Logic Pro X Tutorial | ULTIMATE Beginner Basics

what's up guys Tana Brock here with another home studio tutorial today we're gonna dive into one of my favorite pieces of software and that is Logic Pro and I think logic is hands-down the best off for people who are new to the world of recording and production and there are a lot of beginners tutorials out there but they all seem to be at least twenty minutes long and go into a lot of detail and while that can be useful sometimes I really think the best way to learn this stuff is to just get in there and get your hands dirty so I'm gonna keep this as brief as possible and show you seven simple steps to get started all righty welcome back so when you first open up logic you're gonna see this dialog box step number one create an empty project logic gives you all these other options like project templates and demo projects but I think the best way to learn is to just start with an empty slate so choose an empty project and then select choose now you'll see this step number two is create some tracks so there are really two types of tracks that we need to worry about a software instrument track and an audio track to put things simply a software instrument track is basically a track that allows you to play any sort of sounds that are built into your computer logic comes with a huge library of sounds like piano synthesizers drums all sorts of stuff you can choose from so if you have a MIDI keyboard you can trigger the sounds with that or you can even trigger them with your computer keyboard so let's start off by creating a software instrument track and choosing empty channel strip now let's also create an audio track so to do that click this plus right here and then click this little picture of a microphone now an audio track is basically what we would use to record any sort of acoustic sound source so if you have a microphone plugged into your audio interface and you want to record your voice or an acoustic guitar or if you have an electric instrument like an electric guitar plugged directly into your interface we're going to choose one of these tracks so let's click this choose input one for now and click create so now we've got two tracks right here great step number three is to configure our preferences so let's go up here to Logic Pro X preferences and first thing let's go to advanced tools click show advanced tools and then enable all this allows us to get the most out of Logic Pro if we don't enable our advanced tools we're basically looking at GarageBand so make sure you do that next go to your audio preferences and choose your audio interface as your output device and your input device let's keep the buffer size at 128 for now processing threads automatic process buffer range large multi-threading I like to keep it at playback tracks summing high precision and rewire behavior playback mode this is a way that I found to optimize logics performance so it uses less CPU power click apply changes and close out of preferences alright so first three steps easy-peasy done step number four is probably the most time consuming and most important step and that is to just familiarize yourself with the basic workspace and tools you can do a lot of exploring on your own but I'll just give a brief explanation to get you started so what you're looking at in front of you is your main logic workspace this big grey area right here is your timeline this is where you'll play through your project through time and bars and beats this light gray column right here is where you'll see your tracks as you can see the two tracks we created are right there this left column over here is our library you can hide it and show it by clicking this button up here for audio tracks this is basically a library of presets so if you choose one of these presets logic will automatically load this audio track with effects that it thinks will sound good for that particular source for software instruments this is your library of sounds so we can pick what kind of sound we want to use like bass drum kit piano synthesizers all sorts of stuff and we can start playing that instrument with our keyboard another important tool you'll need to know about is this guy up here this little I is our inspector so that brings up our information about our channel strips our tracks and our regions if all that sounds like mumbo-jumbo to you that's all right don't worry about it basically a channel strip is where we control the volume panning input output and effects for that particular track so the left side right here will always show the channel strip for the current track selected as you can see when I switch between tracks it switches the right side here will always show our stereo output basically all our tracks that we have here as long as they say stereo output right here are being fed into this one so this is basically our single track that is our output of everything else so moving on we have this big section in the center this is our transport section so we got rewind fast-forward stop play record and cycle rewind and fast-forward can be controlled with the comma and period ski stop can be returned and you'll notice if I'm not at the beginning of the section the stop button becomes a go back to the beginning so that's really useful click return to do that play is the spacebar record is our cycle is see basically what cycle is is it allows us to select a portion of the timeline and loop it or cycle it so if you have this on and you play it'll loop this section you can change the length of the section by pulling in the end like this and you can move it around just by clicking and dragging this dark blue window in the middle shows us all the