Logic Pro - 8 Transition Techniques

hey everyone it's musictech help guy and in this video i'm gonna show you eight methods that i like to use to build transitions between different song sections so by a transition i mean a section that builds tension or intensity at the end of one section so that you get the maximum impact at the beginning of the following section so the techniques i'll show you in this video are not necessarily self-contained either meaning that you can actually combine two or more of these techniques to get the most impact for this video i'll start with simple techniques and gradually progress up to more advanced techniques so i've got a musical example here with just a basic intro and then the beat sort of drops here at measure nine this isn't like a super hard beat drop or anything you know this could be a verse it could be a chorus it could be a bridge it could be anything it doesn't necessarily have to be a beat drop section per se so measure nine there's sort of a reinforced kick drum there's an additional instrument and uh an effects crash here already and you know that does a pretty good job but i just feel like i want some tension to build up in these last four bars here or even just the last two bars before measure nine just to make measure 9 have more impact so for my first technique you can use a low pass or high pass filter to sort of choke off some of the frequencies leading up to where the next section is or in my case where the beat drops so what i like to do is add the filter to everything and you can do this by showing your output track your stereo output track you can do this by pressing shift command m this will show your output track this is the same as the stereo output in the mixer here and on the stereo output i have a limiter on here just to keep things from clipping but i'm going to add the channel eq and actually you know what let me show you the easy way to do this first you can use the auto filter so the auto filter has a few other modules in it so i'm going to turn off the distortion lfo and envelope but you can keep the filter on and you can apply either a high pass or low pass filter sweep to this using the cutoff frequency by automating the cutoff frequency so maybe i want to automate the cutoff so that i'm cutting out more and more of the highs as i approach measure nine so you can do this by pressing a to show your automation clicking here in the automation menu and then under auto filter i'll select the cutoff parameter and then what i can do is click here and draw in that cut off automation now if you want your automation to snap to the grid lines like it's doing here you're just going to right click or control click in here and select snap automation so let's say that i want the filter to roll out a good chunk of the high frequencies in these last four bars now i want the high frequencies to come back in at measure nine so what i'm going to need to do here is create another point roll this all the way up and then just push this forward just like so now it's not going to let you do it like that so what you'll have to do is zoom in here turn off the automation snap move this one back just a touch and then re-snap the automation and pull this one forward so that's doing it with a low pass filter you can do with a high pass filter as well depending on the material you're working with especially if there's a base a lot of heavy bass in the section if you use a high pass this can work pretty effectively as well the only thing that's tricky here is you sort of have to work in reverse a cutoff at zero with a high pass means you're getting all of the frequencies in there as you pull this up you're cutting out more of the lows [Music] so when the beat drops that's where you want this to drop back down to zero so you could start higher or you could gradually move higher i think i'm going to start kind of high and then i'm going to roll this up and then at measure nine i'll kind of do the same thing i'll unsnap my automation nudge that over create a new point re-snap the automation pull this over and drop it down [Music] maybe even that's a bit much let's pull it down a bit [Music] and maybe even that was a touch more than it needed to be i could probably roll it down a bit more now another thing you can do too to kind of give this even more uh tension is you can roll up the resonance resonance is going to create a feedback uh a feedback loop at the cutoff frequency so if you click here this will create another automation lane and i can select the auto filters resonance here and i can draw in a filter sweep here as well again sort of doing the same thing building up the resonance and then dropping it back down to zero right when the beat hits [Music] and if you want these slopes to be different shapes you can use the automation curve tool to sort of make it more of an exponential thing where most of the energy and most of the movement happens at the very end so you can do that as well now using low and high pass filters is a really basic way to to create transitions and they're often more useful when you pair them with another technique so i'll get to that later on in this video so let me show you yet another technique instead of using a high or low pass filter i'm just going to bypass the auto filter another way is to create a bandpass filter sweep meaning a band that sort of closes down to just a limited number of frequencies and then opens back up on both the high end and the low end so the way i like to do this is to use the channel eq and again you can do this directly on your stereo output or you can do it uh you know on a track stack or on just some of the instruments in fact you know what i'm going to do instead of doing this on the stereo output this time i'm going to put all of these instruments in a track stack i'll make it a summing stack and then on the summing stack i'll add the channel eq and what i want to do is i want to kick in both the high pass and the low pass filter now if it's an intro for a song you could start with it band passed like this a bandpass filter is essentially just a combined high and low pass filter [Music] and then what i'll do is slowly open up both of the filters or slowly close them and then immediately open them so there's different ways you can do it this is like a song intro you could slowly open these up but for me you know like i think what i'll do is i'll sort of set these a little higher like this and lower so it's already partially band passed and then i'm going to pull this down to say 800 or up to 800 then pull this down to around 20 and then right when the beat drops open these up completely let's do that with automation let's get our starting point here then i'll press a to show automation under automation parameters