Logic Pro X Tutorial - Everything You Need To Know For Beginners - LEVEL 2

hey guys welcome back to another logic pro x tutorial it's an updated version of a previous logic products tutorial that i have available online so by no means is this a duplicated video or a duplicate video of that video i would still recommend checking out the other video i'm not going to cover the same things in this video it's more of an extended version an updated 2021 version of logic pro x for beginners just like in the previous logic tutorial i will make my logic session that i'm working on available for free with the link in the description so you can download it and go along with the things i'm using and use it in practice i would recommend doing that while i go through the tutorial so you can kind of do the things i'm doing in practice while we're learning this is going to be a really long video which is why i've time stamped all the relevant sections and topics in the description so if you don't want to watch the full thing just go to the relevant timestamps in the description and skip to the section that's most appropriate to you but i will be going into some type of chronological order with the sections that i'm going to talk about right now so section one we'll talk about building a song structure and some key organization things you want to have place in your logic session so these things include like tempo song key section two would be talking about plug-ins and virtual instruments so what are plugins where are they located do you need to buy plug-ins or do you need to buy virtual instruments or can you just use the ones in logic and are they professional are they good section three is using samples so how do you use samples how do you bring them into your logic session section four would be editing audio and midi i did touch on this in the last tutorial but i did want to mention some things that i was i thought i was missing section five would be talking about mixing busing and outputs i'm not going to get too deep on mixing because i think that deserves a video of its own section 6 is kind of like a little bonus section where i want to talk about different amateur mistakes that a lot of amateurs make just for starting out with logic or music production song reading whatever section seven will talk about some cool effects and plugins for beginners like pitch correction auto tune and automation as the three big ones and then section eight we're going to package what we've made in this uh tutorial and bounce it and then that file will be available for you that whole logic session file will be available for you in the description let's jump into section one building a song structure and some key organization things you want to have in your logic session first thing off the bat two important really important things that you want to have a good idea of before you actually start your song or before you start some ideas of your song are tempo and key they're really two fundamentals of music and tempo is how fast your song is and the key is yeah the key of your song so whether it's in like a c sharp minor or a d major we want to know what this is before we start making music because it will be difficult to change these things later um not so difficult if we're just working in midi but it just helps us set the foundation so we can kind of get off on the right track tempo is set at right up at the top here and we can double click and write any number we want here like 100 or we can also click and drag down or up to find the desired temp book very quickly so if i want that like just at 110 i can just click and drag down to 110 and then let go and then the key of the song is important because logic will take that into consideration when we are actually playing instruments um the built-in logic virtual virtual instruments and if we tell logic that our song is in d major for example then logic will help us find the right notes in that key so that's really helpful down down the line by the way if you don't have this huge custom bar here and you have see something smaller like for example like this that's just because i've customized my control display you can go to this drop down window here and then choose what you would like in the display whether that's the beats and project or any of these i like to have a custom display where it's like a lot of information because i'm using a monitor so i have the space available moving on we come into logic as in an empty session usually we're in the headspace of we have a song an idea and we're ready to record it and ready to go or we come into an empty logic session and we don't have any ideas we just want to kind of brainstorm and generate ideas so let's talk about the first way where we have a song idea we have a band and or we have a guitar part we want to record or a piano part and then we want to sing over we know what we're doing let's first talk about it in the approach of that and go over some key organization topics for that perspective and then let's talk about we don't have any ideas and how can we use logic to our advantage with the tempo and key that we've chosen to get ideas quickly using live loops and the step sequencer the first way if you know exactly what you want to record then load up whatever instrument you want to get started with whether that's an audio track where it's already default here we can press we can arm the track and we can start recording our vocal whether we want you to use this microphone right here or we want to start with a software instrument track go up here track add software instrument and then we can open up our library here with this folder window or we can press y on our keyboard and that snaps the library open and then we can choose any software instrument available to us for example steinway grand piano i have my midi keyboard right in front of me press record or test the piano out here and i can quickly just press record and throw down ideas like this if i wanted to or get my idea that i want to for my song right away the other instruments we have available to us are drummer tracks if you are a drummer and want to start out with a beat we can add a drummer track where we can quickly get a beat that's made for us in the tempo that we've chosen 110 and we can use this beat right here let's scroll that up at the top use this simple beat and record our piano over it let's just do a c major a minor or let's do a c major g a minor f we can record that right over our drums here [Music] if that was the progression of our song we're kind of off to the races with building a foundation for our song let's say we wanted to start out with a guitar track that is plugged into our audio interface if you're not exactly sure what an audio interface is these are the types of things that i'm kind of skipping over a little bit more quickly and because of these are the things that i've mentioned in the last logic pro x tutorial so perhaps it's better to check out the first logic products tutorial and then come back to this one where organization comes into play and these are the things i want to mention in this section the this marker section so i'm going to press y to snap this section up on the left to get more space and then i'm just going to narrow in our session here so default it happens to be around like 90 90 bars here i'm just going to snap this to about 50 and then zoom in and then it's going to clean up our session here and our our window here is going to be much smaller and this drop down here is where we have our markers the arrangement our signature and our tempo so this is kind of like the metadata to our track and i want to talk about markers markers are going to help you get structure and organization around your track you can click into a marker and type things like intro for example if we have a four bar intro and then maybe here we have a verse i'm gonna press plus again and the right verse one and maybe we have after four bars we have a pre-chorus so i can type in another marker type in pre and then let's say we have a chorus at bar 13. i'm going to type in chorus and then say we have an eight bar chorus then we can i can if we have another verse i can copy this verse by doing command c and then going to bar 21 and doing command v i can copy that marker and by default the last marker will just extend forever so let's say we have a simple structure i'm going to copy the pre again i'm going to copy the course again and let's say we have a bridge at bar 18 so i'm going to make another marker called bridge and then another marker let's let's say bar 45 do you have a chorus i'm going to just command c this second chorus and have it there so you notice that our session view here is too small so what we want to do is just click on this little arrow and drag it out to where you want where you want it to be so for example i'm going to just drag it out to bar 65 and zoom in so this is the end of our song here so we can just do like maybe an outro so this gives us an idea of structure and i like to have these all in the same color so i would choose the choruses and hold shift and then i would type in option c on my keyboard and then choose a color for these and i would do the same thing for the verses verse which would be let's do that blue breeze maybe the outro the bridge and the intro could all be similar colors and i will double click and diverse one and just do verse two chorus two chorus three pre two so that gives us a much clearer visual of what we're now trying to build with our song and we can snap this up and then it's still there at the top color coded so if we did for example we have the song in mind and we know that this piano part is in our intro and will likely be in our our verse sections we can drag and copy it to those sections very quickly i can even loop this for the whole song if i wanted to have that piano part be the whole song or if it's just the introverse pre and the chorus is different then i can hold down command sorry option with my keyboard and then on my mouse i'm going to click and then this little plus sign shows up you can see it there and now i can just drag this anywhere and let go of my mouse and then it's made a copy for me so let's say i want it here and then it's in the bridge at the same thing i'm going to do hold down option click and drag with the mouse and let's say it's the outro 2. and then we can do the same thing for our drums we can drag it like this we can also be double clicking and editing our drums with this quadratic here quickly