Logic Pro X - CUSTOM DRUM KITS and Assigning Pads with Drum Machine Designer

hey everyone this is music tech help guy and in this video i'm going to show you my method from start to finish how to build your own custom drum machines or drum kits using drum machine designer in logic pro i'm also going to be assigning each of the sample pads here in drum machine designer to specific keys on my novation launchpad controller however this method should work for any beatpad style controller or you could even use this to assign your drums to specific keys on your midi controller if you don't have a pad style controller like this so it's fairly important to me that the 16 pads here on the first page of drum machine designer correspond to these 16 pads on my launch pad i want you know visually everything to match up and as you can see they don't all match up some of them do but others others don't so i want to correct that and actually i'm going to set this up up front so that i can have a template my own custom drum machine designer template for creating future kits now you might ask why not just drag in all of your samples and then assign the keys well drum machine designer just unfortunately doesn't work like that and if you try that approach you're gonna end up with more headache uh later on down the road just trust me there i've tried it already there is a cool feature with drum machine designer where you can drag multiple samples in here in the tracks area and then just instantly load them all in drum machine designer and it's a cool trick but it's not very helpful when you're trying to keep things on specific pads so that's just my little two cents there so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to load up drum machine designer just a blank drum machine designer so let me just uh start from scratch here you just create a new software instrument and then under your instrument tab here go down to drum machine designer this will load up a blank drum machine designer kit if you click the empty kit bar up here this will show that this is the empty kit preset in the library so we're going to create our own custom preset that has all 16 of these pads assigned you know custom for my launchpad so the first thing i'm going to do is just click on this first pad click on learn note you just click on this input here and then click learn note and then play that note and it learns it then i can move on to the next one click learn note learn it and then you just keep going for all of these and some of them are going to be correct but others may not now i have two f's so now let's make that f sharp i've got two f sharps now so this is going to be g and so forth and so on so it doesn't specifically matter what midi pitches each of these pads are learned to it's just that i want to create a setup that i can recall very easily at any time to create my own custom kits now as i get up toward the top here you may find that when you play a note it jumps over to another page in drum machine designer that's just telling you that there's another pad that's assigned to that pad to that pitch so like d2 here if i select learn note play the pad that i want to assign it to it's also going to tell me that this one is f2 and it's just assigned it to f2 this isn't going to be an issue unless you create multiple pages of samples but even then if you wanted to go you know even further like let me just demonstrate this here and back on the first page let's learn this very last sample let's say that um and let me just play these real quick so you can see they're all assigned where they're supposed to be they're all in order now so that's nice but let's say i wanted to build an even bigger kit where i wanted you know more than 16 samples i could just select the second page here and then start assigning more samples maybe i want the second page to be this upper zone or this this bottom uh sort of zone here so you could do that but for my purposes 16 samples is just fine so now here's the important thing you only have to do this once once you set this up once you can save it as a library preset so you just select this top bar here where it says empty kit then go over to your library you can open the library by pressing y and it should show the empty kit here but then you click save and you save this as a library patch so what i'm going to do is just call this dmd template and then i'll say launch pad mark 3 and you can see under user patches it saved that patch so now if i ever want to build a custom drum kit in logic i can load up a blank software instrument go to user patches and select that dmd template open up dmd and all of the notes are right where they need to be so you only have to do this once so that's the first step the second step is adding your drum samples in and again like i said before there are faster ways to load multiple samples in at once personally when i'm building a custom kit i like to load them in one by one myself because then i can take time to add labels or icons for each one i can name each one another thing i want to do is i don't want to follow the exact same gm note order here you can see these are pre-labeled kick rim snare clap and so forth and so on i don't want to use that so i'm actually going to right click up here and then select hide general midi drum names so it just shows me the pitch now okay now you can find your drum samples wherever you want you can find or download or buy them online whatever you want to