Logic Pro X | How To ACTUALLY Use Drummer Tracks

if you use the built-in drums in logic and you want them to actually sound good then you need to check this out today I'm going to show you how to use the logic drummer to add real sounding organic drums to your songs and I'll even show you a few tips to take it to the next level this video is for people who write record or produce their own songs in logic but wish their drums sounded better so if that sounds like you you're in the right place I've been using logic for over 10 years and I frequently use the built-in drum sounds and the drummer track especially when I need a quick Groove and don't feel like programming it but by default they really don't sound good and so over the years I've dialed in a bunch of tips and tricks and all sorts of things that help these drums sound real so please make sure you like And subscribe and I'm going to get right into it so if you've never used the logic drummer before or you don't know how to get to it or you need a refresher you can press this plus button right here this is the add track button and make sure you select drummer so you've got software instrument Audio guitar base and then drummer once you select drummer go down here to genre and pick the genre that's kind of closest to what you're working on I'm going to do songwriter cuz I'm doing like folky kind of song today um and then make sure you have open Library checked and go ahead and hit create so when you do this lots of stuff pops up you'll notice your library panel on the left you can toggle it right here with that button this is going to be a collection of genres and drummers each of these genres has a handful of drummers that play in a different style and they're all named and have a little Avatar thing it's a nice touch and then down here in the lower section under sounds you'll see the drum kit that that drummer is using and this is where you can change it or pick a different sound preset for your drums but by default each drummer has their own kit so like this guy likes retro Rock I really like the 60s songwriter he uses the Liverpool kit so it's just a quick way to like yeah if you're going to be using this genre it's probably going to sound best with this drum kit it's like their suggestions and then you can change it after down here in the bottom panel the editor this is where you can dial in what your drums are actually doing and so over here you have beat presets and these are different for each drummer so that's handy if you go through all the beat presets and you don't like it you could try a different drummer or something like that over from there you have a little XY pad that can make your sound go from simple to complex or from soft to loud or literally any combination in between so this is a really quick way to like tell them like hey shut up like play quieter or like hey play do lots of ghosting or hit it really hard that's kind of like where you're communicating with your drummer and then over here this is where you can choose different kit pieces like if you want the kick don't want the kick or if you want to be played on the toms or symbols or high hat you can quickly dial it in there you also have a percussion section here so you can pick different percussion to go along with the drums and then all these sliders are variations of whatever you've selected so if you've selected Tom's here you have variations of Tom groov same thing with your kick and snare down here continuing on you have a little knob for fills a little knob for swings you can dial in the feeli and then over in details you have a couple more options you have a push pull on the feeli you have more or less ghost notes and then you have a high hat section which for this guy it's on automatic so the way I like to go about adding the drummer to start is just picking the drummer that I like and the drum sound that I like and then I start arranging parts so let's go ahead and I'll show you what's happening and when you first pull up the drummer it populates you with one region and you can make this bigger or smaller and it'll automatically kind of draw in Parts um or you can slide it around so I don't want my drums to start right away but here's the beginning of the [Music] song here it comes [Music] that's not good so that's initially like a lot of people's first thoughts of the drummer is it's like what are you doing like that's not what I wanted so the very first step is to start to mess with your grooves and your beat presets and your kit pieces and start to get something that's kind of good but for now let's just have kick and snare I took out a lot of [Music] stuff he's doing this flam that I don't like so I'm going to change my beat [Music] preset that's pretty [Music] basic so I'm going to add a little bit of swing in there and for my case it's a 16th note swing so just add a little bit of that and then that'll start to help the feel a little [Music] bit of course he's only playing [Music] eights so I went ahead and turned off the snare and I liked how that worked but I'm going to play with this slider here and get some kick [Music] variants don't like that let's try to make it a little more simple [Music] yeah [Music] so that's a good start and what I think some people do that might mess them up is they're like okay cool I'm just going to Loop that but that starts to hurt your song because a real drummer is not just going to play the same exact thing so what I recommend doing is clicking your region and going option click drag and pulling that region over and then now you make