let's say for the verse it's more simple and soft without any hi hats but then in our chorus it's more loud and complex with hi-hats and then we can click and drag on our choruses here so these kind of shortcuts of option and mouse clicks quick shortcuts to use to get song ideas quickly and we can be referencing our song structure at the top here just to give us an idea of like where we're going and what we're working with i find that really helps me then if we want to continue on filling out our course we can pop in our course here let's say our course more holds down a g chord to an a minor so i can just go to my midi keyboard here that's plugged in right in front of me i can press r on my keyboard at bar 13 here where the chorus is and i'm just going to pop that in here [Music] okay so something like that um i'm gonna double click in and just clean that up because notice how it's cut off this first bar here and also nothing is quantized so i've double clicked to bring my editor up and this is these are the mini notes that i've played so i'm going to first i'm going to quantize so command a to highlight everything and then i'm going to quantize by 1 16th note 1 16th note is going to snap it into the nearest 16th bar that i've played closest to so if you're going to play something and then quantize it it's safe to say that you can quantize by 1 16 and you'll be okay and i'm just going to get rid of some of these notes here that i played poorly and then here is i want this to start at bar 13 so there's a couple things i can do just let me snap down my editor so what i like to do is i have three different toolbars we'll get into more of the tools in editing audio section but i have this scissors tool on my right click so when i right click on my mouse i can bring up these scissors and then i can quickly cut that and delete it we'll get into more of the tools in the editing section let's get back into the first section of more song organization as you build lots of tracks and it starts getting maybe disorganized because you're not trying to get um you're just trying to move quickly and you might want to pause when you want to take a bit of a break and do something a little bit easier and then you can go through your tracks and just edit the the names of the tracks maybe put some labels on the tracks like vocal track or yeah this is already nicely labeled but you can see if you had like if you kept adding adding audio tracks and i'm just going to press command d a bunch of times but let's say you had like multiple audio tracks and it can just get messy after a while then if this had a track here if there was actually something here do option c and make the guitar audio the right the same colors if you had multiple guitars guitar chorus say or you had and then you had a guitar bridge let's say these were on different tracks or you had a lead guitar section so we can right click and choose different icons for for your guitar sections maybe they're all the same guitar that's fine too same icon just drag the vocal down it's nice to now actually group these tracks together and how you do that you can do a shortcut which is shift command d or you can go to track and create a track stack here which is your shift command d all the shortcuts are available in the menus here and i do recommend popular things you do learning the shortcuts there's two options a folder stack and a summing stack for our purposes as a beginner we're just going to talk about folder stacks because that's it just kind of groups them together in a folder and really nothing more than that a summing stack is a bit more of an intermediate advanced technique where you you put them in a folder but then in this folder you can apply a different effects to that folder which apply to all the instruments we'll touch a little bit on that in the busing and output section of this video as an example we would just put these in a folder stack and then we would call them guitars and change this icon again guitars so now in this little drop down window we have our guitars and it's neatly organized these type of organization techniques are really helpful as you start to build out more of a song and not so don't get too caught up on these like i was saying at the beginning because they're not super important when you're just starting out with a few tracks let's go move on to the second perspective of this video where if you go into logic an empty logic session and you don't have any ideas how can you leverage logic to find ideas right away and this was a big thing that logic made a change with in their big update 10.5.1 this was a new logic update live loops in the step sequencer being a big one and these really help to brainstorm ideas and get ideas just out there and then pick and choose the ideas that can work for your vibe or your song just to clean up some things right now i'm going to highlight these all and i'm going to do backspace delete and i'm going to delete my guitars too right now just delete what i'm going to show you now is the live loops section and so these two icons are important here this blue icon is what we're looking at it's this session window here and i can click that off and it disappears right and now we're given this whole new view and then i can click it back on and it comes up on this half so you can see this grid is this section and then this session kind of horizontal bars is this section when i have one off i don't see it obviously and when i have them both on i see both typically it's just been this view you kind of record tracks horizontally and you get your ideas out this way the big update with this grid view these live loops is where i'm going to show you now is you can record pieces of audio in these little squares that all are based around your tempo okay so the question you might be asking is great how do we actually get ideas with if we're just starting out with a blank template right to clean these things up i'm going to delete these tracks so i'm doing command backspace these are regions on this track there are regions on this track do you want to delete them yes i do same thing with the grand and now i have blank slate okay so i'm going to start with an audio track create if you have an idea of a melody in your head just go ahead and press in this square and you can record audio so now we are recording audio in this square here because red you can see it's recording you see nothing's happening on this side in our kind of traditional view but we are actually just recording ideas in here and we can stop now we have that little snippet of audio in here and we can just go and record other pieces of audio in this section this is the idea of live loops where you have one track with different ideas in in these little squares then over time we can create multiple tracks with multiple different ideas and then we can pick and choose the ideas we like and then record them in to our traditional session view here if that sounded like gibberish to you and everything that's okay we're gonna do it from scratch with a simple example so let's just delete these and let's start with a base of something whether that's a piano progression that you record or a live loop i'm an actual apple loop sorry so i'm going to start with an app loop and i'm going to open up our apple loops section here i can press l i believe l on my keyboard sorry no what's the shortcut for apple loops i don't know so i'm going to press my question mark and oh it's oh so i'm going to turn off the information bar and just press o so this opens up the loop browser i can also just go and click here we don't have to be that lazy i'm going to just x this orange thing to get back to a clean filter and i'm going to look for a guitar loop and i'm going to just scroll through here and search you know you can click and give it gives you highlights i'm going to search for a guitar under guitars and i'm going to do genre indie and feel free to choose any of these any filter you want and then if you know okay i want to start a song that's a high tempo it's more happy so you might say well you might search for filter by tempo and then look for major keys because you want it to be more happy or you can also just filter all scales in the major key in a certain time signature even if you know that for our case i'm open to happy sad right now so i'm just going to do any and then i'm going to just choose one of these [Music] let's just go with this one so you can click and drag to here and let's actually just get into let's remove that view and just narrow in on this view so if we play this we hear that guitar loop now what we can do now is add a drum track let's say new software instrument drum track oops sorry new drummer track let's delete the software instrument by doing command backspace and inside this drummer track we can plus and then we can just add the same similar thing that we were doing in the other view we're going to like just use the quadratic here maybe turn up the hats and then i'm going to press play on my drum kit while that's happening and that's going to come in at the next bar so this is where tempo and key were really important tempo because we are locked in at uh 120 right now if that's too fast let's just say 110. when you play the square it doesn't come in right away this is because everything is locked into the beats and the tempo so i'm in a 4 4 110 tempo so that means i'll show you with the click on so this loop here when i play it [Music] you can hear the tempo right you can hear the click when i press the drums here you see it came in right on the it came in right on the first beat of the next bar you would say you can fill these squares up with different loop ideas drums synths bass guitars vocals you have little vocal ideas you want and then just be clicking these around to see what works with one another so let's add some more loops to give you an idea open up our loop browser again so let's add some more let's add a lead guitar let's just close down our editor by pressing e let's add the disco trans guitar let's add the disco trans lead guitar and i'm bringing them all in at 110. i can just add this for fun to get some ideas we'll also copy this bluebird or we can just press plus on these and i'm going to double click and just edit this one to be a bit more loud and complex i'm going to add another one this is i'm going to do super super simple and soft with claps and another one here loud and simple with a tambourine now i'm going to click some of these and see like this guitar here