instrument uh Shameless plug uh but I do need to keep the lights on over here uh this instrument is from my logic sampler instrument collection called Divine waves it's a collection of over 50 custom sampler instruments that focus on Distortion and Ambience if that's something you're interested in I did do an overview video demoing most of the patches on this channel and I'll leave a link to that below if you want to check it out but right now this just sounds like this just all whole [Music] notes okay so let's add the arpeggiator let's go back to grid mode and let's say I want to Rhythm like up up up up something like that problem here is it's just going to arpeggiate the notes what you can do instead is click this little button here and what this will do is it'll make sure that each step plays the whole chord instead of arpeggiating the chord but I really just want this to happen once per chord so I'm going to drag this out to the 16 [Music] Mark and you can also drag these steps here to the left and right to control their gate or the length I messed that up there let's try that again I want to leave a little bit of [Music] space maybe let's add a couple more over here pull down their velocity make them really [Music] short [Music] so this is a great way to quickly create Rhythms on the fly without having to do it all in the piano roll editor or playing it in or using the step sequencer and again that rhythm is going to apply to any chord we add on this track okay this next one is creating rhythmic synth Melodies but just really simple Melodies not like a main Melody sort of like a maybe a counter Melody to go with the chords and bass and I know some people are probably going to say oh Josh just play that in on your MIDI controller or type in the notes but you know it's easy for me to come up with an idea when it's in my head if I can hear it in my head I can usually figure out how to get it out in piano rooll or on the keyboard sometimes I'm in a section of a song and I'm like I need something here I need a lead here but I don't have any ideas and I find this a really helpful way to sort of come up with melodic ideas so what I've done is I've pulled up the funk pulse lead in retro synth and what I like to do is take the chord progression pull it down you may choose to put this up an octave or down an octave or you know what wherever it fits I'm going to keep it in the same octave and right now this is just going to play those chords in fact it'll probably just play one note at a time okay so it is a polyphonic instrument so that's just going to play those chords let's go back to the arpeggiator and this time we're going to go back to grid mode and what I like to do is set the length of the sequence here because if you only type in the notes it'll only set the length of the sequence to your last note and what I'm going to do is sort of bring this note out to kind of be a little longer like a long tone and then some eighth notes and let's add a little 16th note in here and pull down pull down the velocity a bit so the Rhythm Is Right but we're going to let let the chords sort of influence the melody what Melody is created this is where the variation and the octave range are going to come in really handy you can also switch octave range over to inversions and get some other sounds but let's see what this sounds like as is so you're hearing that this first note is always the root of the chord if you push the variation up to two it's going to go to the Third third of the chord or the second note of the chord if I go up to three it's going to go to the fifth of the chord or the top note of the or well the third note of the chord really it's the fifth in this case but I guess it all depends on what uh information you have in your midi region let's try putting this in octave two okay cool let's see what that sounds like with everything else [Music] in [Music] so I've got sort of this cool little counter Melody that you know it's not going to be the main Melody of the song but you know what all I had to do is drag the chords down and adjust the arpeggiator and I've got this cool little melodic idea here okay this one I really love um I like to take multiple instruments put them in a track stack instead of putting the chords directly on the instruments I put the chords on the track stack so that the track stack uh sends the same midi data to all instruments inside of the track stack so you can do this with as many instruments as you like some of them you can add arpeggiators to some you can add other midi effects to some you can add no midi effects to but what this creates is sort of like this uh like a stereo frenetic arpeggiator effect so let me show you what I have right now it's just a basine and a few [Music] cords so right now this is just playing the arpeggiated chord Rhythm we had earlier so what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull this uh down to a new track let's actually pull the base down and I'm going to reset the channel strip on this I'm going to duplicate this a couple of times and I'm going to choose another one of my Divine waves instruments this one is called epic arcade and I'll add that to both of these instruments so I have two tracks with epic arcade on it then I've got another one that's sort of like a pad this is called SE Beast okay so right now I've got three instruments they all have instruments loaded up only one of them has the cords on it I'm going to select all three of these go up to track create track stack and we're going to create a summing stack what I'm going to do at this point is I'm going to put the midi region on the top of the track stack and I'll just call this Arps and Pad so right now you're just going to hear three instruments all playing chords and two of them are the exact same instrument what I'll do is with the two instruments that are the same I'll change these over to stereo pan and then I'll pan one left and one right I don't know why that one showed up as uh inverted but if you hold command just bonus tip if you hold command you can swap the left and right channels so I've got one going left one going right that's not going to do anything because it's the same samples it's not going to really do anything so let's create some differing motion on these two epic arcade tracks so on this first one I'll load up the arpeggiator now I created two ARP patterns in advance for this one so I just saved these so here's what the first one sounds like and then on the second epic arcade I'm going to pull up the arpeggiator again I'm going to use Josh ARP 2 and what I've done here is I've tried to make sure that I get some notes in on steps that are not being used in this sequence so like one uh not really two it's really just one there um 1 four and six one four and so four and six are open um I've got something on eight here there's nothing on eight here I've got 13 and 15 here there's nothing on 13 and 15 here so this is just going to create some like opposing motion and it'll sort of sound like these instruments are kind of swirling around in the stereo field especially when you listen to it on headphones you can try out different note orders for these this one's going up this one's going down I highly recommend you make one go up and one go down uh and then you can play around the octave range if you [Music] want then I can add in the C Beast pad I'm not doing anything with that that's just going to be a pad playing in the [Music] background let's say I want that to be down an octave I can add the transposer plugin and I'll pull that down by 12 semmit tones which is one [Music] octave so that's what I love about using track Stacks with midi is you can add different different midi effects to each instrument and the same chords are going to be sent to all three instruments now you could just break them up if you want and just put the you know the exact same midi on each track but um I like doing it this way because if I decide to change the midi or or change the chords or something I don't have to do it three times I don't have to duplicate anything so let's hear what that sounds like now with everything in plus the base and there's a bit of like a filtered kick uh up [Music] here [Music] okay so those are five creative arpeggiator tricks in logic pro if you want to see more arpeggiator tricks videos let me know because I mean I have probably at least 20 more tips and tricks on arpeggiators um that I find really helpful and we haven't even gotten into um uh this mode here where you can actually play in your pattern uh note by note so there's and we haven't even gotten into like using the mini record feature with the arpeggiator either so there's a lot of really cool features baked into the arpeggiator and a lot of cool techniques that you can accomplish so 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: 22,186

Keywords: arpeggiator, logic pro, Logic Pro x, musictechhelpguy, music tech help guy, tutorial, music production

Id: kMmk1EWYRp0

Length: 19min 33sec (1173 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 23 2024