Logic Pro #50 - MIDI FX Overview & Record MIDI FX to Track

hey what's up everyone this is music tech help guy and welcome to part 50 of my Ultimate Guide to Logic Pro in this video I'm going to give you an overview of how to use midi effects plugins in logic and also how to record midi effects to tracks which was a new feature added in logic 10.7.5 and then over the next several videos I'll give you in-depth tutorials on each of the midi effects plugins in logic starting with the arpeggiator in part 51 so stay tuned for that I've also made this project available as a free download if you want to follow along with this video but before I get into the tutorial I want to quickly tell you about the sponsor of this video Boombox if you're a music maker a producer or a mixing engineer and you're sick of digging through emails for production notes and feedback you've got to check out boombox.io Boombox allows you to upload full mixes stems or multi-tracks invite bandmates collaborators or clients to the project where they can leave time time stamped feedback on the tracks and if you're working with clients and you want to keep them from downloading the tracks until they've paid their bill you can do that too if you want to check it out for yourself head over to boombox.io and sign up for a free account today to get four gigabytes of free storage okay so to get started you need a software instrument on a software instrument track and one thing I want to point out here is on all software instrument tracks you're going to find this midi effects insert now you're not going to find this on aux tracks you're not going to find this on track Stacks you're not going to find this on audio tracks and you're also not going to find it on drum machine designer tracks because technically speaking drum machine designer is a track stack not an instrument but you'll see this midi effects insert on any software instrument track so in order to understand how midi FX plugins work you kind of have to understand how the midi signal flow Works in Logic the midi data coming from regions in your project goes into the track and despite the fact that there's an EQ first the first thing that the midi data hits is actually the midi FX plugins which can be loaded up here so if I load up the arpeggiator here the midi data from this track these chords are going to hit the arpeggiator first and then the midi data is going to be transformed by the arpeggiator then that transformed midi signal is going to go into the instrument on that track which in this case it's retro synth retrocenter whatever instrument you're using is going to input the midi signal and output an audio signal and then that audio signal will hit any of the audio effects plugins on the track like Reverb delay Etc so with midi effects these transform the midi signal before the midi data hits the instrument so one of the really cool things you can do here is you can take something like basic chords and use an arpeggiator to transform the chords into something more interesting so here's what the chords sound like just on their own on and if I load up the arpeggiator on that track I can select an arpeggiator preset I'm going to go with this one called groovy cycle one [Music] now I'm getting more of like a melodic idea now some of those notes are a bit softer than others here in the grid view you'll see that certain notes have been pulled down and while you can make adjustments here in the grid you can also go to options here and you can pull down the velocity sensitivity or fix the velocity sensitivity by pulling this all the way over to the left and then you can pull up or down the velocity to set all of the notes in the arpeggiator to the same velocity [Music] [Applause] foreign now one other thing I want to point out here with the arpeggiator is that when I use arpeggiators I tend to make sure that each of the chords in my chord progression have the same number of notes so if I have four notes per chord like I have here I want to make sure that every single chord has four notes if you have some chords with more notes and some chords with less notes this can sort of offset the rhythm of the arpeggiator now that may be what you want and it may work in some situations but in most situations I try to make sure that the chords all have the same number of notes so that's the arpeggiator again I'm going to do a deep dive on this plugin in the next video so let's move on to another midi effect here I have an electric piano and this electric piano is just playing one note at a time it's basically playing the root note of the chord progression from before [Music] so another one of my favorite midi FX plugins in logic is the chord trigger so I'm going to go ahead and load the chord trigger up on this and what the chord trigger does is it can transform an input note to create an entire chord so it can take one note and transform it into an entire chord now the factory default setting will actually use the same chord type for each note foreign chords yeah a-c-e-g so those are all minor seventh chords in order to make the chord sort of work diatonically within the key of your song you can either create your own chord preset down here which I'll demonstrate in another video or you can choose a preset up here I'm going to go to multi and I'm going to choose keyboard voicings and I'm going to choose diatonic right hand voicings so this will give you a series of trigger keys and this will transform each note into a chord [Music] thank you [Music] let's see what that sounds like with the beaten and with the synth arpeggiator in [Music] [Music] now another thing you can do in logic is you can stack multiple midi effects plugins in a midi effects chain so just like with audio effects chains each effect in succession will affect the output of the previous effect so maybe I want to repeat each of these chords in a rhythmic way or maybe even transpose the repeated chords now one way to do this is just to go into the region and change up the Rhythm and add some new notes but an even easier way to do this is to add the note repeater midi effects plugin so you can actually add additional midi effects plugins before