does it work best with these this one this one this one or this one let's find out [Music] that's cool all right let's try this one two three four one two two three four one two three four let's try this [Music] you can one the guitar down because it's too loud right now i want to hear the drums a bit better okay let's try this one and let's say you know what this drum is drum set is cool but i kind of like this loop let's say see how the loops changed but the drum set is just continuing their everything is disconnected in a way actually not in a way it's true they are all disconnected everything is is disconnected but it's all matched up around tempo things are still going to sound good because when you press play on a square nothing is going to come in at the wrong time it might it might come in at the wrong time creatively okay so that's how we can kind of get ideas right we can add let's add bass guitar maybe to get some ideas we'll open up our library by pressing y and let's add liverpool bass and i can actually arm this track this makes more space here by pressing y snap the library and o to snap the loop browser and i have my keyboard here so i have a bass guitar and let's just press record and record something in so let's we can also just get a vibe first by pressing these let's do let's do this one cool let's try this drum set and let's let's say i have an idea here let's just test it out [Music] that's all i wanted to do so now i've just created this little here with my my midi this baseline we can take a listen if we just want to listen to uh this one we can stop them all at the bottom right here pressing stop and now i can just listen into the green one the same idea as if we would record the midi in in this zone here we can still double click and open up an editor this is the same editor everything is is more or less the same and we can go in and quantize our midi we can add notes here so let's say i want to quantize this command a quantize by 1 16. let's see how it works with this drum kit [Music] and then let's see how it works with this guitar [Music] not great let's see how it works with this guitar not great either how about this one [Music] that's the one we recorded on so i think it sounds good so those are in different keys and so this is where it helps to have an idea of the key you want because i kind of played this in i think like a c sharp and this is totally in a different key so it's not sounding right but if you don't you still don't need to be in the same key you can be using this kind of flexibility of clicking and choosing different different groups and then seeing what feels good we found these so let's go with that and because it's cool what we're going to do is record all of that into this right window here and how we do that is by pressing r you can kind of see the horizontal bars here and then it says r so we're going to press r and then we're going to line up our cursor to where we want to start things and we'll just press record on our on our keyboard so or press r sorry so i'm going to press r and it's going to come in on the right side here [Music] so you can see it's being recorded these loops are being recorded here so let's say we like that as the intro and we like that as the verse so you can see we have our structure at the top now here's where it gets really cool if i kept going and then i click different little squares here it would actually start recording that in real time let's say maybe i didn't want the um that lead at the pre so what i can do is at this pre here is where i can just press stop on this square so let's do that again delete that bring our cursor back record these intro inverse squares and this is our guitar here in blue i don't want let's say i don't want that at the pre so i'm gonna look at her tempo i'm gonna press stop when it gets close three four one two three four stop okay cool so let's say the chorus i want to come back in with this one three okay that doesn't sound good but you get the idea let's say i bring back this one here [Music] let's say in the verse 2 i drop with the drums or i click on this drum kit now so you get the idea you can quickly record in actual tracks here in our traditional view with the ideas we have in our little live loops view here and when you're doing this um i like to do this kind of cutting things out dropping things back in when i have the right my ideas that i like so i've i might have multiple tracks here and i have multiple different squares of ideas and then i'll highlight the ideas i like in a certain color let's say you know we can we can choose different colors here by opening up option c you know we can change let's say all the colors in dark blue are my ideas i really like and then i would come into this view and record all the ideas i really like in their appropriate sections we can also copy and paste that baseline and open these up double click and just do some edits maybe maybe that's another baseline we have an idea and now we have this baseline which is different than this one and we can go in and edit these ones as well that's the power of live loops and then once you have the right ideas get them into your traditional view and then start working on the song structure again the next big thing that logic did with their new update 10.5.1 was add the step sequencer and this is really helpful and i use the step sequencer a lot for making drum beats but you can do it for any instrument any software instrument available it's a new interface to make melodies so maybe you're not comfortable on the midi keyboard to make melodies well this gives you an interface where you can do it easily with on your mouse on your computer or if you have an ipad or even iphone you can use that as a controller and kind of just click the pads on the step sequencer to make melodies that you like now to get the step sequencer up we can press e on our keyboard and it's now located here so we have smart tempo step sequencer score and our traditional piano roll editor that we're familiar with so the step sequencer here is this view and i can click into these boxes and i can make a melody that way and this is like more or less the same thing for example if i just close this down and delete this if i quickly make a region here i'm just going to go t and bring up my pencil tool just make a region there i'm going to point back to my pointer tool if i double click it's more or less the same way like if i like drew midi notes in this way it's just really a different view to do it you can't do both at the same time so you'll notice that because i've done these midi notes i can't go to my step sequencer and start doing step sequencer now you have to choose one or the other you can start with step sequencer and then move it to midi i do that a lot with drums so let me give you an example with using drums so we can make a beat let's delete this track actually we don't need to delete it we can just delete the region and we can change this track to a drummer track so let's open up an electronic drum kit let's do an 808 flex kit now i'll open up the step sequencer again by pressing e and going to step sequencer so now i have my full drum kit here you can see the kick the snares all the pieces in the drum kit that the edo flick flex gives you let's say on every [Music] maybe a kick and snare pattern like this maybe kick more like kick kick snare or kick this [Music] and we can also just work on the beat by muting our guitar [Music] maybe turning up the click so it's not distracting by going up here and then i could extend these steps so that these are our pattern steps here so the bigger you go the more room you have to make a pattern for example this 64 step just turned into two different views so i have this section here [Music] so maybe i can have another kick right here and then the second section see it's running through the first section here now it's coming into this section maybe if you just want to listen to this one section we'd have to go to our top here and cycle just this second section so this little loop here is this and then this bar here is this one so let's work on the second second section here [Music] see what that sounds like with the [Music] guitar [Music] okay like that let's do the second section [Music] uh don't really like that so much let's have it like this [Music] that's cool let's try that [Music] we can double up on snares here and there let's say every um second hit so we have snare hits here we want to add that here as well so that's what this sounds like and we can add claps even if we want it's as simple as going through the sounds and just clicking where you want them to happen and you can really level in with a step sequencer by choosing um different velocities different notes different how many times you want the notes to hit for example you can see here we are all in 1 16 notes so that means that each of these squares is on a 16th note so a good idea to visualize that is if i press my hi-hats on every square it's going to be in 16th notes so it's going to sound really really fast so let me give you an example [Music] that's cool right 16th notes are really provide lots of rhythm but if we don't want them that fast we can drop them down here to 1 8th notes and that's going to maybe provide just a different character to the song [Music] another good example with the hi-hats is the velocity velocities you can use these big down arrows or these big up arrows to move the entire velocity of the hi-hat so let's say i want to start at about 62 but i want the these hits to be a little louder just to create some dynamics so i can drag up these little individual boxes so that would solo that's what this would sound like maybe just the drum so it's just finding ways to create dynamic within the step sequencer and note repeat is another option what we can do is here you can see on each square it says one we can click into the square and go up or down on our mouse sorry so going up will mean in this little section here the height will play 16 times that's quite aggressive we don't want that but you might want maybe could be something like you know the typical kind of trap move would be kind of maybe four hits right here so with everything that sounds like this i'll have to unsolo the hi-hats [Music] let's say we wanted it to happen here too we go to this hi-hat and go to four [Music] and we can build out our beat like that using the step sequencer going through different elements choosing different velocities um doing some note repeats you can