i'll go to channel eq high cut frequency click here to show another automation parameter this will be the low cut frequency what i'm going to do is sort of like i said before sort of choke this off down to like 2.5 and this one's gonna roll up to around 800 and then once again i've got to kind of do that little thing with the uh the snap automation to sort of move this forward a touch turn my snap automation back on create another point and pull this all the way up it opens up the filter completely and let's give that a listen and i'll just pull up the channel eq while that's playing back [Music] now another thing you might find yourself doing is compensating for the loss of volume as well so you could draw in like a volume ramp here because the filter ends up reducing the overall volume quite a bit you may choose to sort of compensate for that volume volume loss as well [Music] so that's using a bandpass filter that's also one of my other favorite favorite techniques but again like with the low pass and high pass filter it's often done best when mixing it with another technique so let's keep this let's keep this bandpass filter sweep here and let's add to it so another thing you can you can add to all this is you can either find a riser sample or create your own riser so one way i do this is i use an app for sampling called splice and you can search up risers there's various different loops and samples for risers so there's one i can just drag this in i'm gonna go ahead and make this go to the summing stack as well so the summing stack is bus one so i'll make the output of this also go to bus one there we go and you don't have to i mean if you want your riser to be um independent of the the summing stack that's totally fine you can do that as well what i'll do here is just hold option and trim this out again using a snap mode like beat or bar to make sure this exactly eight bars are exactly four bars long and let's see what this sounds like [Music] another thing you can do with risers is you can add drum buildups to them to sort of accent the riser a bit more so for instance maybe i'll i'll just create a new software instrument here and i'll load up just any any drum machine that has a nice kick drum in it i'll just go with the i've got this after party instrument here i'll create a new pattern region you can use a midi region too if you want um let's see yeah it's fine so i might start with you know four quarter notes and then actually eight quarter notes and then maybe i'll switch to eighths and then eighths and then sixteenths for the last two beats so you end up with something like this and you could make the drum kit go to uh your summing stack if you wanted to you could filter it separately you know you could make it uh lose some of its top end or lose some of its low and you could individually band pass it do whatever you want with it let me just try sending this over to the other summing stack there so you can do something like that now using samples and loops for risers is a bit tricky because i find myself just using the same ones all the time so something that is maybe a bit more interesting is to create your own riser so for example i'll just pull up maybe retro synth it doesn't have to be anything fancy i'll just choose one of the presets in here maybe this big sinker that'll work just fine for this and then what i'll do is create a pattern region and i'll just make it straight eighth notes just like that and i could maybe repeat this for an eight bar phrase there for the whole intro now on its own just playing that repeating that note d isn't very effective let's transform this into something that builds tension so the first thing you can do is we can pitch shift this over time like an octave or two octaves logic has a pitch shifter plug-in but it's not really the most effective way to pitch shift something in really small fine increments the best way to do this is to use logix au pitch plug-in you can get to this by going to audio units apple and then au pitch load that up in stereo and what this allows you to do is it allows you to automate the pitch by negative or positive 2 400 cents so that's two full octaves lower and two full octaves higher and you can also adjust the blend of this you can adjust these smoothness and tightness controls which are really helpful for maintaining the tone the proper tone of the instrument as your pitch shifting so what i like to do is press a to show automation open up the au pitch automation here and select the pitch option then at a certain point you can start to move this upward or maybe i'll just do it right from the beginning starting at zero and pitch shifting upward over two octaves and then you can adjust the tightness and the smoothness to dial in a setting that gives you the the least amount of artifacting and you know what maybe i'll just make this four bars i don't even need to make it eight bars we can just do all of this in just this last four bars here and then what i like to do is add some delay and reverb just to give it a little bit of ambience it's a little dry right now so maybe i'll add in a 16th note delay and maybe a dotted uh eighth note delay here we go let's filter that out just to touch and then maybe i'll add a little reverb i'll just use space designer here i'll just choose one of the presets up here i'll go with the shimmering plate reverb let's see what that sounds like [Music] so that along with you know the kick idea here can help build tension and you can create any riser sound you want just by swapping out uh you know whatever starting instrument you're using here let's maybe try a different one and see how this one compares to that last one so there's all sorts of different ways you could do this you could feed this into the summing stack into the filter or you could choose not to it's completely up to you another method i find really useful to layer with risers and buildups is to take a crash like a cymbal crash or an effects crash or a white noise crash and reverse it and use it as a swell to build up to where the beat drops so right here at measure nine i have this effects crash it's just a white noise crash one thing i could do is i could copy this down to another track click on it go to your region inspector up here and then reverse that sample and then what i can do with this is i can line it up the best you can where you want the end of the sample to go pull that over a bit i'll make sure i'm in absolute grid let's trim that up a little bit there just like so and you can even add reverb to this if you want um i'll add like uh that same setting that i was using before large spaces plate reverb shimmering plate just to add a little bit of ambience to it between the three of these plus the filter sweep that's going