property we need to know about our project what I like to do is click this little arrow on the right-hand side and go to custom this brings up a lot more information so the first section of this shows the position of our playhead that's this vertical line here that we can drag around that shows us where we are in a project the top shows us seconds in minutes and the bottom shows us bars and beats the next section shows us the length and position of our cycle bar so if we enable the cycle you'll see it shows us it starts at bar 1 beat 1 and ends at bar 3 beat 1 if we move it it'll correspond the next section shows us our tempo right now that's at 120 next we have our time signature and next we have our midi activity meters if we have a MIDI keyboard plugged in and I play a note you'll see that shows up here lastly we have our CPU meters this will show us how much CPU load we have so if you have a huge session with lots of tracks and lots of regions and lots of effects you'll see a lot of activity up there next up we got our metronome this is super important because chances are when you're recording you're gonna want to record to a metronome so you stay in time this is our counting button which enables a 1 bar counting before you start recording next we got our metronome controls so the metronome should automatically be on click while recording I think that's the best setting to keep it on and I always pretty much keep it on that setting alright moving over to the right hand corner we got a few more tabs we can open up and that brings me to step 5 and that is to mess around with loops if we click this little button right here it'll bring up our loop library now I really think this is a great way to get to know logic and just start cutting things up and messing with audio if you don't want to do this that's fine record your own stuff and I'll show you that in a second but let's start with some loops so we can just have some content to work with right off the bat we can click a loop to preview it nice that sounds pretty groovy so let's drag that in and if we drag it below the tracks we created it'll create its own new track and you can see that the session tempo has automatically been changed to 100 BPM instead of 120 and that's because as you can see here that the original tempo of this loop is 100 so let's play our session so we can hear what we got [Music] great but not that cool yet alright so I want to zoom in on this so I can see it a bit closer there are numerous ways to do that but my favorite is to hold option and just scroll left and right that way you can easily zoom in and out vertically and horizontally now this loop is only two bars and I want to loop it so it continues on and on the way to do that is really simple just hover your mouse over the right hand corner of the region and drag forward that'll loop it you can zoom out to see your loops from further away sweet so you can see that the first iteration of the region is white and the following loops are grayed out let's bring in another instrument to go with these drums nice that sounds pretty groovy as well so let's bring that in again pull it in right below the tracks you already have and it'll create its own new track now you can see this is a software instrument loop as opposed to our drums which is an audio loop you can see the software instrument it's using right here it's called analog swirl so let's play these drums and the synth together [Music] sweet sounds super 80s I love it all right so let's say I don't want this fill every two bars I only want two every four bars what we're gonna do is chop this audio region in half and loop the first half and then put the second half just every four bars so put your playhead at bar two right in the middle of the region and click command T to split the region in half and we're gonna delete what we had previously looped so let's drag the second half to bar four and then let's hover over the upper right hand corner of our first half and loop it now we've got four bars of drums with the fill in the fourth bar let's loop our synth to match that length so you can really go to town with these loops and build up layers and layers and layers with apples loops they have a lot of great content but at a certain point you're going to want to record your own original content so that brings us to step number six and that is record using a software instrument track so let's go to this software instrument track we created and let's pick a preset we want to use so I think a nice lead synthesizer would go well with what we already have here so let's go to synthesizer over here on the library tab go to lead and let's explore some of these to see what we like [Music] alright I think I like this eighties sinc lead let's stick with that and I'm just gonna record a simple lead line over this so let's press R to record will here a four bar account in and then we're in awesome that wasn't the most genius of synth lines but it'll do for now let's double click this region to open up a detailed editor so that brings up this where we can see a more detailed view of the region we just recorded you can hide and show up by clicking these scissors up here the first thing we want to do is quantize this if you don't know what that is that basically means making all these notes we played perfectly in time on the grid in most contemporary popular and electronic music styles you're gonna want to quantize most things so let's click a note command a to select all and over here we have our time quantization tools most of the time you'll want to keep it on 16th note but there are a lot of options of what you want your time quantization base to be so let's click