changes to it right because you dialed in your groove already know how you like the feel but now the song's progressing and we need something else to happen so coming out of [Music] that so now it definitely needs some BackBeat so I'm going to click that snare to turn it back [Music] on and I want more high hat so I'm going to check a different [Music] variation [Music] and I actually want more ghosting on this section so I'm going to pull up ghost notes and see if we get a little more [Music] [Music] there [Music] so right there we go to another change I'll go ahead and click option click drag again and see what that sounds like so the chords kind of change here the feel changes so I'm going to move the drums from high hat over to symbols we'll see what that sounds [Music] like [Music] and then right there it goes back to the original feel so I'll shorten that region and then click drag another make the new One 8 bars and we'll switch it back to high [Music] hat so I kind of want to change the feel here and and bring it up another notch one way you could do that is by adding to the soft loud complex thing here which we'll try and see if we like Oh I like that [Music] yeah [Music] all right now we're to the B section again we're going to go back to ride pull that up symbols here we [Music] go I want this one to have more energy so I'm going to pull up the fills a little bit and you can see when that happens some some little waveforms got drawn in let me make this bigger that might [Music] [Music] help cool now we are to the final part of the song it's just eight bars left we're going to go back to high hat and I'm going to play around with it even more show you a couple other things you can [Music] do so over here on this high hat section if you hit automatic it's going to automatically decide like Let the Drummer decide how open his own high hat is which could be cool if you want some [Music] variation [Music] some other things you can do while we're at it um say I want this last section to push her pull a little more you can adjust that knob here and what that does if you're not familiar with it is kind of how on the beat the drummer is versus like pushing kind of rushing a slight bit or dragging a slight bit and depending on the vibe of your song you want to adjust [Music] that so there's like all the way pushed here's [Music] [Music] pull other things to check out um these both these fills and the swing have a little lock and what the lock does is preserves those settings if you change presets so if we suddenly want to go to like number n the the preset called number n um those didn't change now so once you dial in your swing and the amount of fills you want just leave it and lock it and then you can change presets without that [Music] changing [Music] so if I go back to BackBeat now the other thing you can do is mess with this kick and snare to really change the pattern and feel so here's number one like really [Music] straight [Music] [Music] these last two here and it might be different depending on the drummer but you always have some sort of option for half time or double time so if you want to quickly change that feel you can do that right there and then double [Music] time actually like [Music] that so the other cool thing you might notice this box here that says follow and so if you really don't know what your drums want to do or you just want to keep it really simple to your song go ahead and check that and it lets you pick an instrument so I usually like to start with bass here and what it's going to do is look at the transients of the base and change your drums to just follow the Bas so if you listen to the bass solo here where's my base doing this kind of like bouncy walk thing so the drums have now changed so the kick and snare especially match that [Music] and then once you dial that in you can still play with this this XY box here so if you want it really simple you can do [Music] that or just all the way loud and [Music] complex or a little [Music] softer so again that's a great way to get some originality because once you use the drummer a handful of times you're like oh I've heard all these beats before but let it follow something in your session especially if it's like your primary instrument let it follow your primary instrument like you've already put the thought into kind of how that performance is so why not just have the drummer follow it that's What drummers do anyway right sometimes I'm going to also add some percussion to this last one just to give it a little bit of a lift um so let's do maybe a clap sounds good there you go it's done you can change the variation don't like that or if you wanted a Shaker sorry a tambourine [Music] rather cool so now I'll play that all [Music] [Music] together the last thing as far as arranging goes is you'll notice this ends right before the downbeat of the last beat that was kind of weird but I mean to say it doesn't play the downbeat of the final like the last note so just drag it like a tiny bit and you get your crash ending if you want it so that's a way to quickly dial that in now you have a full drum track that evolves as the song goes it's great it already sounds pretty good but there's mixing things and routing things we can do to really take it up a nut because a lot of people can get it this far but it's getting it that like professional polish that I'm going to show you next open the mixer press X to open the mixer if you don't know what's going on in the mixer I just did a video on that a couple weeks ago so I'll link it and you can check