also go to this plus section here and add different options here so we have gate we have tie we have note octave so we can go down an octave the note i'm not actually sure yeah the note is i guess the pitch of the note the tie i don't know what the tie is to be honest i haven't used the tie i really am sticking with velocity and and note repeat now what we can do with the step sequencer here is change is break down all our midi notes into their uh or break down the step sequencer notes into its own midi notes and on midi channel so i'll right click and go to convert to midi region and now all of the nodes are in midi inside this one track and i can right click again and go to midi separate by no pitch and it's just split them down into their separate tracks using midi so i can again go into these midi tracks and change the elements here if i want to like we would change any midi note oh let's continue developing our song with this trump simple drum kit we made and this disco pop rhythm guitar i'm gonna rename that to guitar and gonna rename this to drums since i've kind of we've made this i'm gonna delete the bluebird and i'm gonna delete the liverpool base by doing command backspace let's continue on here and let's move on to section two where we talk about plugins and virtual instruments this is something i didn't really touch on the last tutorial so um i will briefly mention in this one and talk about everything that logic does give you and the quality of the instruments as well logic does really compete at the level of every other daw in terms of the quality of their virtual instruments i use a lot of the virtual instruments in all my projects actually and on a lot of pop hit records there have been logic stock sounds as well the new billy eilish record has a lot of stock logic synths in there as well let's go over some of those the plugins and virtual instruments are all found in the inspector window let's add a new software instrument track to take an example so new software instrument track let's just call this a synth synth and here is where all the action goes down this is our main plug-in window of where this like kind of blue pill is and whenever we click on the right we can go to our plugins and virtual instrument interface so here is where the virtual instruments lie in this blue pill and then in this blue pill under the audio effects this is where our plugins lie so we can go into audio effects and all of these are plugins plugins are different effects that we can add to our audio sounds so whether that's a delay effect distortion dynamics eq filter imaging metering modulation these are all plugins that are stock plugins that are available in logic so all these ones here are all for free in logic when you buy a plug-in it will be available under audio units and then here are your purchased plugins other than the apple packs that are also for free you don't have to go out and buy any type of plug-in to to make music they're all available for free in logic when you get more advanced and you get more picky with quality of the plug-in or you're looking at something very customized that logic can't give you that's when you have to go out and purchase a plug-in but at the beginning you can use all these free plugins that are available how you just get them on the chain here is by going to the plugin and pressing it now it's available here and we can just continue to add plugins now you would first usually have an eq plugin and because an eq plugin is so popular logic has made it really easy with this eq box here you can just press it and then it gives you an eq plugin and then this little window here is the shape of the line here in here that we make so if we cut out a lot of low end and we boost the mids or the highs that shape will be here so it's nice to visualize quickly what frequency shape your track has without opening up the plugin and that's why logic does that for you if you don't if you're not familiar with eq um feel free to reference another video i have on how to use eq i don't want to get too bogged down into all the specifics of the plugins or else this video would be days and days long the next plugin you would typically have could be a compressor so logic has dynamics compressor and then inside this compressor there's different customized options that you can choose and then maybe you would have some delay some echo delay or you could have some tape delay very similar type of features and then you can drag plugins up the chain so the chain continues to grow it does matter where your plugins are in the chain so typically we want our eq at the top because that's when we're filtering signals you might ask yourself where do i put reverb on this plugin window as well reverb is well under reverb you have different four different options that logic gives you what we're going to do and talk about in this video is adding reverb not on the plugin window it's okay to do that in some cases but typically you want to bust out reverb and so that has to do with busing and that's a different section in this video if you're looking for that specifically you can locate that in the description timestamp what about virtual instruments and what are virtual instruments versus virtual instruments are just like instead of having the actual hardware physical pieces in your living room or wherever your studios it's just having them on the computer instead so there are a lot of virtual instruments you can buy and just have them on your computer instead instead of having them in your house there are a lot of benefits and disadvantages of doing that the virtual instruments are all available in this blue pill window so i can go into um on the left hand button is to click the virtual instrument off in the middle is to open up that specific virtual instrument so this is a retro synth and then on the right side is to choose different instruments if you pay for something it will usually be down here where you have au instruments so the virtual instruments and the plugins they are mutually exclusive so if i click on this and go to my alchemy synth and open up this synth now my plugins wind plug-in window will remain the same nothing has changed here the virtual instrument has changed which will dramatically affect the sound of my track then i can go in here and choose any instrument or sound i want within the alchemy synth alchemy is an enormous synth it comes with more than 3000 presets instruments and then you can also just go in and design your own sound by using the synth customization tools that alchemy gives you as a beginner i would recommend just narrowing down on the category the subcategory the genre to choose a sound that is good for you you can continue on and go through all the other types of instruments that logic gives you so for example studio strings is a little more easy on the eyes in terms of interface very simple you can go through some a couple of the other ones that i would recommend the sculpture modeling synth is a is an instrument that is great i find for atmospheric sounds i use this on some tracks with the pads like if you want an ambient pad for example or a distant air pad i typically stick with the presets when it comes to synth instruments and might do some small customizations here and there but i'm really just going in to the presets choosing a preset that works for me and then i move on with my kind of creative flow the drum machine designer is another one that i use quite regularly as well and this opens up a full new interface here of different pads and here's where you can load in different pieces of a drum kit that logic gives you so when i opened up that drum machine designer it opened this window and it also opened the library for me so i can go into any electronic drum kit choose any drum kit and it will load in these samples for me so for example this 808 flex has all the elements of the drum of the drum set inside these pads and i can click on these pads here to get a preview and i can actually see the waveform i can fade this clap if i want to be a bit smaller let's say i really want to cut it off like there can be a bit faster and snappier so if i go to my kick you'll notice the instrument is the q sampler so just like i was showing you before here are the instruments but this kick is actually coming from the sampler and this is getting into the territory of using samples so i want to save that for the next section or a couple sections down you can just reference the timestamp in the video description to wrap up this section i would recommend just going in there and starting out with stock plug-ins that logic gives you and the stock instruments that logic gives you and just playing around with them don't worry that you have to go and buy all these paid things it's already overwhelming enough to use logic when you're beginning out and it can be just too overwhelming and there's just too much to think about if you have to start buying things unless you're looking for something really specific logic gives you everything you need out of the box for free let's move on to the next section section three where we're talking about using samples and importing audio from our apple loops browser but also importing audio from if we downloaded sample packs from the internet or your friend gave you a cool snare sound or a little vocal sound that you need to import into your project and use that and you want to edit it a bit so let's just delete this drum track by doing command backspace and we'll close down our library so we can import any type of audio file whatever into logic with our file browser and that's this icon here we can also open it up by pressing f on our keyboard and just like any finder mac finder window you have your files here and you would locate the file you want to import in and then you would import those files for example i have a bookmark where i like sounds that i reference frequently so i can go here let me just do maybe a snare and clap sound so here's a clap sound that i might use sometimes i would click and drag that in and it's created an audio track for me with the name of the wav file which is ph clap 909 i can rename this just clap and then i have that in and then if i want this sample to or this sample i can just continue clicking and dragging samples in like this that's how i approach it sometime especially when i know i like the sample sound already and it doesn't need much editing sometimes though samples do need editing you need to edit the tempo you need to edit the key or you want