Setup ANY MIDI Controller as a DAW Mix Control Surface (LOGIC PRO X)

hey everyone this is music tech help guy and in this video I'll show you how to turn a simple MIDI controller like mine Ovation launch key 25 here into a simple dock controller to control things like faders pans sends track mutes tracks solos track selection and playback now there are a lot of control surfaces out there for various DWS but the difference between those and a simple one fader MIDI controller like this is that my launch key is not intended to be used as a mix controller it's meant to be used as a midi controller for inputting notes modulation wheel pitch Bend some basic rotary knobs for controlling synthesizer and plug-in parameters and again one fader so this is not a substitute for setting up a proper control surface for logic that's a completely different process what this is is it's a workaround to use your small format MIDI controller as a mix controller so you don't have to use the mouse to control faders in your mix window so in this video I'll be assigning my single fader to adjust volume on whatever channel I have selected the first rotary knob will be assigned to pan for whatever channel I have selected the next three are going to be assigned to the first three effects sends the send amounts on whatever selected channel I have these top two pads here are going to control the bank channel left and Bank channel right so basically select previous channels select the next channel so I have to do that with my mouse these bottom two buttons will be mute and solo for whatever channel I have selected and then additionally I'll set up the transport controls as well so the first thing I'm going to do is just for demonstration I'll create eight audio tracks I'll just go ahead and create a few software instrument tracks as well and I'll hit X to open up my mixer so yeah right now if I want to move knobs and faders I have to kind of do it here the first thing I want to do is I'm going to hit shift option K this is going to pull up your controller assignments window it may go to the easy View click on expert view and make sure there are no assigned controls in here if there are delete them because we don't want anything that we do with our mix controller to affect other things so we just want to start with a clean slate the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go up to Logic Pro 10 preferences automation then from here I'm looking at this automation quick access option what I'm gonna do is click learn message and then move my volume fader now what automation quick access allows you to do by the way click done once you're done what automation quick access allows you to do is it allows you to only apply the CC action to whatever fader you have selected so if I select audio 1 here move the fader it controls the volume if I go to audio 5 control the fader it controls the volume and so forth and so on so let's do the same thing with Sens and pan so real quick I'm just gonna create some sort of bogus effects sense here on plus 1 plus 2 and bus 3 for all of those channels and I'll hit shift option K to pull up my controller assignments then what I'm going to do is click learn mode click on one of these volume or pan knobs here rather and then turn this first rotary knob here so you can see it's it's learned it and you want to make sure that under channel strip it says selected track here because I want to be able to move over to another one and control its pan as well I don't want to have to assign these you know individually next what I'll do is I'll assign the send amount note that learn mode is still on and I'll assign this to my second now notice that it doesn't really seem to be working so what you have to do is under channel strip here while that control is selected is you have to go to selected track let's see if that works there we go so now it's working so I'll click I'll turn learn mode back on move my second send here move my third rotary knob I'll do the same for the third bus or the third send here move this guy right here turn off learn mode so again for pan actually for all of these for volume pan and all three of the send controls make sure that channel strip the channel strip option is set to selected track so now whatever track I have selected not all of them though let's close this out whatever track I have selected the volume fader controls volume the first rotary knob controls pan ii controls the send amount for bus one send to send three and you could assign additional controls as well but i think i'll just stop at the three one thing that's tricky here and this goes for all of these controls let's say that on audio six here i pull the volume way down and then i pull the pan far left I pull the buses or the sends all the way down and then I move over to another channel if I move my volume fader here look what happens nothing happens at first but as I move further up it sort of it catches the controller see yeah see that so the controller has to be moved into the position of the of the channel that you select like for instance these will work fine because they were already are all the way down but if I had these all the way up on this channel but then I moved them all the way down on another Channel and then I move back to that previous channel and try to move these up nothing's gonna happen because the value of my three rotary knobs here for my three cents are lower than the current value on the channel that's just the way MIDI works you have to go up and sort of get to it and then pull it back down move up to it catch the value and move back down same thing here and the same thing goes for pan you know if I pan this channel hard right move over to another channel pan it hard left then move back to the previous channel I'm gonna have to move this knob my pan knob all the way over to the right to catch the value and then pull it back so that's all my volume pan and send amounts let's talk about banking it's not like just sort of going banking channels not banking whole you know fader groups of faders I don't want to have to click on a channel to move back and forth because then I'm constantly moving back and forth between my mouse and my MIDI controller now I could use the left and right keys or the up and down keys on my keyboard but again I'm having to go back and forth between two different devices so the way I'm going to set this up is I'm gonna go up to Logic Pro 10 key commands go to edit or you can hit option K and what I'm looking for first are these two key commands ones called select previous track and this one's called select next track now there is there's another one in here in the mixer it's called I'll just do select channel search for select channel yeah there's select previous left and right channel strips you would think that that might be the control but I'll explain to you in a second why that's incorrect to use this at least for this application so I'm gonna go select track and then we you can see we have select previous track the normal key command is up select an extract the normal key command is down I'm gonna click on this one click learn new assignment down here and then press the button here that I want to control this with so I'm just going to press this first beat pad here and it learns it and you can see it so assignments one I'll click on the next one select the next track click learn new assignment and click this next one the next thing I want to learn is mute and solo so I'm