Score Editor in Logic Pro X (Everything You Need to Know)

in this video you'll learn everything you need to know about using notation and scoring MIDI inside Logic Pro X now this is a pretty long tutorial so don't feel like you need to watch it all now I've also included some timestamps in the description so you can come back and reference different parts of it later and before we dive in and just want to share with you our free Logic Pro X cheat sheet it's completely free and inside you have my favorite keyboard shortcuts so you can save time while you're working also some information and tips for the different stock plugins that come with logic as well as some recommended starter settings so it's just a really useful PDF to have if you're a Logic Pro X user so you head to the link on-screen now or the link in the bio to get access ok let's do this [Music] in this section you'll learn all about working with notation in logic we're going to talk about graphical input versus step input we're gonna go over transcribing and this is going to be an introduction to the notation engine there are some more advanced features that are beyond the scope of this course but using everything you're going to learn over the next few lessons you'll be able to write notation you'll be able to turn your MIDI performances into a notation and transcribe them and you'll also be able to create notation quickly and efficiently using a few different methods so here I've got a brand new project and what we're going to do first of all is just create a software instrument and for now let's just use a Steinway grand piano let's have a listen cool so once you've got a instrument sorted the next step is going to be to create a new template and to do that we're gonna first of all make a new screen set so we're gonna press two to go to screen set two and then we're gonna close this window first of all let's open the score editor and then we'll close this window and we're also gonna open the piano roll and just reshape them so that they're this kind of layout with the score editor on top and piano roll underneath now we can lock this screen set and save this as a project template so let's say the notation great so now what we can do is we're gonna press one to go back to screen set one which was just the track for you here and we're going to add an empty MIDI region so let's right click create empty MIDI region and let's make this really big so let's zoom out and you only have to do this if you're going from scratch if you already have a performance or a MIDI region that you're working with you won't have to do this if you're doing notation from scratch and you're actually composing with notation you'll have to do this first I said you've got something to work with of course so now we can go back to screen tattoo and now we can see all with the notation let's make that even bigger just see got a lot to work with now there's a few different views here so first of all this is the area where we're seeing the notation whereas down here is the piano roll and this is where we can just see the actual MIDI data which this is the MIDI data but displayed as a score and up the top here we've got a few different view options so the first one is this one where it's kind of a continuous linear view we can always see the time signature and the key signature and we can scroll horizontally like so in this view it's more like a traditional score and it's laid out vertically and then in this view this is our kind of final pay for school where it's laid out as if it was in pages so the one that you used to compose is up to you they're all the same it's just slightly different layouts now down the left here we've got a few different windows as well and the important one is this part box window now we can filter out differ views by turning on or off these boxes up here so if we want to turn key signatures on or off we can turn that on and time signatures there and now everything is displayed here all of our different notation symbols or we could just have for example oh and that's everything displayed and then we can skip to them we can reorder them here so you can play around with that and different views or if you click this drop-down box here you can actually go to sets that have already been created so text their lyrics or notes and rests and we can actually customize these and if we click on or off of one of them like so we can then create new sets and call it what we want Robb's set and i can turn things on or off like so and there we go so play around with those filter views you'll get to know all of these I'm not going to actually teach what any of these are because this is more about notation within logic not general music theory but you'll get the gist of it so use the quick sets or create your own sets to view these now what you actually do with these is input them onto the score and there's a few ways you can do that the first way is to use the pencil tool so we've got the pencil set as our secondary tool here you might prefer it the other way around head to his primary and pointer a secondary now whatever we have selected here is what the pencil will be so there we've got a crotchet so if I draw here adds a crotchet like so and then we can use the pointer tool to move this around move it up and down to change the note move it sideways to change the position in the bar etc and then of course if I selected something else like a key signature like 6/8 I can then draw that in here okay just adding it then at 6:00 8:00 and then if I wanted to change to three four in this bar and just draw it in there three four and then maybe back to four four here so whatever you have selected in the part box is what your pencil tool will create now another way of doing it is to actually just drag these so I can just drag it from there I can grab semibreve add it there I can then grab mininum add it there etc now if you grab the title and then move this over here you've got as a separate window and this makes it even easier to click and drag if that's the way that you like to work so that the ninjas drag these whatever I'm whatever I want to use like so so that's the basic way that you enter information by either dragging or using the pencil tool now you might have also noticed that at the moment we're adding accidentals and we're not staying in the key signature so if I change this here to D major you can see all these accidentals here now I can drag them like so but you'll hear it's doing it in semitones it's not staying in the key now if