to do some take a certain section of the sample and use that so let's go over how you can do this let's say instead of a drum sound i want to use a female vocal ad-lib sound so let's just say i choose a any ad-lib here that i have let's just work with this might not sound great but let's just solo this to hear what it sounds like now let's try to put this which is in c minor in the key of our track f sharp minor how i find the key or how i need to know how many semitones i need to drop it is i open up musical typing with command k this just gives me a view of a keyboard i can also just look at my midi keyboard now this vocal ad lib is in c so that's where this k value is and my song is in f sharp which is the t value so i just have to count the space in between these notes which is one two three four five six so i have to drop down six semitones so how do i do that there is a short way and a fast way the short way and the short way to fast weight so there's a longer way in a short way the short way is just clicking it and doing option holding up down option then going down arrow and then you can see this negative one have popped up so we just drop that by one now two i'm just continuing to press down three four five six so i've dropped this down six semitones the longer way to do this is clicking here and then going to our region so this top left is really handy to do quick editing and we'll get more into that in the editing section but we can do a quick transpose edit so i'm going to click this box and then just drag down and then i can drag it down i can pitch it by 36 go up 36 but i just want to go down six so that's a bit of a longer way it's still not that long let's see what this sounds like now let's just do ad-lib and we'll just bring that up here let's just lower the volume so it doesn't sound too great does it let's see if it's six up is better so six up sounds better it's in key it does sound quite high still why it doesn't sound super great yet is because the timing of the ad-lib is not in time with our song so now we have to change this to be in the right time and how we can do that is there's a couple ways so let's do the short way right now which is holding down option again but hovering over the end of our track and we want this icon to show up with the kind of squigglies at the end and the bracket in between now when we click and drag this and let go this is going to time stretch our audio what usually works is if you just time if you just drag it to the nearest grid and let go usually this works because it will set it in time with the grid but depending on the performance of the track sometimes you might have to stretch it more sometimes you might have to stretch it less so let's see what this sounds like [Music] let's just hear it solo for a second and i'm just gonna um boost the signal up so i can see where she's singing that second note it kind of fits with the music it's a bit fast so i could stretch it another bar and see what that sounds like let me let go now he's we've made the sample slower [Music] that sounds better to me and what's happening is i can zoom in i'm going to zoom in now on this i'm just going to undo now i'm going to press command down on my and make these tracks fatter you see how the transient here on the female vocal sample starts here when it should start here so what i'm going to do is right click because i have my scissors on the right click i'm just going to cut this audio i'm going to click this delete it and then i'm going to bring my cursor to number five click this and then i'm going to press semicolon and semicolon is gonna snap that to number five i could also click and drag it's a personal choice and let's cut it at bar seven and loop it two bars to see what that sounds like [Music] it's pretty much in time because it's a vocal sample it can be flexible but it is still a little fast for me so i want to hear what that sounds like [Music] just a little bit less maybe like this what i'm now is just time stretching it by a smaller amount to seeing what fits in to your taste let's just try a little slower [Music] let's roll with that one for now so i'm going to cut it at bar 7 again and why am i doing that because if i don't cut it here and loop it it's going to start too late so i need to make sure the loop starts right at bar seven then i'm going to loop it here so now i have a little sample i've brought in i've pitched it to the right key of our song we're building and then i've time stretched it to fit in properly with the music and you would go about doing it the same way with drum samples you have whether those are hi-hat loops or other ad-lib sounds or piano sounds guitar sounds it's the exact same way if it's an audio track it works the same if for some reason that doesn't work you can always double click the file and go to file here and then go to functions and then time and pitch machine it's important that you do know in if in this case the original tempo of your sample so that's really important because you would put the original tempo in here and then you would put the tempo you want and that would help probably sort out any timing issue you you had with your file let's take this sample a step further and use the quick sampler tool that logic gives us so we can actually have this sample on our midi keyboard and we can play the sample on our midi keyboard with different pitch levels and use it actually as more of an instrument only than just one piece in the song so how it would do that is i'm going to zoom out a bit or yeah zoom out so i'm going to do command hold command down and press up on my keyboard and that just kind of zooms things out i'm going to delete these tracks we'll add a new software instrument track but we'll go to our quick sampler um here it is i'm going to open up the file browser again it will default go back to the original place it was what i'm going to do is drag a sample in [Music] let's not get too picky about what these are right now i'm going to drag this in and it's going to give me two options do you want to do original use the original tuning loudness or do you want to optimize for tuning and loudness i usually just go original on my midi keyboard i'm pressing notes and you can see it actually being triggered here and i'm not sure why i can't hear anything yeah it's because things are soloed so make sure that solid is off i have record so i'm just going to say vocal sample and i'm going to open up my q sampler again so if i press like c i'm just pressing the c note on my midi keyboard now now that happens if i just press it quickly if i hold it plays the whole sample if i do c sharp [Laughter] it's a pitch up if i go to d you can see i can play any type of pitch on my midi keyboard now using this exact sample so you can kind of use it as an instrument i can play chords too that's a c major chord let's say i just wanted to use a specific piece of the sample we would drag these and find that specific piece we like let's say it's this part and we can test it out by pressing the note say we like actually this here [Music] or this piece here [Music] maybe just that part so let's fade it in here like this maybe let's use that so we can access down we can record arm it and record over what we've done here i'm just going to play on my midi keyboard try to find something [Music] that wasn't recording was it why wasn't that working oh did i press record i don't think i [Music] did [Music] something that's an idea and you can see it's come in with midi notes so i can double click on that and open my piano roll editor let me just close this down and you can see that they're just midi notes so i can quantize these i can stretch them do anything as i would with midi midi at midi editing in the next section and quick reminder if this if i feel like i am going i'm skipping a lot of beginner things i'm quickly talking about midi and opening up things skipping some explanations on things so do feel i do recommend checking out that other video where i don't skip so many things or and i take more of my time explaining these things so i could quantize this by doing command a quantizing now you can see what that sounds like in context i'll just cycle it at the top and press spacebar [Music] what would sound cool if i put a lot of reverb on that so i can go to my plugin window and go down to reverb space designer reverb for example stereo and let's look at the preset so let's go to factory default here where our presets are we can look at all the presets large medium small let's do a big large reverb let's do a indoor space maybe a bright a a big gothic church an 8.7 second reverb and bump up the wetness so it sounds really really wet let's see what that sounds like now i'm not busting out this reverb so keep that in mind right now [Music] [Music] that's how we would use samples quickly loading them in and programming them quickly on our keyboard so we can use them as an instrument let's move on to section four this video now where we talk about editing audio and midi with using the available tools that logic gives you i do want to reference these tools at the top by default you would probably only see two tools available here i've added a third tool because i've made it my right click tool and you can do this as well if you open up settings command comma and do so under general under editing you can go to right mouse button is assignable to a tool you can make it open the tools menu you can make it open a shortcut menu it really isn't more of a workflow comfort thing i like to have my right click as the scissors i've just got used to that these same tools are available in the piano editor window so if i open up this vocal sample editor by double clicking or pressing e i'll have this similar three tools here as well so they're mutually exclusive right you can have like yeah the pencil here is different then i have a marquee right here get used to using these tools because th these are the tools that help you edit audio and edit midi let's briefly go over some of these tools um that are i find are really valuable when it comes to editing i always have the pointer tool by default because i'm clicking things and dragging them and just clicking on things for example if you have the text tool by default and you click on an audio and drag it you just can't do that and that's really frustrating so i have the pointer tool on and let me just close down the editor e whenever you want to bring up the toolbar menu just press t on your keyboard and that will bring up the tool menu