Logic Pro X - Drums Pt. 2 - Drum kit designer and producer kits

let's talk about the drum kit sounds you get with logic and i'll primarily talk about acoustic drum sounds using a plug-in called drum kit designer and we'll also talk about producer kits and a lot of what i show you in this video will make a bit more sense if you watch the previous video where i go over logic's drummer feature as i had explained in the last video each drummer has a unique drum kit assigned to him or her that matches their genre or style of playing but i also have the flexibility to choose any drum kit for any of the drummers so let's stay on our drummer kyle which uses the socal kit by default and will change the drum kits in this lower area of the library so that means again the groove is going to stay the same but the drum sounds will change [Music] for right now i think i like this east bay kit maybe a bit more than the socal kit for our imaginary pop rock song i think there are some similar drum samples between the two but the east bay kit has a bit of a fuller sounding kick drum it has some nice sub frequencies in it that maybe you can hear if you're using a subwoofer and also it sounds a bit more ambient you can hear the room sound a bit more in it but i may realize that after i say record bass guitar that i want to go back to that tighter sounding kick drum of the socal drum kit because i may find that that kick drum works or blends better with the bass guitar so again we have the flexibility to change the sounds using this method and that's going to lead us into talking about our next topic which is the drum kit designer plug-in to access and change those individual drum sounds themselves if i press i i can open up the inspector and take a look at what's happening on this track's channel strip and it looks like we have a software instrument track because it has a software instrument on its input if i double click on that it's going to open up the drum kit designer plugin we can also see that there are a couple of insert effects plugins on the chain along with a bus send if you remember from a couple of videos back what we have here is an instrument patch and each one of these drum kits in this list here is an instrument patch and you can see the elements of the channel strip change as i select the different drum kits let's take a look at the drum kit designer plug-in so if i have a midi keyboard controller i can play each individual drum sound that way i can take my mouse pointer and click on each of the individual drum icons and you can hear them that way symbols included and you'll see that some of them open up an area here on the left and they all have this area here on the right where i can edit them further as well let's take a look at the kick drum and here we have a gain knob so the gain is going to adjust the volume or gain of the individual drum or symbol selected in relationship to the rest of the drums and cymbals so this is a good mixing tool if you find that you know here in this case if my kick is too loud or soft i can bump it up a little bit or down a little bit to match the rest of the drums and symbols dampen is going to shorten the sound or dampen it a little bit so let's drastically move this up to 100 so you can hear what i mean probably wouldn't want that but this is going to take some of the sustain away from the drum maybe just to clean it up a little bit if i need to in the mix and then tune of course is going to change the pitch of the drum or symbol down or up each of these crashes here there's a left crash in a right crash you can hear the difference each of them have separate controls for both the left and right symbol individually and then there's an all tab with controls for both crashes globally so both the kick and the snare in this case in this instance will ha will give you the option over here in the on the left side to change the actual drum being used on this drum kit so right now the kick the kick drum is this east bay kick but i can also use east bay 2 and hear that and east bay 3. i'm going to keep it on this first one i like that and then the snare drum gives me three different options as well and i think i'm going to keep it on this first one here which sounds and looks like the type of snare that we use predominantly at most of our lcbc campuses which is based or modeled off of a ludwig black beauty snare drum if you want to go a little bit deeper and you're looking for more drum sounds at your disposal or you're looking for more complicated or sophisticated mixing routings for each of your individual drum sounds then there's something called producer kits which allow you to do this what i just showed you is more the simplistic way to handle your drum kits and a lot of people like to keep it that way they don't want it too complicated totally understand that but let me show you producer kits really quick so over here in the library we have our drum kit folder we have east bay selected that's the kit we've been working with and if i scroll down here to the bottom there's this kind of hidden folder called producer kits i'm going to open that up and you can see that a lot of the producer kits names are similar or exact to what we have in our normal drum kits over here on the left and you can see there's an easter bay version