on up here on the summing stack this can be a really effective way to build tension into the next section [Music] and again the crash effects if you want to be even more effective you could maybe take it out of the filter effect out of the filter sweep [Music] now another way to take this even further is to create a stutter uh note repeater effect using the remix effects plugin so on my summing stack here i'm going to load up remix effects you could put it on the stereo output if as well it all depends on the instrumentation you're working with and i love the note repeater here it's just it repeats notes it's it does exactly what it says it does when you use remix effects you have to be careful to sort of use it sparingly but use it effectively you know the most ineffective thing you can do is just go wild with remix effects and just pollute your song with too many effects i'm just going to use this a touch right probably at measure seven and eight to just build up some tension on the instruments going into the summing stack maybe not even measure seven maybe something like that so what i'm going to do is press a turn on a live automation mode like uh touch or latch and then just press play and then write in that automation now what i just played in wasn't perfect but the good news with remix effects if you keep clicking that plus button it'll eventually show you all of the parameters within remix effects there we go so it's repeater mix repeater rate and then repeater on or off so up top here i'm just going to snap this to bar 8 through bar 9 just so the on and off are exactly on those bars and then what you can do is sort of modify the automation to your liking if you feel it needs to be modified maybe i need to pull that back pull that back you can redraw lines if you want to so even if you choose not to use the actual live automation the real-time automation you drew in you can still sort of use it as a starting point you can come back in here with the pencil tool if you like and redraw some of these lines if you feel it necessary just make sure after you draw an automation to switch this back to read mode so you don't accidentally write in any additional changes one of my other favorite transition effects is to use a tape stop effect within remix effects now if you click here you can adjust the tape stop time so this is a whole note this is a quarter note so i'm going to keep it on a quarter note but as you're hearing not everything is going to the stack so you're not hearing it on everything so on my stereo output i'm just going to add an additional remix effects that's just going to be used for the tape stop effect so once again i'll just set this to a live mode like touch your latch and then just press the stop button where i want the tape stop effect to go so then you can also come in here and like i said before use that snap automation to make sure that these automation points are going where you want them to go there we go that's exactly the effect i was looking for so tape stop effect i love using it for transitions it can be used just on its own it doesn't have to be used you know with all these other uh effects i'm just sort of building on all of my my previous ideas now this last technique i call it a fault start because some motive from the main beat comes in but then the rest of the beat is still delayed and you can use this in conjunction with any of these other techniques i've demonstrated so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take the base idea here i'm going to duplicate it and actually i don't want to duplicate the whole thing so let me just put this on bar and i'm going to copy this part down so what i'll do is i'm going to cut out these i'll just mute them control m there we go mute that mute these chords i'm gonna move the crash back and watch what happens it's like the beat still comes in at at nine but it's a false start you get a little bit of the bass and then the rest of the beat kicks in at 11. [Music] when you borrow an idea from the the drop you need to change it in some way or filter it in some way because this whole time building up to measure nine everything's filtered so what i'll do at the fault start base is i'll band pass this with the channel eq and i might add some distortion or some other modulation effects later but let's give this a listen as is yeah so i think i'm gonna add distortion to this maybe use like the bit crusher here and maybe i'll add the eq after the bit crusher instead [Music] [Music] so let's listen to that whole thing one more time another thing i could do to make this more effective is to kill any reverb tails at measure nine so you get this big swell and this big build up and it just cuts to nothing but the base so maybe on my crash effects here i could just cut the volume there down to zero and any of these other instruments too that might be putting out uh reverb tails i think pretty sure that the riser is going to as well i could take the base out of the summing stack too and mute the whole summing stack here at bar nine but i don't think i need to do that i think that's fine like that [Music] and then yet one more thing you can do with this is you can play with the pan too because it's isolated you're gonna hear all of the pan adjustments so let me just show the pan absolute controls here and then what i can do is start this off mostly on the left and then maybe jump over to the right side mostly on the right side and then for the last couple notes here go back to the center let's see how that works out [Music] so there's all sorts of crazy things you can do yes i know my summing stack is clipping you'd have to you know figure out your uh volume levels there going into the summing stack and pull that down for proper mixing but those are eight transition effects i like to use to sort of build tension and make um new sections hit with more impact so you've got low and high pass filters band pass filters risers create your own risers with the au pitch reverse crash or white noise using remix effects for note repeats using remix effects for tape stop and false starts 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 leave a comment below and let me know what video you would like to see next as always thank you for the support and thanks for watching

Channel: MusicTechHelpGuy

Views: 37,214

Keywords: logic pro, Logic Pro x, logic x, tutorial, transition, riser, fx, effects, buildup, edm, electronic, beat, filter, high-pass, low-pass, band-pass, resonance, create riser in logic, pitch, automation, reverse, reverse audio in logic, remix fx, note repeat, note repeater, tape stop, false start effect, false start transition, musictechhelpguy, producer

Id: W-7OYEzBI8w

Length: 28min 47sec (1727 seconds)

Published: Fri May 14 2021