wherever your mouse is located so if your mouse is located over here press t it's going to happen there it's over here you press t it's going to happen over here and this is really handy because you can just press t and just and then just scroll quickly down to what you want your default tool to be so t scissors t zoom t back to pointer and once you get the muscle memory of like the distance between those you can get there pretty quickly you can also do that by doing t and then it gives you the shortcuts here to go back so if you know for a fact you want you headed on let's say fade tool and you want to quickly get it back to the pointer tool you would press t t right because it says t here so t t if i do t p i have my pointer tool now if i do t g you get the idea this second tool is by default available with the option key so by holding option this tool just becomes quickly available so you can see you can imagine while you're editing audio you have one tool in your pointer click on your left click you have your option ready to go with like holding your thumb on your option key and then you have a right click ready to go the biggest thing i find is scissors because it's you it's important to cut things pointer because you're moving things around a lot fading is great when you're in that stage of crossfading audio tracks together or maybe you're going through your whole song and applying crossfades or fading think tracks in and out pencil tool i'm going kind of tp really quickly and then i'll click to make regions and then go back to tt so i can then double click in and now in this tool bar menu a little bit slower so this so i would do tp create a region and then go tt now i have this region ready to go so i quickly want to add another vocal sample right let's do this in context so let's say let's say we only we chop it here and we only have this section so i want something else here for my vocal sample i'm gonna go tp create a region i can extend that region double click in now i'm in this piano editor and i can use these tools available by default i have the pencil as my option so then i can just quickly press option and draw something in and then as my third tool i have it as the velocity tool because when i'm just putting notes in at like random like this or using the pencil tool it gives a default velocity of a hundred you can see all these notes have a velocity of a hundred so i would right click on my mouse and then just drag down sorry that's super annoying just let me take the preview off here but this paint tool now i won't be able to hear them when i click them so i can just click and drag down and that will change the velocity quickly so you can just be like click drag click drag click drag up click drag down and that helps create dynamic really quickly if you're using the pencil tool to draw notes in another thing when it comes to editing midi and audio is really use the available grid that you have using the grid and lining things up to the grid will help you copy and paste different tracks to different sections but it will also help you loop things for example this little section here i kind of have this piece here and then this little piece and this empty section with midi um you can just extend whatever section you have to the nearest grid wherever you'd like now it's more even here and then i could also highlight these two tracks and press command j and that will merge those tracks and make one together now i have this one track that i can click and drag or hold option with my mouse and click and drag and then make a copy of it like that and that makes it really easy to line things up we have two home bases really where we can edit audio and midi and it's there it's the same thing so let's do this audio track here um under track we have where we can see our audio track in more detail and then this is our home base to edit the audio as it is for midi inside audio it's just called track and inside midi it's called the piano roll these are your home bases the piano roll is your home-based edit midi and then in audio it's track and this is where we can apply flex time and actually change the pitch and we can dive deeper into the the timing of our audio i'm not going to get into flex time in this video i'm going to save that for another video the same things apply to the audio track as it did the midi so when we midi we had our tools here in the audio we have three more mutually exclusive tools where we can cut and delete audio drag audio pitch audio when i'm dealing with audio usually the most usually the things i'm doing the most is just cutting different pieces of audio for example if i just want to cut this section out i just did right click and scissors and then i would delete that and maybe i would change to like a fader tool and then i would fade that and i could fade this too or i could just cross fade them and match them line them up and do bring my fader tool back so t um fade and just do like a crossfade here and then you can edit the crossfade if you don't want to be to be that big now your other home base i'm just going to command z that because i did like kind of where it was the other home base basis for editing audio and midi would be your region inspector we briefly touched on this so inside the region is up at the top left here is where we can get a brief kind of synopsis of some of the data on our track so we could mute this little region and it's only applying to what you have highlighted it's not going to affect anything for example if i made a quick copy of this and let's say this was down here now i have two regions so this region will have its own data so i can mute this region and then this region i can come up here and then it will have its own data as well so mutes a popular thing sometimes if you have a section of the song where you maybe you're like you're not sure about that song yet and you don't want to completely delete it you can just do go up to region and mute it you can also do control m and that will mute that region you can quantize audio in here as well this is flex time and we'll get into that in another video you can transpose audio when we already did that with this region by clicking and dragging up and down to transpose the audio you can fine tune it if you find it's just a little bit out of pitch maybe too sharp or too flat and then this is flex time the gain is a thing i'm using a lot on uncertain regions say this for simplicity purposes let's do a cut here and this section this region here let's say it was actually just way too way too loud in our sample then we can just turn the gain down so because i've made a cut and now highlighted a new region here it's giving me a full new region kind of metadata here so i can click on gain and then drag down and you can see that signal there look at it just decrease all the way if i'm now i'm bumping it down negative 16.7 db i could also do the same thing if it was too quiet and i can bump that up this is really helpful when you're editing audio or sorry editing vocal sometimes and you just do want to do a bit of gain leveling you can quickly do some cuts and bump up the game by clicking in and dragging up and down that really is something i'm doing a lot on on things and then fade-ins fade-outs similar clicking and dragging on on regions so you can see right here when i click and drag up see that fader come in so let's if i can do it ten thousand you'll really see it kind of a huge fade in and then i can do a fade out at the end of the region ten thousand as well or wow that was uh yeah ten thousand so you never do like a huge fade like that but you get the idea you might come in here and just do a hundred on each end sometimes you barely see it here but if we zoom in and really get an image of how much you're fading another thing is this reverse a reverse can be really a great production tool to add some drama or some i guess dramatic tension to a chorus where you have a reverse of something leading into the course and this is popular like in dance music or like a sweep into a chorus i'll show you how to do that if we solo this track here let's just cut this and let's move it to a new track so let's create a new track here a duplicate of this track we go command d and then i'm just going to do i'm just going to drag make copy so hold option and hold my mouse and then drag it down and then let go of my mouse now i have a copy of that file so i have a separate region here where i can go over and now reverse this and you'll see it's just completely kind of flipped reverse the audio signal and so this is what this sounds like so this little part here it's a it's a nice lead in so i can cut it right there i like that so i'm just going to delete this it comes in a bar five and i'm gonna drag it to bar five so if i just cycle out a bit and now solo both these tracks in context it will sound like this [Music] and i can also have that maybe if i don't want to fade in so much i can cut it here i can um do a fade so i can go here fading you can do it multiple different ways i can just bring up the fade tool by doing t fade and then do do like a big fade into the kind of let's say this is the chorus or here [Music] or i can just go over here you see it created that 366 fade if i found that too big i can just drop that down to 100. i mean looking out now it doesn't sound too too gray does it so i'm just gonna mute those i don't uh really like the sound of them right now we'll come back to that while we kind of put things together for the song okay let's move on to section five now the video i want to touch on bussing and i want to touch on outputs as well why you might want to bus reverb for example for beginners and what you kind of need to keep in mind with using outputs so let's dive into bussing first let's take the idea of our vocal sample here because we've created a space designer reverb on the track already what we want to do is change this space design reverb into a bus reverb instead of a reverb on the track so let's create that first then we'll explain why we do that so let's just remove this plug-in creating buses happen to be under the sends or stereo output and now i'm going to open up my mixer and show you what i mean by this okay so command 2 to open up a mixer and this is all the tracks that are happening in our session right now we have a guitar we have drums we have this ad-lib tracks we have our vocal sample now this small verb church ambience small hall drums stereo out and master these tracks here that i've highlighted these