do i personally like using splice i've been using it for a while now and i'm going to go through and build a custom kit with 16 different sounds so what i want is a couple different kicks maybe a kick with a bass then a regular kick a couple different snares a couple different snaps or claps some high hats some crashes so let's see what we can find in here let's start with kick samples that's a nice just tight kick i'll drag it right on there and you just double click and you call it whatever you want i'll just call it uh kick tight and then you can right click and i like to go to percussion or no drums here just choose one of these icons there so i got that kick right there let's say i want another kick right here and you know normally on c sharp one if you're following the gm drum kit you're not going to make that another kick drum but because we've created our own custom setup here we can make these whatever we want them to be so let me try to find another kick so that's kind of cool it's got a little bass on it i'll drag that in and i'll just call this kick again right click choose a custom icon there [Music] now another thing you can do is with some of these samples that have like extended uh tails to them like this one does you can click on that pad go to q sampler main and if it's set to one shot mode that means it's going to play the whole sample from beginning to end regardless of how long you hold the key down what i like to do with samples like this is put them in classic mode instead so now i have some control over the length of that sample let's find a couple snares so i'll search up snare see what i can find it's a nice tight snare i'll put that right there there's another like snare clap that one's kind of cool so i'll just call this snare tight and i'll call this one snare plus clap then right click and assign some icons so here's a snare icon here's another snare icon so now i have kick kick and bass tight snare [Music] scenarion clap if you get a sample like this it has a unnecessary long tail you can kind of trim it up just fade it a bit there's no reason for that sample to be that long if it's really long with a lot of extra space you can end up with a bunch of overlapping samples which eats up your uh number of uh possible voices so that's helpful to trim some of those things up um let's find like a clap sample up here it's a tight clap i like this little snap here so let's maybe i'll do all three of these oh and that one's a loop okay so i'll show you how to deal with that too so it's dragging tight clap clap hit and then this sort of snap sample so let me select this first one this is clap tight i think i can trim that up a bit go let's clap tight this one is clap hit just call this clap hit this one is okay so this is cool um what i'm going to do is i'm going to drag this one on both of these samples i'm going to re-drag it i'm gonna re-drag it here as well for this one i'm gonna call this snap and then i'll say verb it's got a little verb on it and this one i'll call snap dry and then what i'll do is in classic mode for both of these i'll trim out just the sample that i want so this first one's got like a reverb tail on it and i will actually i will put that in one shot mode there we go the next one i'm going to put it in one shot mode but i'm going to trim out one of these other samples that are that's more dry and there is an option up here that says snap you can snap to uh transients so when i move this over it should snap right there at the transient i'll pull that up a little bit more and now i have a snap with verb and then snap dry let's give these some uh icons here as well um so these were claps this is a clap as well under percussion there's a hand clap icon for the snaps uh well there's no snap symbol is there so i'll just put the hand icon for all of these and you know this may seem a little tedious and it is but once you set it up once you never have to do it again um if i want to come back and reuse this kit on multiple different songs i can easily do that and uh if you ever want to replace a sample you just drag another sample right on top of the pad and it'll automatically replace that pad next let's move on some high hats up here now normally your hi-hats on the keyboard would be f-sharp g-sharp and a-sharp but here i'm just going to put them on these three pads because they're all right next to each other optimally i want maybe two different closed hi-hats plus an open hi-hat so let's see what we can find here kind of like that one so drag that as a closed hat that's a nice one too and then let's see if i can find an open hat oh that's a nice one too i like that one and see if i can find just an open hat in that same library let's try that one so now i have three different hats let's see these sound like so they're like longest uh like lower higher even higher open so i'll just call this pat one hat two at three i'll just call this one hat open okay and then these i'll just uh again right click control click if you don't have a mouse and i'll make these hi-hat samples i think i'll make these this icon and then for the open hat i'll make this the open icon so here's the thing most of the time you want your hi-hats to sort of behave like hi-hats meaning that you want an instance of an open hat or an instance of a closed hat to choke the open hat you know when a when a drummer plays an open hat followed by a closed hat you hear it's right you don't hear these these overlapping sounds