of a producer kit on on the right side and each of the producer kits also has a plus after the name to show you that it's producer kit so let's click on that and open the east bay producer kit now when we take a look at this track we can see that it has become an aux track and we know that because it has instead of a software instrument on its input it has a bus path as its input in this case bus three and over here if i press this drop down arrow we can see that now we have instead of a normal patch we have a track stack patch so i talked about track stacks a few videos ago and all these tracks inside this folder stack are routed to this aux track here let's open the mixer for a better view i'm going to use screen set 4 for that which is programmed on the lcbc template now i'm going to open the arrow here to show me all the tracks inside the stack so all the outputs are going to bus 3 which is the input of our main aux track here we can also call this our mix bus for the drums the first track called overheads holds our software instrument the drum kit designer and all the rest of the tracks look like aux tracks but instead of having a bus path routing as the input like we're used to seeing we have what looks like drum path assignments as their inputs so what's happening here is that each of the individual drum sounds of the drum kit designer are routed to these individual aux tracks if i play the midi keyboard i can hear that the sounds are still the same it's still the east bay drum kit but now we have more options for mixing if you take a look at the kick drum we can see that there are now two different kick drum tracks a kick in and a kick out that make up the kick drum sound for the east bay kick drum so i'm going to assume that these are two individual samples of the kick one with a mic placed in the drum and one with a mic placed outside the drum let's go ahead and solo both of these channels and listen to the kick by itself and now let's solo the first one so this gives us a bit more of the attack and there's some sub frequencies in there and then the kick out there's some higher mid-range frequencies here and some of like the woofiness of the drum the snare is now broken into top snare and bottom snare if you need more attack or punch on your snare you might want to try bringing up the volume of the snare top and if you need a bit more of that sizzle that wire snare rattling sustain sound you can boost the bottom snare mic up a touch moving over here to the room mics these are really going to change the character of the whole drum kit sound and add or take away ambience as you adjust the volume of the fader [Music] let's open the drum kit designer one more time and as i click on each drum and symbol now i have access to logic's entire library of acoustic drum samples for every drum and symbol and not just the kick and the snare let's listen to a few different tomtom options for during our bridge section tom groove that we created in the last video [Music] another option you get when you use a producer kit on this drum kit designer plug-in is that over on the right side near the bottom i can also choose whether or not i want the selected drum or cymbal sound to be sent to a few different ambient mic options so we already talked about the room mics there's also an overhead option and overhead mics are the two mics that are typically placed directly above the symbols or some somewhere close to the drum kit and leak is interesting it simulates the sound of drums leaking into other nearby mics and i think it can give you a more natural and lively recorded sound of a drum kit if you blend it in and let's listen to how these sound and how they blend in with the rest of the drum kit [Music] as i click on the toms for the east bay producer kit i can see over here that they are not being sent to the room mics so they definitely are coming in on our tom high tom mid and tom low channel you can see they're also going to overheads and leak but let's say i did want to add them to the room all i need to do is turn this slider over to the right so let's listen to how the sound changes when i do that i'm going to solo the room a channel strip here [Music] cool so now i have my toms in the room mics they have that nice roomy big sound on them but hey you may say i think the toms are nice in the room but they're a little bit loud compared to the kick and snare room mic volume so i can also adjust that and the way i'm going to do that let's solo our room mic again is i am going to adjust the volume of the toms with the drum kit designer gain knob so let's make sure we have all selected here in the tabs which is going to change the gain of all three toms at once and now i can adjust the volume of the toms going into the room mics via this knob let's let's adjust that now just be aware that when you change the gain knob in the drum kit designer for your individual drums and symbols it's going to affect the volume in this case of the toms in going into your overhead channel here going into your leak channel and of course and most importantly going into your direct channels here tom high tom mate and tom low so in this case what i might do to compensate for that volume loss is i'm just going to select all the tom uh direct channels here and i'm going to boost the volume