that out but this is our drum track right here and by default it has a bunch of stuff on it some of it's helpful some of it's not as helpful so what we're going to do is get rid of all of this so just click no plugin on all of it we're going to put it back and it's going to sound better and you can get rid of this send as well now on the drum kit designer by default it's in regular stereo operation so you're going to want to make it multi output so go click right here and go to drum kit designer multi output it might preserve your drum kit it does great so what we're going to do is this plus button right here hit this and logic's going to automatically route and label those channels for you so now all of a sudden we have Liverpool we have kickn Tom's high hat and if you hit play you'll notice the audio for each of those things is coming through the new channel that we made and it's not the original Channel that's like hosting the plugin and you can solo them [Music] up [Music] and you'll notice symbols still come in on this Liverpool main channel so I'm just going to call that and call it overhead or symbol or whatever you want and now one thing that used to bother me with this is you make these down here but you can't see them in your main window uh if that bothers you and you want to fix it just highlight them all right click and hit create track and now in your main window you can see all these and what this is going to allow us to do is create a track stack so highlight them all press shift command D and create a track stack and you're going to want summing track stack this is going to create a sum and then we can do bus processing to the entire sum the additional cool thing about this is once you make a track stack you can play the drums and record midi on [Music] it so that's something you can't do you can play on one of these but you can't record on it so if I go and hit it and hit record it's going to say drummer tracks don't support recording but track Stacks do so make your track stack and then you can record drums over top so say you don't like this F right here even though it's pretty cool so shorten it to just the distance you want to [Music] fill and then you can just record over on the track stack put your own fill there so then I recorded that in there done [Music] right so additional ways to add more flexibility you can hop back and forth between midi and drummer really easily and you can if you want to just commit this whole thing to MIDI you can do that just highlight them all and drag it over a midi track and it'll make midi for you but I prefer to keep it in drummer form as long as possible because it just makes it easier to deal with um unless I'm full committing to just programming drums on the song that's up to you but if you want to make midi out of it you just drag it to a midi track so I'm going to show you a handful of my favorite mixing tips especially for Midi drums and it's going to take it to that professional sound really quickly the first thing is parallel compression so you're going to want to highlight all your drum tracks hit X to open the mixer click right here where it says sends and create a new bus I'll just use bus one you'll see it popped up over here we're going to call this drum per okay and now we're going to send all of these at Unity so highlight them all option and click and now if we hit play just to test we're going to see them coming in here on drum [Music] parallel so on the drum parallel we are going to go to Dynamics and add a compressor and my favorite compressor to do this with is either the classic VCA or the Vintage VCA I'd like to encourage you to try both and see what works better we're going to use classic today unless I hate it the idea behind parallel compression is you have your original drum bus or whatever you're compressing not compressed and then you have a parallel path meaning like happening at the same time same copies of the sound but this one is getting absolutely slammed with a compressor and the end result is a blendable basically punch and attack that you can add to your drums so I'm going to start pulling down this threshold I pulled the ratio up to 4.1 and we're going to get a lot of [Music] compression this sounds really good right around 10 so you might have heard that kind of pulsing symbol just then so I'm going to pull our overhead and high hat down about minus5 that'll help take care of that I'm going to add a little bit of makeup gain CU we're compressing a [Music] ton and now we're able to blend this parallel compression in with our regular drum [Music] sound that is a super quick way to add lots of punch and attack to your drums and I guarantee you any top 40 record or any sound you've heard on the radio is using parallel compression so you definitely want to do that to your software drums next we're going to do a drum Reverb so highlight all of them again and we're going to create another bus let's try the small room that's already in there it's one of those ones that logic makes for you I don't know if I like [Music] [Music] it I don't like it sounds disgusting okay we're going to make our own so just put it to another bus I'm going to use four all right and we are going to use chroma verb I'm going to try the Vintage concert hall and kind of keep the Decay a little low nope that's not it let's go to spaces let's try [Music] rooms Studio drums [Music] room that's okay it just feels pretty dead or like [Music] bright my goal with reverbs is to get rid of these sublow because those will really kind of mess up like get it'll mess up