this cue right here and boom you can see it adjusts everything to the grid now let's play through our session to hear what it sounds like [Music] all right so we got our synth lead our drumbeat and our kind of synth bass loop we got going on that brings us to step seven which is record using an audio track now let's go to this audio track we created before and I got an electric guitar plugged into input one on my interface so I'm gonna go ahead and use that now before we record let's go to our preferences real quick to configure our input monitoring go to preferences audio and then go to the general tab and we want to make sure we check this button input monitoring only for the focus track close out of preferences and grab your instrument or your microphone that you're gonna record with all right so I got my guitar plugged into input one you can make sure input one is selected in your track by going here input and choosing input one now in order to record an audio track you got a record enable the track that just means clicking the R right here in the track header in order to hear what you're recording you have to enable input monitoring that just means clicking the eye right here next to the R now if I play my guitar we should be able to hear it so another useful thing to know when recording an instrument is that logic has a built-in tuner you can go right up here to the right of the blue information window and click this little tuning button that'll bring up the tuner and if I play my guitar I can tune it alright another thing I think it's really important to do before recording audio is make sure your project doesn't start at bar one so right now our project does so I'm gonna select all our regions by just dragging up from the corner and selecting all of them and move it over to bar two you can see logic automatically snaps to the bar and that's because our snap mode is on smart for right now just keep it on smart it'll automatically snap to places you want it to this will make sure that the beginning of our audio track that we record is not cut off so I'm gonna put my playhead just before two and press record here that way we'll get our one bar count in before one one extra bar between one and two and then we can start playing right at two without the beginning being cut off alright so now that we got everything set up in logic let's make sure that the input gain on our audio interface is set so our signal is not clipping basically when we play our part we want the signal to be well below zero and all green if it's hitting the red that means it's clipping looks good to me so we're ready to record I'm gonna press R to record then I'll get a 2 bar count in and I'll start playing [Music] all right that sounds pretty good to me so let's go ahead and name this track so we know what it is I'm gonna call it rhythm guitar so we got our four instruments we got our Cynthia - rhythm guitar drums and our synth bass kind of thing now we probably want this whole groove to go on for a lot longer so we want to loop the whole thing now as you probably noticed when I recorded the MIDI track logic automatically trimmed this to the perfect length but with the audio track that didn't happen it just stops where I press the spacebar so we want to trim it so it loops correctly so let's put our playhead right at bar to press command T to trim delete the beginning put our playhead right at bar six command T and delete the end now we got everything the same length but there's one more thing we got to do before we loop this whole groove remember we made these drums by combining a loop Plus this fourth bar so we got to combine them let's select both regions by clicking and dragging and then press command J to combine them and create a new audio file now if we zoom out a bit and if we select all the regions by clicking and dragging from the lower corner we can loop all them at once hover over a right hand corner to find our loop symbol and then click and drag forward nice now we have two loops of this awesome groove so there's one big error we're making that we need to fix before I wrap up this video if you notice when I play the project down here in our stereo output it's clipping its 2.2 DB above zero which is really bad we got to fix that so let's open up our mixer by pressing command two and then let's select all four instruments and if I click and drag one of these volume faders it'll bring them all down at once so I'm gonna click and drag down about 5 dB now if I play the project we're not clipping anymore we're sitting at about negative 3 DB which is a pretty good place for us to be sitting right now there's a long conversation we can have about that but that's for another video all right guys those were my seven tips to get started in logic I hope that was useful I hope you can jump into logic now and start making awesome music leave a comment below if you have any questions or suggestions about what I should cover next I'm gonna follow this up with a lot more logic tutorials on recording producing editing mixing and everything in between so subscribe to the channel for updates stay safe and happy music making you

Channel: Tano Brock

Views: 62,423

Rating: 4.9834709 out of 5

Keywords: logic pro x, music production, tutorial, beginner, intro, intro to logic pro x, intro to music production, 7 simple steps, simple tutorial, home studio, Logic Pro x beginner tutorial, Logic Pro x tutorial, intro to Logic Pro x, Logic Pro x intro, Intro to Logic Pro, Intro to Logic Pro X, Mixing in Logic Pro X, how to use Logic Pro, Logic Pro how to, Logic Pro X DAW

Id: 4M5nMkWT3d4

Length: 15min 53sec (953 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 28 2020