Logic Tips - Using Logic's Drummer tool

[Music] I'm Johnny Buchanan and in this video we're going to be looking at logics drummer instrument to find out how we can add really intuitive drum performances to a track so in this project I've got a basic 8 bar piano figure and it sounds like this [Music] now there are a number of ways that we can develop an idea like this but what I want to do is to bring in some drums but it would be really nice to have the feel of a real drummer applied to this track as it grows and the way that logic allows me to do that is to use the dedicated drummer instrument here's how it works if I click on the plus button I have a chance to select a dedicated drummer track so not a software instrument track or an audio track but a drummer track and here I can choose even from a series of genres musically so do I want a rock drummer or alternative or songwriter or from a range of electronic options as well I'm going to sleep with an alternative for now and I can change that later if I want to I'm going to select create and what logic does automatically is to create a region for me but as you can see it's not really a region that looks like a regular MIDI region what we're looking at here is a kind of an approximation of a drum part with information down at the bottom representing the bass drum and the snare drum pattern and information towards the top representing high hats and cymbals now the way that these notes are actually controlled and the way that I can change the pattern that I'm listening to is controlled down here at the bottom as you can see we have this matrix which from left to right runs from a simple pattern to a more complicated one and from bottom to top runs from quiet soft playing styles through to louder ones so to accompany this piano part that I've put together let's start with a simple pattern that's played moderately loudly and as I move this ball across to the left-hand side you can see that this pattern has changed let's listen to it [Music] so you can begin to hear the pattern that's being played let's go for something more complicated and even louder we'll end up with more hits and more variation in the performance too [Music] so we've got a much more involved drum pattern there I can increase the number of fills that I'm going to hear and again the waveform will display to show the extra fills now there's one at the end of bar two as well as a more involved one at the end of bar four and at the end of bar eight as well or I can back those right down so that we end up with our core pattern but with less variation I can bring in a swing value so the whole pattern is a bit more swung as well if I want to let's hear something with lots of fills and a slightly more swung feel [Music] I can go even further as well as relying on this matrix to provide me with an overall pattern I've got some control over the patterns that the kick and snare can play so I can vary these as well as you can see the waveform is updating every time I do that to become more involved and more complicated and similarly I can do the same thing with the hi-hat part so again if I want a different feel I can change these for the different sections of the kit [Music] and as you can see I can update them as I'm listening back until I find a pattern that I like so I'm going to go for something a bit less involved from a high hats point of view and I'm also going to go back to roughly where we were for the kick and the snare I might even choose to add some percussion I'm going to put in a little tambourine part here as well by selecting the tambourine icon and that's going to be added now to the performance as well and also I'm going to just turn the swing down a little bit back to a straighter pan [Music] and that feels about right to me so what we've now got is a drum part that's sort of interactively a something that we can control to work alongside the piano but what if what I want to do now is to have the sort of control that I would expect to have if I was programming drums from scratch I want to be able to change these individual notes individually so I can take out ones that I don't like or add more in spaces where I feel another fill would work well well I can actually convert this individual region to become a MIDI region in its own right so if I come to convert I can convert this to a MIDI region and the way that I've done that is by pressing control whilst clicking on that region and then from the pop-up menu that's arrived I'm selecting convert and then this option here and the moment I do that this part becomes a regular MIDI region every single one of these hits now is available to me so I can select it I can turn up velocity I can erase it I can add new parts if I want to as well so if we now listen through this pattern again we'll be able to see those drum hits go down the individual colors here represent different velocities so the brighter the color the louder the note is so you can see that the tambourine is broadly very loud whereas some of the snare hits these purple and blues are quieter let's have a listen [Music] okay so if I suddenly decided for example at the end that in this very last bar this fill is too involved I could take some of these snares and simply select them and backspace to delete them so I'm just going to take out most of that fill right there at the end and then right at the very end of the piece will hear a much less busy pattern I can use the ruler here to scroll back to about bar seven so we don't listen to the whole sequence we can just hear the last two bars [Music] if I decide that I've got rid of too much information there I can use command + Z to undo those steps to get back to where I started so in that video we've created a drummer track we've used the unique interface for that instrument to create an overall feel that we like and then what we've done is to convert that drum part to a MIDI region and what that's done is to allow us to have per note control over the drums that we've created you

Channel: MusicTech

Views: 6,209

Rating: 4.9802957 out of 5

Keywords: logic pro x, logic x, virtual drummer, logic pro x beginner tutorial, music production, audio production, logic x pro beat making, music production tutorials, logic drummer, logic drummer tutorial, logic drummer tips, Music Proiduction tutorial, learning logic pro x, logic pro x tips, logic masterclass, free logic course, jono buchanan

Id: DHT7vAgA7yQ

Length: 8min 3sec (483 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 08 2019