your Low's make them dirty and then the top end is really where it sounds fake so if you roll off top it'll help it sound more like a real [Music] room and then turn that down and blend it in cuz we don't want too much of [Music] it and then that kick is not doing it for me so I'm going to pull that down about minus5 or [Music] more great so now we got drum parallel compression and and room Reverb and now I'm going to quickly EQ and compress each of the following and actually I like to EQ and compress before I Reverb so I'm going to go and mute that drum Reverb and the parallel compression um I got ahead of myself there so quick EQ on everything I'm just going to highlight them all click to add the EQ and run through these tracks really quick and we're going to cut lows cut mud and boost for some character that's it so we'll start with the kick so starting with this low cut right here I'm going to push up and sweep until I hear the fundamental like the beefy good part of the low end and I'm going to roll off right there and when you're on the the 12 DB per octave filter you can actually boost where you're cutting to give a nice resonant hump so that's what I'm going to do now that's nice and thick right there so I'll roll with that next I'm going to cut mud so I'm going to grab one of these midb bands sweep around somewhere between 200 and 1K and wherever it sounds the worst I'm going to pull out the frequencies [Music] there great and then the final thing is just a boost for some character so I'm going to take this top or high mid right here and just find somewhere that it sounds nice and has a nice natural feel to it probably right there just a little bit so here's without that here's with it now we're going to quickly run through and do that to the rest of the [Music] drums [Music] let's find some [Music] [Music] Toms our mud cut and some [Music] character great back to the full section mud cut somewhere in there and I'm not going to boost character on the high hat because I don't like to do that character I really want from the main drums but this can just whoops this can kind of get nasty up there so not going to do anything and then same thing on the overhead we're going to just deal with the low end and the mud [Music] great so let's take a listen to all our drums with and without that so here's without our changes get a little more here and here's a with so cleans it up gets a lot tighter feel punchier all of those things now we can turn back on now I'm going to do the same thing but with compression on each one so I'm going to go ahead and pull up the regular compressor and my go-to is the studio VCA for this kind of thing and we're going to do 3: one with an attack around 20 because we want enough attack space for that transient to get through if you're not familiar with compression I have a video explaining it in a lot more depth so I'll have that somewhere for now though I'm just going to run through and get just a little bit of compression on all of them [Music] I actually like the Vintage VCA for this so I'm going to now that I've got it dialed I'm going to go and copy that to my snare and toms and just check [Music] it let's check the Tom section again I'm going to compress that a little more and add some more makeup gain to kind of get that level higher better okay here's all our drums with EQ and compression now here we [Music] go I'm going to bring back parallel [Music] compression and the drum [Music] reer [Music] let's give a longer section of song [Music] here this Reverb has a nasty overtone so I'm going to find that and get rid of it [Music] another thing you could do is add some light compression to your drum bus here so I'm going to add yet another compressor on the Vintage VCA set it to 4: one attack at 30 release at 100 and then I'm just going to pull down this threshold until I'm getting like two DB of gain reduction somewhere around there [Music] I'm going to send more of my high hat and ride to the room to kind of give it more of that Spacey [Music] feel [Music] finally I'm going to send my main drum bus my parallel and my drum Reverb to one final drum bus just so I can add some some Global processing to the whole drum sound we'll call this drum master and the main thing I want to do here is add some sort of saturation and any other color so I'm going to start with the logic EQ vintage EQ collection vintage console EQ um this is like a NE style EQ and I'm going to push this drive until it's it's sitting how I [Music] want you notice my drums are really loud over here so I'm going to pull down all of my tracks a little bit [Music] and for this I'm going to boost some top end to give it some of that polish and Sparkle [Music] [Music] I hope that was helpful and maybe give you some new ideas on how to make the logic drummer work better for your own songs if you have any questions about the logic drummer or anything else I covered in this video please go ahead and ask down in the comments or if you'd like to schedule a one-on-one logic coaching session with me you can check out the link below and visit my website thanks so much for watching and make sure you like And subscribe e

Channel: Woodyard Music

Views: 2,009

Keywords: Mixing, Logic Pro X, Music Production, Recording, Producing, Home Studio, Sound, Audio, Beginners, Learning, Tips, Tricks, Stock Plugins, Audio Engineering, Tutorial, Plugin, Routing, Workflow, Efficiency, Mixer, Mixer Window, Sends, Busses, Bus, Output, Sends On Fader

Id: huGQdISrBsU

Length: 36min 7sec (2167 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2024