Logic Pro - Arpeggiator Drag & Drop MIDI Tricks!

hey what's up everyone this is music tech help guy and in this video I have even more arpeggiator tips and tricks for you specifically in this video I want to cover the dragon drop features within the arpeggiator you heard that right the arpeggiator in logic pro has a drag and drop midi function that a lot of people don't even know about and I'll also talk talk about one other hidden feature in the arpeggiator called Silent capture these techniques are going to be really helpful if you like building midi sequences in the arpeggiator and then dragging and dropping them out to your tracks area so that you don't have to rely on the arpeggiator and the benefit over the tricks I showed you in the previous two videos is that you can sort of bake in the arpeggiator into the midi just by dragging and dropping it out to the tracks area but before I get into the tutorial I want to quickly tell you about the sponsor of today's video boom boox if you want to take your workflow to the next level 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into the piano roll editor where you can edit them further if you like and the great thing about this is you're not stuck to just one pattern per track because you can drag and drop things then change it drag and drop it change it and so forth and so on now the way these drag and drop features work is you have to have the play button on and you also have to work in latch mode now in a previous video I demonstrated that you can use latch mode to play individual notes or chords and you don't have to hold down the note or chord on your MIDI controller so let's try that uh the very first chord here is an A Minor triad when I'm done I can turn off the playback and you'll see that these two icons light up this one is your drag and drop option you're pulling the midi region out of the arpeggiator so you just click and drag drop that over on the track and I can even Loop that because this cord goes for two bars so the next thing I'm going to do is clear turn play back back on and then I'm just going to play the next chord which was an F chord I'm going to play an F major 7 stop playback drag and drop that chord in and then at bar 60 here I have two different chords I have an E minor and a G major so I'll go ahead and clear turn playback back on here's E minor 7 drag and drop that in I'm going to trim it up because I'm only going to use the first half of it and then clear that and then I'll play my last chord which is a G major drag and drop that in trim it up pull it into place then I can drag over all of these and press J to join them together now the thing you have to remember to do here is once you're done using the arpeggiator as a drag and drop tool bypass it because otherwise it's going to play everything in here um you know with the arpeggiator we we've already baked The rhythms and the cord into the midi so there's no need to uh to have the arpeggiator on at [Music] all so that's how you can build chord progressions and rhythmic chord sequences with the drag and drop feature in the arpeggiator now in addition to generating chords that you can drag and drop in you can also use this to generate monophonic patterns like Melodies and baselines all you have to do is make sure latch is on make sure that playback is on create a pattern that you like and play a chord or a set of notes it doesn't necessarily have to be a chord yeah I like that one so I'm going to drag and drop that in and then I'm going to play another one so I hit clear with a different set of notes here let's go ahead and drag that in and then the next chord like I said before IS F major so I'm going to go ahead and clear let's come up with uh a different uh pattern here let's try adding some extra notes here and maybe we'll shorten some of these up a bit bit and so this is I was saying before you can use this to sort of change up uh the pattern let's see what that sounds like that's pretty cool um so I'll go ahead and drag that in that'll be for my F chord and then like I said before I have uh E minor so it's clear play play an E minor so there's a new one drag that in and then I'm going to do the same thing here for the last chord which was the G chord clear play drag and drop that in but this time I'm going to use the second half of that and there we go so now I can bypass the arpeggiator and I've got this melody that I was able to generate just using the drag and drop feature in the [Music] arpeggiator yeah I can play around with the velocities in here if I want these a little louder I can go ahead and repeat this a few times [Music] okay so in all of these examples so far I've only been using this bottom drag and drop option so what this does is it allows you to drag and drop the output of the arpeggiator so the signal with the arpeggiation applied to it but what's this top one do well this allows you to drag and drop the input from the arpeggiator so I find this one really helpful if you want to build chords one by one and you don't want to have to play them in in real time but you want to hear what they're going to sound like with the arpegiator and you don't want the arpeggiation to be baked into the midi region so for this the process is exactly the same you turn on playback and you turn on latch mode and then you simply play in your first chord or set of [Music] notes stop stop playback and then drag and drop in that top option so this is going to just drag in the chord itself with nothing else on it let's say I want my next chord to go here on bar three so I'll clear turn playb back on and then play my next [Music] chord now the reason why I played that one a few times is I was trying to get the velocities right I wanted the first step to be the loudest so I'll drag that in and then my next chord I'll just clear turn playback on stop playback drag in the chord and then my final chord here clear start playback [Music] then drag that in so now what I have are just four chords that I can trim out join together with J open these up in the piano roll editor and if I want to extend these out all to the next uh notes I just select command a select all with command a and then hit shift back slash hit shorten and there we go go and now I don't have to bypass the arpeggiator like before because the effects aren't baked into the cords or the uh the midi effect is not baked into the cords so this allows you to use the same pattern but then sort of rely on uh the chords here rather than having everything baked in uh one thing you do want to remember here though is to turn off latch mode so that the arpeggiator uh [Music] works [Music] so that's just another way that you can use this by dragging and dropping the input signal the input midi okay I got one more trick for you in this video this one's really cool if you want to sort of type in your sequences one note at a time and not have to worry uh about the time timing as much and the way you get to this is you click on this little arrow in the lower left corner and this is called Silent capture so when you turn on silent capture you're going to see that switches to latch and then the add mode and then it's going to also sort of Flash the playback button here and what this is doing is it's waiting for you to input notes so I'm going to build a baseline note uh note by [Music] note [Music] so maybe something like that then if you turn off silent capture and then press [Music] play turn off playback and then I can drag and drop the output and it drags and drops in that pattern that I just created so I'm just going to repeat this for two bars and we're going to go to the next chord and I'm going to do the same thing I'm GNA clear turn on silent capture and then play in whatever pattern I want step by [Music] step turn off silent capture press [Music] play and then just drag and drop this onto the track and so this really functions like step input for the arpeggiator let's get our last two uh baselines here for these last two chords so again I'll clear turn on silent capture play in the Baseline note by note you know I didn't like that one let's click [Music] clear and then we'll do that drag and drop that in Loop that out then our last chord here which I believe is uh E minor so once again turn on silent [Music] capture drag that in and then pull that up okay so now at this point because I uh inputed each note I don't need the arpeggiator on I can just turn it off let's go ahead and join all these together and you can see now we've created a baseline using that sort of Step input silent capture in the arpeggiator [Music] and there we go that's how you can use silent capture in the arpeggiator once again guys 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 as always thank you so much for the support and thanks for watching

Channel: MusicTechHelpGuy

Views: 5,610

Keywords: musictechhelpguy, music tech help guy, tutorial, logic pro, Logic Pro x, arpeggiator, MIDI, drag and drop MIDI

Id: qi6aCa4cO9Q

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2024