you want to compose diatonic Li within the key you can go to edit the diatonic insert and what this means is now we can only add notes within the key so if I get rid of that except as an old one but if I add a new note now you hear now it's only within the key it's only when I drag it that I can change it to an accidental like so but when I insert I only add diatonically so that's a really handy little feature that stops you composing of accidentals if you're not in that kind of style when you're adding notes and composing here you'll notice it of course we've got oral feedback and as I move a note up or down I can hear it now if you want to turn that off you could hit this button up here to turn off the MIDI output and what this means now is I can move these around without doing anything but when I play I can still hear it whereas if I turn that on it's giving me instant aural feedback so you can turn on or off the MIDI out button up there if you want to hear that now you can use the pointer tool to highlight several by clicking and dragging and then I can move them up by dragging you can move them sideways I can press delete to delete them and the same with these time signatures I might have to actually delete them manually so if I go to 6/8 and now we're back to normal so you can just click on notes or you can drag and highlight them if you want to delete them so now let's add a few notes back in and let's actually create a chord this time so we go in I scored and what we can do now is we can highlight all of this by holding command and then we can actually copy this so we can either hold alt and drag it like this or we can press command C to copy it and then we can add our playhead there and press command V and now I'll paste it like so and then if we want we can move individual notes [Music] like that if you want to change the length of these notes we can highlight them and we can do one at a time or several like this and in this event box here it tells us how many notes we have selected and then we can see length so we can even just click this and drag it and that allows us to make them shorter like so or longer like say oh we could actually double click here manually input how long we wanted them to be like that now another good feature is here to view duration bars selected notes now what I can do is with the pointer tool I can drag the length like this to the full length of the bar or make them shorter if you want to edit the actual size or the other attributes of the notation you can just double click on it with the pointer tool and then we get a window here of no attribute so I can make the size larger like this and that makes the size bigger or I can I change the stem direction to change the stem like that and there's a few other hand the attributes in there that you might want to play around with so that's it for graphic input and that's the way that most people would work but in the next lesson you're going to learn also about step input sometimes entering notation use the graphic input method can be a bit slow especially if you're composing from scratch so there's another input method called step input that is usually quicker so if we press ENTER to return to the beginning here and then going to go to window and then show step input keyboard or you can do aught command K and now we can see this keyboard here that we can just click on the notes like so and he'll add a note and the distance of the note is dictated by what we have selected here as is the dynamic and the voicing now you'll notice at the moment is adding them all as one chord and that's because we're currently in chord made as soon as we come out of called mode it will start a new note for every time you hit a different note so when you want to write cause you then go into chord mode add your cause and then come out of chord mode to continue like so now you can also use the keyboard here you can also use a MIDI device you just need to make sure that the MIDI in button is turned on and now I've got a MIDI keyboard here [Music] so that can speed things up a lot so you can use either method but just remember that this is normally a quicker way to compose and of course you can then still go and delete them and edit them afterwards using the graphical input like so lots of the time when you're working with notation you'll probably be working with texts as well to add musical directions and various other text instructions so you go to text and lyrics or you can just go to this box here and now we can see all these different types of text so we can just drag this wherever we want and it'll pin it to the beginning of the bar and then this might be the general direction like and Dante which I was wrong there we go and now this is pinned to that bar what we can also do is go to functions text attributes and fonts and then we can actually change the font of this I could change it to chancery make it a bit bigger like that something else that can speed up the work for a bit when you're using text are textiles so if we go to layout text Styles and here we can see all the different styles that we could have said bar numbers page numbers note heads instrument names etc and we can change the fonts of these so we won't want that to be something like that monotype casanova and then tempo symbols like and then say we can make that as well make it a bit bigger and you can play around with all of these and you can even add your own so I can now be I could say chords if you change the front of that and then when you go to this text and go to the event window you can see the style drop-down box and I can simply click on here change the style so there's chords which are just added but if I want this to be tempo markings and there we go it's changed it's at four and made it bigger and now all of my text styles will be the same and we consistent across the score in this lesson you'll learn how to transcribe pre-existing MIDI performance into notation and this is a really great feature because if you've composed something within logic and you most of it in live using a MIDI device or by writing it in using the piano roll you can now turn it into a score that you can pan to other players that you can share online so that people can play your music and however else you want to use the notation so this is just really simple most of its one notes there aren't any chords but you can see here this was just recorded in using a MIDI device so if I go to screen set two which is where we've got all of our notation windows we can see already