Logic Pro #52 - Arpeggiator Latch Modes, Drag & Drop MIDI, and Live Playback

hey everyone this is music tech help guy and welcome to part 52 of my Ultimate Guide to Logic Pro in the previous video we looked at all of the main features in the arpeggiator midi effects plugin in logic and in this video I'm going to demonstrate all of the latch modes and live playback and recording features in the arpeggiator so if you haven't watched part 51 yet or you're not already familiar with the arpeggiator I highly recommend you go back and watch part 51 before jumping into this video before I get into the tutorial though I want to quickly tell you about the sponsor of this video Boombox if you're a producer or mixing engineer and you're looking for a fresh new way to collaborate with and collect feedback from your clients look no further than boombox.io Boombox allows you to upload your tracks and invite your collaborators and clients to a project who can then leave time stamped production notes and mixing feedback on the tracks once you've made revisions you can upload new versions of the track to the project as a mixing engineer Boombox helps me easily collect feedback from my mixing clients and turn around quick mixing revisions but don't take my word for it try it out for yourself head over to boombox.io and sign up today to get four gigabytes of free storage okay so just like in the previous video I'm using just a drum Loop and I'm using the default patch in retro synth to start and because I'm demonstrating live playback techniques I'm actually going to be playing my MIDI controller throughout the video rather than relying on a pre-recorded midi region and many of the features I'm going to show you how to do in this video are meant for live input with a midi controller okay so I just have the default setting pulled up in the arpeggiator let's talk about latch mode so you can turn latch mode on and off here this allows you to play in chords and the arpeggiator will latch on to those chords and hold them until you play another core or turn the playback off in the arpeggiator this playback button also needs to be on for this to work so I'm going to set this to on I'm going to turn on latch and then I'm going to put this in reset mode and what reset mode means is that the notes in the pattern will change will clear every single time you play a new chord so I'm just going to arm the track and I'm gonna play a chord on my MIDI controller and Watch What Happens so you can see that it's continuing to hold the cord and arpeggiate the cord even though I'm not pressing and holding the keys now if I switch to another chord [Music] so it'll continue to arpeggiate those chords and latch onto those chords until I stop the playback now as you enter in chords it'll still remember these here in the live pattern editor and if I turn this back on again it'll start right back up where you left off so if you need to clear that pattern and start over you can click the clear button here now before I go through all of the different latch modes I want to show you two different ways to record your latched arpeggios into your project so let's say that you're just trying to come up with arpeggios one by one like chord by chord so I'm going to use latch mode and reset I'm going to turn on playback and latch mode will also follow all of these other controls down here in the note order section so if I want maybe 30 second notes maybe I want to go up and down second variation maybe two octaves I can totally do that now one way to do this is you can turn on your record midi to track here and then just hit R to record and then play in the chord where you want it to come in at [Music] [Applause] thank you and then just stop playback in the arpeggiator and then you can also just stop playback with the space bar and because we use that record midi to track function it's recorded that entire arpeggio into a new midi region however there's a bit easier way to do this that doesn't require you to actually play in real time so I'm going to click here I'm going to turn off my record midi function let's open up the arpeggiator real quick and let's go through those chords again I'm just going to turn on the playback you can clear if you need to clear and I'm just going to play in that first chord again that was an A Minor 7 chord stop the playback and these two icons here next to the playback button these are not just icons you can actually drag and drop midi from these so if I drag the first one into the tracks area what it does is it Imports just the raw midi basically the midi input so just the cord that I played and if I drag the second one this actually drags in one sort of cycle of that arpeggiation so what I can do is I can just Loop this up to where I want the loop to end and then I can play in Another chord so once again I can just clear turn on playback and play the next chord [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] then I can just drag that cord in Loop that out and then just continue the process until you get all of the chords in that you want in your recording [Music] [Applause] [Music] now when you work this way you can actually bypass the arpeggiator or you can turn off playback in the arpeggiator while you're not using it because there's no need to arpeggiate the arpeggios so just be careful about that now we're going to come back to these drag and drop features with the as played mode at the end of this video it's another really cool way to get some really creative and interesting