are all bus outputs and you can notice that because they're given these yellow icons and these are aux tracks these are tracks that i've created that you can add different effects on and then you can like go to any of the your tracks in your session and you can send signal like a certain percentage of signal to one of these tracks so for example this is the track we're going to have our reverb on i'm just going to remove this paid plugin and add a designer space designer reverb i'll show you how to create this in a second but i just want to explain the kind of theory behind this so on this track we have our space designer and over on our vocal sample track which is here we're going to send a percentage of this vocal signal to this yellow aux track which is also a bus track so how we do that is now i'm going to go back to the inspector window and show you how to do that but it's nice to visualize what's going on here and then these tracks you can see are going to this track the stereo out track now let's go back to our inspector window on the vocal sample and i'll show you first of all how we can create a bus from scratch on the inspector window we would go to our sends and we would go to bus and inside bus we have all these empty buses bus one bus two bus three plus six and bus seven are taken and that's what was happening on our mixer window you see how we have one two three four five now let me go to my mixer window i have one two three four five so if i want to create a new bus i can go sends bus bus five because it's empty there's no writing here and now i just created this track here and it says aux 6 at the bottom so let's call this reverb okay and now let's go back to our mix our mixer window option two sorry command two now we can see that we've created this reverb track has nothing on it yet okay that's all i want to show you with the mixer window now let's do everything in the inspector on our aux track our reverb tracker we've created bus five we can add the space designer so let's add the space designer and here we would choose the reaver we like let's just use a preset let's do the same preset we had because it was cool it was the big gothic church when i play my track here nothing's going to happen it's going to be there's going to be no reverb added yet because i haven't sent anything to the track i haven't put any people on the bus yet i got to put people on the bus so i can drive to the reverb track and drop the kids off at the reverb track you can kind of think of it like that so i have to go to this bus here that says bus 5 on the vocal sample and then click and drag up and now once the circle is full that means i've put all the signal plus more to say hey go to the reverb track that's going to have way too much reverb i might tail that back to maybe negative 12.6 the idea though is you choose how much you want based on how it fits with your song and if you don't like the reverb you've chosen go into this reverb that you originally clicked and you can also edit the reverb but the idea here of using buses and why we want to use buses is because it helps us organize our session it also helps us save on cpu power because i don't want to add the same plugins on every single track sometimes you're using plugins that you want on all tracks these are reverbs that i've already added i have one in my session always as a small reverb and then i have one that always has a big reverb so because i know bus one is small reverb always in every session and bus two is always a big reaver and let's say i'm recording a vocal or i'm recording a guitar this is what will save you time let's say you have this guitar loop at the top and you want to add a big reverb to it you know that in bus two if i go to my guitar track and go to this little thing go bus two i know that i can add big a big reverb here and that just saves time but it also saves your computer power let's move on to section seven now where we talk about common mistakes that amateurs make when you're just starting out with logic and i find myself i'm still making tons of mistake i'm by by no means a an expert in this i'm learning just like you're learning trying to get better at logic and trying to get better at music music production songwriting but there are some things if you're just starting out that you can avoid that i hope to clear up in this section so the first thing would be reverb and it's a segue to what we were talking about with adding buses it's just adding too much reverb the first time you hear reverb it sounds really cool when you add reverb to tracks but one thing reverb can do is really also make your track sound really messy so try to use tasteful amount of reverbs a great way to know how much reverb you should use on a track is listen to reference tracks listen to the favorite song or a vibe of the song you're trying to create and listen to what they're doing um try to recreate the same reverbs that that they're creating and this will be difficult at first because it's hard to train your ear to listen for a reverb but try your best and over time your ear will improve the second mistake that i found myself running into a lot at the beginning of when i started music production was not choosing your tempo or key fast enough while you're in that creative phase don't yeah like i was saying they don't create those hurdles for you at the beginning but i did find when you just choose something and move on from that so you're not always like falling back on not knowing anything so choose a tempo pretty quickly try to get a key going lock those things into logic and then just pile ideas down don't get too overwhelmed with how good the ideas are try to remove yourself from those exhaustive kind of loops that you find yourself in of creating something that you don't complete so if you find yourself in that loop just get out of it and then do something different a lot of the songs that i've made in logic have come out of completely different ideas i've scrapped something brought in a new loop started a new um drum like drum pattern maybe played something differently on the keys it's constantly not getting hung up with what you're doing but just trying to keep moving another mistake i was not doing at the beginning would i didn't leverage the tools that logic was giving me and i just found workarounds for example like i was just using my pointer tool for everything not taking the time to invest like an afternoon to learn the tools that logic gives you that will make your sessions more productive because it is a pain when you're creating something and that the tool is a hurdle for you as soon as you can use the tool to help you create that's when really things start getting fun so i would invest an afternoon a day to learn those boring things about the tools about logic like the tools how to cut audio and transpose and shift audio that's going to really help you be creative but they're it's really hard to do in the moment while you're creating and hey you're doing it right now if you've made it this far in the video and you're watching me talk about it so congratulations let's move on to the next section right now section 7 where i just want to talk about some cool effects or plugins that are available stock for free in logic that you can use in your mixes so the first one is pitch and we can find different pitch dynamics to use on anything in audio or midi inside logic under our plugin section so let's use the let's let's bring in an audio loop for example just so we can pitch audio and we'll play with that with our guitar so let's go to this orange button here and go to let's say instrument vocals um genre doesn't matter too much [Music] let's just try this i'm not sure if this is going to work and i'll show you what i mean by pitch so inside our plugins we can go to plugins pitch so we have pitch correction pitch shifter and vocal transformer so pitch correction is auto tune and because this is a audio and apple audio loop it's perfectly in tune but we how you would use this let's say this is your voice here you have to choose a scale so let's say you're singing in the major scale okay let's say you're doing d sharp major then auto tune is now on this is pretty much the only button you'll have to or slider you'll have to use the faster response time the more robotic it will sound so it's actually should work on this it's trying to actually pitch a piece of audio that's already in tune so it's not working really well the idea is if you want to sound like your voice has more auto-tune then just create a faster response the next pitch thing is pitch shifter and so this just completely shifts the pitch of your voice if i want to pitch that down 12 semitones to make it sound really low see what that sounds like so that did a low pitch and you can still hear those kind of aspects of the original vocal in there and that's because the mix is at 25 percent so if i did the mix to 100 that means i want the whole signal to be pitched down and i only want to hear the pitch [Music] so it's almost too low right so maybe i might want to not have that good complete mix and you can also do it do it like let's say this is your lead vocal let's duplicate this track command d and bring this track down let's say up here on our lead vocal we don't have any pitch crotch correction at all so no plug-in but on the second track here we want it to be completely pitched with 100 mix and then we can lower the fader so we're kind of saying like hey on our lead vocal we just want a normal fresh we want to have it like we would be actually seeing with our real voice but then we want to track behind it that's totally pitched and we'll just lower the volume so it sits below that so let's hear what this sounds like let's now look at a different pitch which is the vocal transformer and this is just kind of makes your i'm just going to turn the pitch shifter off this makes your vocal like a robot so let's listen to this [Music] increase the volume [Music] so those are the big pitch tools that i think are cool effects that you can find room for your productions or to make things jump out in your songs a bit the next big one is automation and this is a huge topic but i wanted to briefly mention this because i didn't mention in that previous logic tutorial that can be a good a great thing to add for beginners and intermediates to your tracks to create dynamic automation means you can automate something over time so for example if we want to do hands-off let's say between bar five and bar nine we want the guitar