Logic Pro - Live Loops Quick Start Guide

hey everyone this is music tech help guy and welcome to this live loops quick start guide where i'll show you how to get started making music with live loops in logic pro this was a new feature added in logic 10.5 and it's a great tool for arrangement building for electronic music and loop-based music in this video i'll cover the interface how to operate live loops and i'll go over all of the important shortcuts that are essential to efficiently using live loops so i've got a blank project here and the first thing you need to know is how to access the live loops grid now there's two buttons right here where you can switch between the live loops grid and the tracks area and you can hide and show either of these just by clicking up here however you can access these a bit more quickly by using the shortcuts option l which brings up just the live loops grid option n which just brings up the tracks area and option b which brings up both the live loops grid and the tracks area before i go over how to operate live loops i need to add some content into my live loops grid so for now i'll just add in some loops from the loop library although logic does have several starter grids that you can use for practice i want to start from scratch and show you how to actually import and get your content into live loops there's a set of loops i'm going to use these are called house fever and i'm going to start with the house fever beet now i could drag these in one at a time just like this but you can also select multiples and then drag these in just like so now if i press shift this will switch to a vertical arrangement however when you're dragging in similar loops and similar instruments it's typical to keep them all on the same track just like you would in the tracks area so i'm going to put all of these house fever beats on the same track additionally i'm going to add in some bass so there's these house fever dirty base one through five i'll add these in as well on a separate track now one of the most important things you can do with operating live loops is create a 4 8 or 16 bar loop in the tracks area so i've just created a cycle range here and i press c to activate it and now i have an 8 bar loop the reason for this is that the transport of live loops is still tied to the tracks area so if you start playing live loops and you don't have a cycle loop range like i do here the playhead will just wander off into the distance and you know it'll end up by bar 200 after a few playthroughs of your live loops grid so i find that adding a cycle range here is a great way to sort of wrangle the playhead and keep it close now that i've done that i'm going to hide my tracks area by pressing option l and this will only show the live loops grid now just like in the tracks area you can use your same zoom shortcuts so you can hold command and use the arrow keys for horizontal and vertical zoom and you can also hold shift and click on the boundary between the track headers to set them all to the same height so i'm going to go ahead and just zoom this to sort of fit the window there now each of these little regions here are actually called cells in the live loops grid a cell is just an audio midi pattern or drummer region that can be looped within the live loops grid essentially they're identical to regions it's just how they're looped that's different any content that you drag in from the loop library will automatically adapt to the tempo of your logic project as will most third-party loops as well now you can place cells individually just by hovering over one of these and clicking on it and you can also stop the cells by clicking on them again however you might have noticed that the stop and start of every cell is automatically quantized to the next bar by default at least and that quantization setting can be set up here by this quantize start menu notice this little circle is still spinning here and the reason for this is that the transport is actually still moving if you look up here in the time display you can see that the values are still moving and if i go ahead and show my tracks area by pressing option b you'll see that the playhead is still moving so this is the reason why i said that it's so important to create a loop or cycle range in the tracks area and this is because cell playback and the global playback are not tied together i still have to press spacebar to stop playback however in most cases you're not going to be stopping cells individually so if i just play a couple of these again and press spacebar it'll stop playback for all of the cells but notice that it just pauses the playback it doesn't actually reset the playback of the cells if i press spacebar again spacebar to stop and start up again the reason why pressing spacebar is resetting the playback is again because i set this loop range over here had i not set that loop range you'll actually see that the cells will restart from the moment that they were stopped so that's another big advantage of creating this cycle range over in the tracks area now if you want to manually reset the playback of your cells you can click right down here on the stop button or you can use the shortcut command return or command enter key depending on what type of keyboard you're working on additionally you can playback groups of vertically stacked cells and these are called scenes just like in ableton live you can see the scene numbers down here at the bottom of the live loops grid so we have scene 1 scene 2 scene 3 and so forth and so on to trigger or cue a scene for playback you simply just click on this arrow button [Music] and once again i can press spacebar to stop playback and command return to reset the playback of the cells so that's a that's a really important key command combo that you've got to get used to using just get really familiar with using it spacebar then command return if you're going to use live loops at all you're going to need to memorize that key command combination and while playing those scenes back you might have noticed that the playback of the scenes is also quantized to the quantize start value up here now another way i like to trigger my scenes is to select one of the scene numbers down here and then you can use your left and right arrow keys to jump back and forth between these different scenes and then you can press the return key to trigger a scene for playback and you don't have to play these in order either i could start on scene three jump over to scene one and then jump over to scene 4 if i like [Music] and once again spacebar to stop playback command return to reset all cells now like i said before cells can be midi they can be audio they can also be pattern and drummer regions as well so let's find a pattern loop and the one i'm looking for is called bell wave chords i'm just gonna drag this in on its own track and you can also add drummer regions or drummer loops as well so i can just drag one of these in here just like so now if you want to edit any of the cells that are inside of your live loops grid what you can do is just double click on the cell so if you double click on a midi cell it opens up the piano rule editor if you select