of those to get back some of that volume that i lost [Music] the a and b slider down here is for the room mics you can see we do have two room channel strips or tracks for room mics so far in this kit every drum and symbol if they're going to a room mic they're going to room a but let me swap the two and i'll let you hear the difference [Music] i want to talk about another aspect of volume control using the software drums and this concept is really for software instruments and midi programming in general so we know we can change the volume of the drums with the logic mixer and with the drum kit designer plug-in and we've seen how those two interact but you may ask well couldn't you just adjust the volume of the drums by changing the velocity of the midi notes in the midi regions so you're in effect streamlining your workflow and not having then to go and open up the plug-in or the mixer to change those volumes okay to answer that question let's take a listen first to our course drum groove that we came up with in our last video [Music] i like the vibe of that but maybe the crash symbols are a bit too loud so i'm going to do a little experiment here and play two different versions in the first one it's going to be normal no change at all which is a repeat of what you just heard and in the second example i'm going to lower the velocity of the midi notes of just the symbols but then i'm going to boost the gain of the symbols in the drum kit designer to compensate for that volume loss so if i'm lowering the volume with mini velocity and then raising raising it again in the plug-in it should sound the same as the original version right let's find out if it does [Music] now let's select all the symbols and i'm going to bring the velocity slider down for all of them relatively to around let's say just like 33. then i'm going to go to the drum kit designer plug-in and make sure i have the symbol selected and all here in this tab and take the gain and let's let's boost it up about 11 db so i'm going to put this at 9 db and that's going to compensate for the volume loss that we lost here by dropping the midi [Music] velocity [Music] the first version symbols feel more driving and they cut through a bit better and in the second version they feel a bit weaker and less intense even though the symbols in both version are around the same volume now maybe i'm going to like the vibe of that second version better musically for my song here but my point is that changing the midi velocity on software instruments i'm not only changing the volume of that instrument but i'm also changing the character and the tone of that instrument and in the case of the symbols here i'm losing the energy and i'm losing that sizzle of that symbol which is maybe something i don't want to have happen and and the reason this happens in the case of the drum kit designer plug-in is because of a process called multi-sampling used to create the software instrument and i won't get too deep into how technically this works but if you can imagine when you hit a symbol with a stick and i hit it at a lower velocity or quieter that symbol is going to be more mellow it's going to have lower frequencies in it and as i start hitting it with a higher velocities that symbol is going to open up it's going to become more brash and it will contain higher frequencies and again this concept is not just the case for midi software drums but really for any acoustic instrument like software piano strings and even many synth presets will be programmed like this so just to be clear and to recap a little when i'm changing the gain volume within the drum kit designer or the volume fader on the overheads track because as you can see the symbols are routed there i'm only changing volume the tonal characteristics are changed by altering midi velocity so hopefully you have a more accurate perspective on how all these things work together midi velocity is usually best used on a note by note basis when you have one or two or maybe a few more notes that you need to adjust and overall volume changes may be best served using the plug-in gain volume and the mixer one more thing with the drum kit designer you can see this little drop down arrow here and you'll you'll find this feature whether you're on a producer kit or not this is going to open up a few more options for adjusting gain or volume for some of the other percussion instruments and a lot of logic plugins will have this drop down arrow so don't miss this many times it's going to reveal options that will help you out in shaping and designing your sounds thanks everyone for sticking around have some fun creating your drum parts and your drum sounds

Channel: LCBCMusicians

Views: 3,814

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Logic Pro X, Logic, Logic 10.5, Logic Pro 10.5, LCBC, LCBC Church, LCBC musicians, LCBC worship, Jeff Culp, Logic Pro for beginners, Logic Pro tutorial, beginning music production, music production, DAW, learning Logic Pro X, tutorial, beginner, how to, tut, music, tips, Logic Pro midi, midi, drum kit designer, acoustic drums in Logic, drum programming, track stacks, producer kits, drum kits in Logic, Drummer feature, creating a song in Logic, how to use Logic Pro

Id: moSnnSDtVlo

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 01 2020