and fortunately enough the open hat is actually the sample itself is fairly short so what you can do here is you can create an exclusive group so what you do is for all four of these you click on this little little cog icon here and you click exclusive group and then just choose exclusive group one all of the samples within that group and you can see the little one icon and all those what that means is that all of the uh samples within that group are monophonic meaning that if i play more than one at once it chokes um any overlapping samples if i play the open hi-hat followed by a closed hi-hat the closed hi-hat will choke the open hi-hat now another thing i want to do is with my first hat here i think i'm going to pitch this up a bit so i'll click cue sampler detail and pitch this up a couple couple steps i think the open hat i want that to be a little lower too maybe just a couple or even just just one or two half steps cool next let's find some crashes and maybe some effects up here maybe some toms um actually let's go with the toms first so i've got a really cool tom sample here i like i'm gonna use that i don't typically use a lot of tom samples with electronic kits but i usually like to have just like one or two of them in there just so i can have something else in there some other you know type of drum and i could i could drop this in twice there we go i could call this tom low tom high there we go and then the one that's low i will pitch it down a few steps [Music] maybe i'll pitch this one up a bit there we go another thing you can do here is you can start uh panning some of these so if you want the high tom which i've misspelled here if you want the high tom to be a little off to the left then maybe the low tom to be a little off to the right you can do that let's add some crashes and some effects that one's kind of cool yeah there's just like a standard crash that's fine and i want like some sort of like a white noise crash i think that one will work it's sort of like an effects crash so just call this uh crash and then i'll call this effects crash i'll just select some icons for these and again if you find yourself needing more samples you just go over to the next page and assign another set of of samples on your midi controller where you want them but now i've built up a full kit with 16 samples now one thing you may find yourself doing is wanting to adjust sort of the mix of these like some of these crashes are a bit high for my taste some of these high hats are a little low for my taste so you just select the pad and then make sure you're in q sampler detail and adjust the volume [Music] that snares a little low for my taste so now that i've got my custom kit created all you have to do is again select the top bar here which selects the whole kit and then you click save then you give it a name so i'll just call this josh custom kit one and anytime i want to load up this kit to work with i just create a software instrument go into the library go to user patches and select that kit and it loads up all of those drum samples and it loads up all the programming for the drum kit so let's create a beat with this now the other upside to this is when you create a new pattern region by right clicking or control clicking in the tracks area and you just select create pattern region by using drum machine designer it will automatically assign the first 12 pads ascending so there's the two kicks the two snares the four claps and snaps the four hi-hats the only thing this is missing are the toms and the crashes um so this is actually pretty easy to remedy you just click up here you click learn and then just play in those four pads although it has learned channel pressure which i didn't want it to learn which is fine but now i've got tom tom crash effects crash so i'm going to move these down to the bottom just like so there we go and then i'll put the um the crashes up top and then the two toms at the bottom and then i've added in a few notes here to include the crashes and the toms and the beat as well so let's check this out [Music] now the tricky thing here is if you want all of the drum kit pieces to show up in this order every time what you'll want to do is create a custom pattern preset and you can do that by clicking here and then just select save template and then you can just call this whatever you want i'll just call it josh custom kit dmd one so now if i want to create a new pattern at any point i just create the new pattern region and then click here to show your presets go to user templates and then there's that josh custom kit and it's got all of the kit pieces loaded up in the order that i like so i can start building my beats quickly so this method is a lot of work up front for sure but once you do that work it makes loading up these custom kits incredibly quick and easy for incorporating them into any of your songs 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 as always thank you so much for the support and thanks for watching

Channel: MusicTechHelpGuy

Views: 13,829

Rating: 4.9548874 out of 5

Keywords: logic, logic pro, Logic Pro x, logic x, logic studio, pad, beat pad, beat pads, assign samples, sampling, samples, drum, drums, beat, beats, assign beat pads, assign beat pads in Logic, novation, launchpad, drum machine designer, drum machine, tutorial, musictechhelpguy, music tech help guy

Id: mbqp1Z2Vdcg

Length: 22min 12sec (1332 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 02 2021