an audio cell this will open up the track editor if you select a pattern cell this opens up the step sequencer and with drummer cells this will open up the drummer editor and if you want to close the editor you can just press e to hide the editor and press e again to show it so i don't really want this drummer cell here so i'm going to go ahead and delete this and go ahead and delete the track but i do want to add in some additional audio loops let's add in some guitar so i'm just going to switch this back to all loops and i'm going to search up house fever again and i've got these house fever hot guitar loops i'll go ahead and drag these on scenes two through five and let's see what these sound like okay so i really don't like that beat with the weird electronic toms so i'm going to go ahead and select it hit delete and i'm going to copy over house fever beat2 just by holding option and you can duplicate any cell just like you can duplicate a region now if you want to record in your own midi or you want to create a cell from scratch you can very easily do that for midi cells all you have to do is right click or control click on an empty cell and then select create midi cell then double click on it to open up the piano roll editor and then just enter in the midi data just as you normally would the same thing goes for the step sequencer just right click and select create pattern cell double-click create a template based on a particular key i'll just use minor since i'm in c minor and then you type in the notes that you want with your mouse and then you can play that cell [Music] so it's totally possible to create your own original content in live loops you do not have to use pre-made loops when working in live loops additionally you can record midi directly into the live loops grid so for example if i wanted to record in some chords here on my bellwave chords track all i have to do is arm that track for recording and then click the record button and play in notes in real time to the click track using my midi controller or i can use my musical typing keyboard which is what i'm going to do since my midi controller is not hooked up [Music] and then just press spacebar when you're done recording then what you can do is double click on that midi region and you can edit the midi data just like you would in any midi region you can quantize the notes so i'll go ahead and quantize these two whole notes i can trim these notes up just like i normally would so just trim the back end of these up but what's really important here is making sure that you don't have this extra space in the region if the length of the cell has three bars it's going to loop every three bars but here i really wanted to loop every two bars there's two ways you can set this actually there's multiple ways you can set this but the easiest way to set this is just to come down into the piano roll editor and trim up the length or the loop of the cell another way to do this is you can use the cell inspector over here so much like the tracks area has a region inspector the live loops grid has a cell inspector so you can select any cell and then you can set the loop length or the cell length here now you can set the loop length independently of the cell length however the cell length must match the loop length so if i double click on this and type two now i have a cell that's two bars long as well as a loop that's two bars long [Music] and i can go ahead and play this along with my scene and you can even do things like transpose and quantize from the cell inspector as well let's transpose this down by an octave i'll go ahead and press command return to reset the cells and give this another shot now i find live loops most helpful for building musical arrangements for electronic music and loop-based music very quickly if you're a rock musician and you're tracking guitar parts and programming intricate drums and stuff it's probably not going to be your cup of tea but regardless of what type of music you're creating in live loops eventually you will want to flesh out your arrangement in the tracks area especially if you're going to be recording vocals which i would not recommend doing in live loops at all so the next function i want to show you is how to transfer your scenes over into the tracks area so i'll press option b to show both the live loops grid as well as the tracks area i'll turn off my cycle range there and what i'm going to do is name each of my scenes so you can just double click on the scene number here and then you can give it a name so i'll call this first one intro i'll press tab i'll call this verse a verse b chorus and then maybe this is a bridge now what i can do is set the playhead wherever i want the first scene to go and then just right click or control click on that scene and i can select copy scene to playhead so there's the intro then maybe i want the verse so copy scene to playhead then verse b the chorus and then maybe the bridge and then maybe i want to go back to the intro again now you'll notice that there's actually two functions here there's copy scene to playhead but there's also insert scene at playhead copy scene to playhead will just copy over what's already here so if i set my playhead to say bar 5 here and i want to insert another intro here and i right click and i choose copy scene to playhead it's just going to add the intro right on top of verse a that's not what i want if i want to add another intro here and push everything over then you're going to use the insert scene at playhead function so you'll see it adds another intro and it pushes over all of the other scenes and you can just continue building out your arrangement in the order that you like now once you've inserted all of your content into the tracks area if it looks grayed out like this just make sure to click right here and this just activates the track area with this all grayed out nothing in the tracks area will play so you have to click here to activate the tracks area and once you've done that you don't really have to do anything with your live loops grid you don't have to delete anything you don't have to mute it you can just leave it there as an arrangement tool if you need it later just hide the live loops grid by pressing option n to only show the tracks area and then you can continue on recording your vocals or mixing as you normally would in particular i find live loops helpful for getting the big ideas out there to get the most important instruments there and then i'll use the tracks area to add things like transitions and effects and again for mixing and adding vocals unlike ableton live's session view which is kind of similar to live loops live loops is not necessarily meant for live performance it's really meant more for arrangement building and that's really where live loops shines so that's a quick guide on how to get started working in live loops in logic pro 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: 100,983

Keywords: logic, logic pro, logic x, logic 10, logic 10.7, live loops, loops, midi, producer, beats, musictechhelpguy, music tech help guy

Id: iqJu0opJb2c

Length: 17min 11sec (1031 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 06 2022