arpeggios into your project without having to play them in manually so next let's go through all of the latch modes we've already talked about reset mode so let's move on to transpose what transpose does is it allows you to transpose an entire arpeggio up or down by just playing one key on your keyboard so for example if I play that a minor 7 chord again and I turn on the playback here if I want to transpose this down or up I don't need to play the entire chord again I can just play another root note so if I play e for example now it shifts down it transposes the entire chord down to E minor seven and now we're in F minor seven C minor seven and then back to a minor seven now the only thing that's tricky about this is it's only transposing the chord up or down so it's Shifting the chord up or down in parallel so when you're trying to work you know within a chord progression within a composition and stay in key you want to move your chords diatonically so for example if I wanted to go a e f g it would be a minor seven E minor seven F major seven and then G7 so I've got three different Q qualities of chord so when you're using transpose mode if you need to change the quality of the chord you can simply just play in the full chord so let's clear that pattern let's try that again I'm going to play a minor seven I'm just going to press e to trigger an E minor seven then I'm going to play the entire F major seven chord and then I'll play G7 [Music] [Applause] [Music] so anytime you want to transpose the same chord quality up or down it only requires a single note press rather than having to restate the whole cord the next latch mode is gated transpose gated transpose is just like transpose but when you release the keys on your MIDI controller the chords are not held so they're not really latched onto but you can still play a single note to transpose the chord up or down so let me just clear this and let's play in a new chord [Music] so you can see as soon as I let go of the keys it stops playback but it does remember that I played it in a minor seven so if I play another note here [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] it's going to jump down to E minor seven [Music] and then the same thing will happen just like it happened with the transpose mode you can play single notes up or down the keyboard and it'll remember the previous chord quality I don't really find this mode very helpful but it's there if you need it next up is ADD mode add mode is interesting because it allows you to add to your existing pattern so for example if I start with E minor then I can slowly add extra notes one by one and you'll see those extra notes show up here in the pattern editor [Applause] [Music] [Applause] now if I want to delete a step in the pattern I can click the delete last button here so now I'm back to Five Steps four steps [Music] and then three steps add Mode's another one that's really great when using the drag and drop midi features if you're adding notes and removing notes and coming up with arpeggiated sequences on the fly now add mode in a live setting if you're trying to shift chords around is not really that useful unless you're using a sustain pedal because you can actually pair your sustain pedal to the latch button here by default if you go to the controller tab you'll see that the sustain pedal is automatically paired to latch so what this means is if you have a sustain pedal like this when you press the sustain pedal when you hold it down it's going to turn on latch mode and when you release it's going to turn off latch mode now if you want to permanently turn it back on again you can always click on it but having a sustained pedal gives you a way to remotely turn and latch on or off so what you could do is you could hold down latch with your foot and then State a cord I just need to remember to turn on playback here then I can add to the chord [Applause] [Music] [Applause] I'm gonna have to play that chord and really quickly lift up the sustain pedal to turn off latch and then play the next chord and now I can add to that chord to another chord [Music] [Applause] so that's add mode it can be really helpful if you're trying to use the arpeggiator in live performance and you're trying to play different chords and then add to your existing arpeggiation but again in the context of like making a studio recording it's I don't find it that helpful but it's there if you need it and by the way I just want to mention that using the sustain pedal to turn latch on or off will work with any of the latch modes not just add mode there's also add temporarily this works exactly the same way but any added notes have to be held down so when you release an added note that note's going to go away so if I have latch mode on I can play my first chord and then I can add to that [Applause] but notice when I release the key the step goes away so if I release these those steps go away so let's add temporarily again I don't find it that useful but it could be useful for live performance if that's what you're trying to use this for the last mode is through mode this is kind of like add mode except you're not adding notes you're just passing some notes through the arpeggiator so basically the first chord that you play is going to be latched onto and then any additional notes are just going to be sent through the arpeggiator so this is helpful if you want to start off with a baseline or a chord progression and then you want to play a melody on top of it so maybe I'll come down