that it's pretty much already done it very accurately I made sure it was all crotchet so it's nice and simple and the only but I can see here is that it's kind of got a bit confused so we'll look at that in a second now anything that you change in this region window here only affects the notation not the original MIDI so when you see this quantize function this isn't going to affect the original performance it's not quantizing the MIDI data is purely quantizing the score so if I change this to four it's going to quantize everything to crotches or if I change it to eight it's going to quantize everything to quavers and I can go further down like that where I can get to 128 and that's when it starts to get a bit bizarre because here it's not quantizing it at all so it's taken my literal performance and because I'm not a robot I wasn't playing dead on the beat so a lot of the time it's a regular length notes like this one here or I started just ahead or behind the beat now the default is 16 and 24 and that tends to work but I can already see here that it's not working and I know that this doesn't have anything faster than a quaver in it so I can actually just go to 8 and now I know this is spawn so experiment with the quantize function by a default interpretation is also on and if I turn that off you can see how it turns these two notes here into shorter quavers rather than crotches and what interpretation does is it uses logics kind of brains to say well actually it's more likely in the real world that you would want the performer to actually hold those notes for a whole beat not for half a beat a concern interpretation on and then it does that and similarly if you were playing really staccato with interpretation it would register that as slightly longer notice and then you might just want to add a staccato marking for example but we can actually double click these and now in a note attributes window we can see an interpretation and we can actually say force which forces it or defeat and I'll remove it but for this we're just going to go to default which is going to resort to this so if you have a score where you only want to force note imitate interpretation on a few notes that have done it wrong you can turn it off here and then I can just highlight these change their interpretation to force actually and same with this one and there we go so now if you have a listen you'll notice that this pretty much matches perfectly it's really simple melody but now we've got perfect notation that we could hand to someone else and they're better play this straight away so all we'd have to do now is add our kind of dynamic markings ornaments that kind of stuff make a piano and then we could add maybe Forte to one of these notes and we could add a crescendo like so and go in and finish it off but the large bulk of it which is adding in all these notes and getting the timing and the pitch correct is already done for you so it's really easy to transcribe MIDI performances into notation using logic using logic we can also create guitar notation and move between different styles of notation by going to the style drop-down box in the region window so if I go to guitar now it will actually change it to tab for me which is really handy and then if you wanted to turn this into a stereotypical tab you could highlight all of these go to functions note attributes and then stems we can hide and now we've got a guitar tab there are a few other styles like defaulting to send instruments for example bass and it's gonna give us just a bass clef piano of course gives us the right hand on the left hand we can then go to certain horns like a flat horns and it will transcribe it for us viola and it will just automatically transcribe it so make sure you use that style box to find the appropriate instrument in this lesson you'll learn about creating score set so you can print entire scores for say an orchestra or an ensemble because a lot of the time you won't be just printing or composing for one instrument you'll be printing and composing for many so here I've just added another part we've now got a string part as well as the piano part now the one that you have selected will dictate what you're editing in the score editor so if I select the string ensemble and go to my screen set I'm now editing the screen string ensemble or if I select the piano and go there and now our editing the piano so how do we get them both to be on the same screen because when I've got nothing selected I can see both but that's a bit of a pain constantly going between the track view and selecting the one you want and then go in here so what we can use instead is score sets so if you would go to layout show school sets or you can go to this drop-down box up here under filter and go show school sets window and what we can do here is add score sets and we can make school sets of the complete score the whole ensemble or we can do individual ones so if we go to a new complete set it'll automatically add everything in the project so we can see automatically got the piano and your ensemble we can change this to a whole ensemble now you can also do is add a new empty set and then I can add instrument and it you can see here it's added the piano so now I can pull that piano and I could do the same but this time I could change it to the string ensemble like so and you call that strings so now we've got these different score sets so now I can easily navigate between my different sets using this filter and you can just go between the instruments themselves and then you can go to other instruments but I can now use my screen sets like whole ensemble and I've got over here now the cool thing about screen sets is that you can change the settings and display settings individually so I can go to this I can change the scale for example to 50% and now you can see it's changed to scale there which you can't do without screen sets if I just go to all instruments it's going to keep our scale where it's now whole ensemble so see if I had a few more instruments I want to keep this to a smaller scale so school sets are really handy to use when you come to printing and organize in your final score and then if you want to print anything you just go to file print or command P you can print this off or I could go to strings and print this off etc

Channel: Mastering․com

Views: 151,930

Keywords: musician on a mission, rob mayzes, notation, scoring, logic pro x

Id: 1qwqBYkD0Cg

Length: 22min 18sec (1338 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 08 2019