or after any midi FX plugin that's on the track so you can just click below or you can actually click above you'll see this little white line shows up and you click and you choose a different midi effect so I'm going to add the note repeater after the chord trigger so here's the note repeater so what's going to happen here is the track is inputting a single note it's transforming that single note into a chord and then each of those chords are going to be repeated using the note repeater now I could use a preset up here let's try this octave shifter [Music] foreign [Music] that sounds pretty good but I think I want something that sort of shifts downward instead of upward so I'm going to go back to the factory default I'm going to set the repeat to one I'm going to transpose this down a full octave which is 12 semitones and I'm going to set the Rhythm to a dotted quarter note [Music] thank you and again remember what we started with was just a single note playing the root notes of each chord so using midi effects plugins is not just a technical thing it's also a very creative thing and allows you to get ideas out quicker without having to play in each and every single note next up let's check out this base here now right now this is just playing long notes [Music] maybe I wanted to create sort of like an arpeggiated bass line that jumps up and down in octaves so I'll add the arpeggiator to this and what I'm going to do is just use the stock setting here but I'm going to set the octave range to 2 and the variation to 3. [Music] now instead of just recording these long tones down here maybe I want to actually record the motion that's being created by the arpeggiator because I might want to go back into the recording and change some of the notes so in logic 10.7.5 they added a new feature where you can actually record the midi effects to your track what you do is you click on the right side of any of the midi FX plugins here and you select record midi to track here and this will add this extra little orange arrow which is showing you where the midi data is being recorded over to the track the only caveat to this is you cannot do this with existing midi on the track you actually have to play in the midi in real time with your MIDI controller this is as of the most current version available at the time of making this video which is 10 point 0.7.7 so maybe in a future version they'll add a feature where you can record midi effects from previously recorded regions but for now you have to play it in in real time so what I'm going to do is just delete these regions I'm just going to hit R to record and I'm going to play in that whole note Baseline and it's going to transform this into a repeating arpeggiated pattern in real time [Music] [Music] thank you okay so what you'll see there is it's automatically transformed my input with the arpeggiator and recorded the pattern from the arpeggiator now I do have a couple of wrong notes Here I want to take care of this one right here needs to come down this one needs to come up and then this last note can go and then I'm just going to conform all of these midi notes to the same velocity by holding option with the velocity slider but now I'm good to go now you can actually leave the arpeggiator here if you want to or just bypass it you can also just get rid of it because we no longer really need it anymore because we already have the motion of the arpeggiator recorded as a new midi region [Music] but again what this does is it allows you to take that arpeggiator and then maybe do something else with it maybe I want to transpose a couple of these notes up and maybe do something a little bit different with them maybe I'll do something like this [Music] foreign one last thing I want to show you is that you can actually use track Stacks as a way to layer up multiple midi instruments and you can actually change up the midi effects on each instrument inside of the track stack so to demonstrate what I'm going to do is just delete the midi information off of my chord track I'm also going to get rid of the cord trigger plug-in and then what I'm going to do is add one more layer so I'm going to double click create a new software instrument and I'm going to create like a synth pad type instrument [Music] so this is just a preset in retro synth called access codes and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take all three of these tracks the arpeggiator the what used to be the chord trigger which is now just the note repeater and I'm going to take these tracks and I'm going to load them inside of a summing stack so I'll just select all three of these go up to track create new track stack create a summing stack and then what you can do is essentially have like a synth group here and you can put the midi data on the track stack so the midi data that's on this track stack is going to be sent to all three of these instruments but again notice that I'm using an arpeggiator on one of them I'm using a note repeater on another and just a synth pad on the other so two of these tracks are going to be affecting the midi data in a different way and one of them is just going to be playing it as a pad [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] or maybe I want one of these instruments to be up in octave there's another midi effect in here called the transposer and this one's really simple you can just use this to transpose up or down in semitones so maybe I want to bring this whole synth pad up by 12 semitones without having to mess with the Midian here or have to worry about any other settings on the track or in the synthesizer thank you [Music] [Music] so that's an overview of midi FX plugins and how to record midi effects to tracks in logic pro 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: 7,760

Keywords: logic, logic pro, Logic Pro x, logic x, tutorial, midi, midi fx, FX, arpeggiator, chord trigger, note repeater, beat, beats, electronic music, musictechhelpguy, music tech help guy, logic 10.7.5, record midi, record midi fx, free logic course, logic course, Logic Pro course

Id: RWuC41qyN6Q

Length: 15min 32sec (932 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 14 2023