to like 16th notes here maybe I'll drop the octave down and I'll start off with like a really basic Baseline so now what I can do is maybe bring my octave range up and all notes I play in at this point are just going to be played through the arpeggiator they're going to pass through the arpeggiator without being affected [Music] once again not very useful and for me personally for like studio production and composing but can be very helpful if you're trying to use the arpeggiator in live performance most of the time I find myself using reset or transpose mode or add mode in the case of using the as played mode which we're going to get to in just a bit here now one thing I want to show you with the transpose mode that's pretty helpful is you can actually use the keyboard to scale quantize your arpeggios so remember what I said before is if you use transpose mode and you just play one note at a time to shift the arpeggio up or down the keyboard it's just shifting it in parallel it's not paying attention to what key you're in but if I set a key like if I say okay we're in a minor so I'll set this to a natural minor and I start by playing a chord like a minor seven [Music] here this would shift that entire a minor seven chord down and I would get an F minor seven but now that I have the keyboard kind of scale quantizing to the key of A minor when I play F it's actually going to transpose certain notes to keep the arpeggio in the key of A minor foreign now one thing I will say here is that the scale quantize feature in logic whether it be in the arpeggiator or in the piano roll editor doesn't really do a very good job of converting minor chords to Major chords because what it's doing here is it's actually lowering the third of some of these minor chords down to a second rather than raising them up to a major third so that's just something to keep in mind as you use this feature okay so one last thing I want to demonstrate is the as played mode now I did demonstrate this a bit in the previous video I just demonstrated the basics of it and what this does is it allows you to play in your pattern note by note and this works best when you have this silent capture feature turned on so you have to open up this little bottom panel turn on silent capture what this is going to do is it's automatically going to turn on latch and it's also going to put you in add mode and you'll also see that the play button is now flashing so what silent capture does is it'll allow me to enter in all of the notes in my sequence in the no order I want foreign now when I hit the play button here silent capture is going to uncheck itself latch mode is going to stay on but the mode is going to automatically change to transpose [Music] and you know what let's use a different variation and octave we'll just use variation one octave one does it sound a little different and that's because in the keyboard mode I still have this transposing to a minor but I'm now an E minor so let's change the key to E minor there we go now because I have transpose mode on I can simply play different notes on the keyboard to transpose this pattern up or down and because we're using the keyboard to scale quantize the arpeggio it'll always stay in the key of E minor [Music] now the problem I have with the keyboard here is that it doesn't always transpose correctly like the chords that I want to use are much different than than what it's giving me when I just play one note to shift the whole thing up or down so what I'll often do is I'll just turn this off by going back to Chromatic chromatic just means all 12 notes or all notes on the keyboard so what I can do is I can go through and I can create these patterns one by one and I can use the drag and drop midi function to add these into my composition so let's say I want this one a few times and then let's say I want to jump down to a different chord I can just click clear I can keep as played mode on I can turn on silent capture and I can play in a new pattern just like so I don't even need to play it if I don't want to I can just drop it down in there and let's repeat that and then let's play another chord so I'll hit clear [Music] I can drag and drop that in I can join all of those together with J open this up you can see here's the first pattern here's the second pattern and then here's the third pattern [Music] and the thing about as played mode is you really can't use this with the record midi to track feature because what happens is when you hit record it actually clears your pattern so there's really this is the only way to use this function and get the midi in here there is another way you could do it with capture recording but it's it's honestly more trouble than it's worth so I find that the drag and drop feature is really the easiest way to to get around this and to work with the as played feature so really you know play around with this it's an incredible compositional tool if you want to have maybe more tactile control over your compositions and maybe you're not a big fan of working in the step sequencer or working in the piano roll editor this allows you to enter in patterns and see sequences one by one and then just quickly drag and drop them into your project okay so those are the more advanced latch and live playback features in the arpeggiator in logic pro I hope you guys enjoyed the 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: 6,541

Keywords:

Id: 6PWGHvFh4xg

Length: 22min 25sec (1345 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 18 2023