to slowly get louder or we want the guitar over time to slowly have more low end or high end so that would be an eq automation so we can automate anything in logic pretty much anything all i want to touch on right now is eq automation and volume automation to open up our automation interface we're going to press a on our keyboard and this will make it look kind of like this grayed out this is where we um program our automation in and it sounds like oh programming do you have the code or anything and no you don't it's not super hard so what we do is how to choose the automation is by are these drop down boxes here on every track and by default they all save volume because volume is the mo is the most popular automation you can do in order to actually start the automation we have to click into the track that we want the automation on so for example our guitar so click in and now it's created this line for me if i drag this line up and down it's moving my volume here right this fader and this fader below i want to just start down here and i'm just going to click some dots i'm going to click the lines and this is this creates dots you can also click the dots again and press backspace to delete them but basically it's kind of just like using paint like you click the dot in and then you drag the dot to where you want it to go then let's say i don't want it such a big slope put another dot in and just draw a bit of a curve you can also show you know what this tool is up here is a curve tool so the automation curve tool you see before what the heck is that well that's actually using it i'll put it on my command tool so now i have to hold command and now i can see curve this line i can do crazy s curves i can do general curve so one thing i could do is just click sorry click these dots delete them where and when go back to where i was with this one press command and just do like a a huge slope maybe i wanted to start here too i don't want an s so maybe like maybe like that so let's hear what that sounds like if i just solo the guitar so the second piece of automation i wanted to show you is an eq automation now we have to go and find where eq is in this drop down and so it's i can click on this drop down and under automation we have all these available automations on every track you'll have smart controls volume and main and then you'll have a list of numbers here so these numbers correspond to whatever plugins you have on the track so i have one compressor two channel eq and that's because over here i have compressor and a channel eq so for example on my audio 4 track here i have a compressor a channel eq and a pitch shifter so if i go to drop down i have channel compressor channel eq and a pitch shifter see i can even automate for example the the pitch shifter so let's go back to our guitar and we'll go to our channel eq and we'll do something called a high cut frequency and you'll you've probably heard this type of automation before i'll just click in and then i'll find a frequency and i'll show you what this is like in action i'm going to click our eq box here this little thing this is our eq window now i'm going to turn on the high cut as i drag this down it covers all the signal as you drag it up it it makes room for more signal so what i want to do is create a dynamic where the guitar is kind of quiet and then really becomes louder it's almost like a volume automation but not i'm just going to go back to my volume see i've used volume automation and channel high eq automation so i'm going to go back to my volume and i'm just going to delete this automation for now so right click so we can really focus in delete visible automation i just really want to focus in on the sound of this high cut so here's what this sounds like in in context and watch the signals coming in here so it actually didn't get louder it was um it technically did get louder but the volume didn't change is just because i was hiding those all these signals at this area and then over time i was bringing that fader up so we could also just press command because we have our fader tool here and just create more of a kind of a slow curve there so that would be an eq automation let's move on to the next section of the video and just put a bit of the things that we've learned in this tutorial so far into practice by making a bit of a song so how i want to get out of this automation is i can always just press a and it comes back to this view now i'm just going to zoom out by holding option and pressing up on my keyboard and then i'm going to hold option and press the left arrow that just gives me a better view of like what i'm working with right now if i'm going to put in things into practice of what we learned so far let's say i want this disco translate as the main piece of my my song right let's say i'm not super feeling creative today and i'm just going to loop that for the full song i'm going to have that song stop at around this bar and then i'm going to have my beat come in let's say the chorus so i'm actually going to drag this to the chorus and then i can drop this down and i'm going to move the tracks up just so you can see them a bit better of the tracks i used at least oops and i'm going to loop them highlight them all and loop them and then i'm going to make copies of them to the second chorus and third chorus so i'm going to drag click and drag holding option with my mouse sorry do that again holding option with the mouse click and drag and then i'm making copies so now i have three courses and let's say i want these vocal samples also in the courses i'm going to create sections like this so let's just take a listen out and we'll do quit a quick sorry leveling mix of of things so you can see that guitar is still underwater because we have that automation on [Music] so that doesn't sound that doesn't sound good these um these vocal samples i i don't really like those i'm just going to drag them to the bottom right now this one however sounds pretty cool here i can pan that off a bit if maybe i can have that actually this little part kind of sounds like a transition sample into something new so i might have that come in right here and it sounds like the drums i feel like it's just too long of an intro so what i might do is drop down i might just remove this pre entirely and i might highlight all these oops click that shift and click all these and just drag them over now i'll snap that up and on this cursor i kind of want my drums to come in i'm going to drag in these drums over too so let's see where our guitar is coming in with the automation probably pressing a yes it's coming right in our chorus here okay so let's see what that sounds like coming in now the guitar is sounds really fierce kind of loud and upfront and that's because earlier we added all this reverb to it so i'm going to take that off now and i might keep a bit of that bus 2 which is the big big reverb [Music] so that sounds already a lot better and increase the drums because the guitar is so high we would want to add a bass guitar so we could go to track new software instrument track and let's add a let's find maybe using the sculpture synth let's find a bass guitar model bass so let's just go through some of the presets here and click our midi keyboard and then we can click our left arrow so that we can go to the next one here if we don't like that one don't like that one at all [Music] see what else we have a sub bass let's just use this sub bass right now you can never go wrong with the sub bass i'm just going to record starting at the cursor here and just add a little bass line with my midi keyboard i don't really like that but i'm going to edit it now in my midi i'm going to double click on this i played a wrong note at the beginning so i'm going to click that and delete it and i'm going to drag this note over because i wanted to play that first you can solo it just to hear what things sound like so it's a bit off time i can quantize that [Music] so i will quantize by doing command a 1 16 should be fine let's listen to it with the drums [Music] i don't like these the high notes that pop out the velocity is a little high so i can because i have the velocity tool and when i right click i can right click and then bring that down and what might be cool is to add actually add an arpeggiator with this base so what we can do is go to our midi effects now um we didn't really go over this but why not right now i'll click on midi effects and go to an arpeggiator and as soon as i play my bass guitar now if i just solo this it's gonna sound [Music] you know like like an arpeggiator this is happening at 1 16 so i might want to do 1 8 and this is what 1 8 sounds like so that's a bit sounds a bit better to me let's hear that with the drums [Music] maybe that would sound better if it was lower i need to preview again so i'm going to go up here so i see what this sounds like [Music] that sounds cooler to me and i can loop it here and i can also make copies here like this so with guitar [Music] that's how we would go about creating a song and just not worrying about what like the sounds are or how good it sounds like don't let your kind of lizard brain tell you how bad it is at the beginning even though yeah okay this isn't the best song right now but it's important just to keep moving so maybe with this logic session you can use this as a foundation to take the next step on something you're working on or try to bring in a sample that you're using or bring in some apple loops and make it work with this drum bass and guitar foundation that we've built here so please let me know what you think of this video in a comment i'd be happy to help and i'm really excited to do more logic pro tutorials in 2021 feel free to subscribe and have a listen to some of my own music i'm curious to know what you think about it you can let me know in a comment as well and i hope to see you in the next video

Channel: Charles Cleyn

Views: 125,393

Keywords: logic pro x tutorial, logic pro x tutorial beginner, logic pro x tutorial 2021, logic pro x tutorial recording, logic pro x tutorial beat, how to learn logic pro x, beginner tutorial on logic pro x, complete course on logic pro x, full beginner tutorial for logic pro x, learning logic pro x for beginners, just starting out with logic pro, making music with logic pro x, getting set up with logic pro x, free tutorial on logic pro x, free course on logic pro x, how to use logic pro

Id: nnGsYw6Zjrk

Length: 110min 31sec (6631 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 13 2021