going to search mute we have toggle channel strip mute normally you click M for that so I'll click learn new assignment press this one it's learned it and next I'll search for solo and we have toggled channel strip solo which is normally just s so I'll click learn new assignment and then press beat pad that I want to assign that to so now in my mixer I can press these two buttons the sort of bank left and right between all of my channels and I can press this to mute whatever selected channel I have and to solo whatever select the channel I have okay so for some reason my solo button some reason the solo buttons being weird it's like the meats working fine the solos being weird let me just press shift option K all of these will show up here as well so I have toggle channel strip solo toggle channel strip mute for some reason the minimum maximum value set to 0 to 4 so I'd have to press a really low velocity for that so I'm gonna set this to 0 to 127 any value you can trigger it as a matter of fact if you want to make the lower velocities on that beat pad less sensitive like if you just accidentally bump it but you don't actually want to press it you might actually set a minimum value here so I could set this to like 50 right so I'll do the same thing here I'll set these all to 50 to 127 cuz right now there be a right now they're being limited on the top ending um but not on the bottom end so set this to 50 to 127 so that should work out a little better now now if I just barely tap on it nothing happens but if I really press on it it works so that'll sort of get rid of any faulty you know I accidentally you know pressed on it and sent a value now the mutes being weird hang on that's probably just because the there we go there we go I think 50 might be a little too much let me go like 25 I'll do 25 because I'm really having to press those but it what this will do is any sort of just you know if I accidentally tap one but just really really gently it's not gonna accidentally trigger that control there we go so toggling left and right toggle mute toggle solo got my volume control app and control sends all right so I've got that set up um you could also set up record enable if you want on another one this is gonna have to do more with the main window not the mixer but she could set up a toggle arm for record an input monitor as well if you wanted you just go up to Logic Pro 10 key commands edit I'll just search up toggle record and one of the options is toggle track record enable which is normally control R so I'll click learn new assignment I'll sign that there and then I can do toggle input monitor toggle channel strip input monitoring which is control I normally I'll sign that to this fourth one here and once again I'm going to go in shift option K make these minimum 25 maximum 125 just so we don't have any mishaps there we go and again if you're if you don't know why it's 0 to 127 is the range it's that's the range of MIDI values 0 to all MIDI data is 0 to 127 so like a knob all the way there's a left to 0 all the way to the right is 127 127 likewise the hardest that you can hit a key and 0 is the softest you can hit the key it's like the velocity of that of the note but here we're using it for a control track control rather so now I can toggle like I did before mute solo arm for record loop input monitor and there you go okay so next up let me learn my playback controls or transport controls as they're often called so typically what I like to assign these two to is I'd like to assign them to moving one bar left or one bar right which is normally your little bracket keys here well you can hit shift and you can move eight bars at a time so it might be helpful to assign these to the shift bracket rather than just the bracket obviously stop a stop playback is playback record is record and loop is you know you can use it to turn on cycle record I mean you can really assign it to anything so I'm just gonna use it to turn on my cycle mode so same thing go up to Logic Pro 10 key commands edit so the first one I'm looking for is forward which here it says it's actually the period button and that's just because the secondary button for that bracket is period so this is period in comma and so I'm gonna learn that so I'll click learn new assignment I'll press this button right here I'll do the same for I think they call it rewind yep there's a rewind learn new assignment learn that now there's also one called fast rewind that one goes back that's the one that goes back and forth eight bars at a time you so you could do either of those it's up to really up to you I'm gonna do stop playback so just do stop stop playback learn new assignment press the stop button I'll do play now there's there's a couple different ones it's kind of interesting that the the key commands that are here there's a play from selection play from left window edge play or stop and then play so I'm just gonna hit I'm gonna do with play I'll just go with play there learn a new assignment press play play button I'll do cycle just see toggle cycle mode right so learn new assignment press the loop button over there and the last one is record so record is our so learn new assignment press the record button so now I should be able to jump back and forward with my forward and reverse buttons here stop while actually stop will also is a secondary function go back to the beginning and play play will actually jump back to stop stop again goes back to the beginning turn on your cycle range and then record which I don't want to do that cuz maybe a bunch of feedback through my through my microphone but if I go ahead and mute that channel then arm it for recording and then press record turn off my metronome there now I can actually record using alt adjust my video controller to mute it to arm it and to hit record this is really great because it allows you to use any MIDI controller even a really cheap small one like this as a doll controller for mixing cuz I find myself in two different modes quite often you know I might be in you know MIDI composition arrangement mode or I want these things to be controlling different plug-in parameters and modulation elements but then I find myself in mix mode where it's like okay the composition is done all of that has already been created you know I want to puree work with this as a mix controller rather than you know a composition device alright so that's pretty much it I know someone will say in the comments well Josh it took you 17 minutes to explain how to set this up well sorry if you don't have 17 minutes of patience I'm trying to show how to set this up so no one misses anything and including some issues like the velocity settings that you might run into in the process in reality once you learn how to do this it only takes like two minutes to set it up I do this all the time when I'm doing mixing work from home now at the studio we have a Mackie MCU which is a great control surface and in like three clicks it's all set up in logic and all the faders and knobs are Auto mapped the Mackie MCU is a $1,300 control surface that's intended just for mixing in logic my Novation launch key is a hundred and twenty five dollar MIDI controller so again this video is sort of a workaround for that to save money and use what you already have for mixing it's not a primary demonstration of setting up control surfaces and logic so I hope you guys enjoyed the video if you did please leave it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel to see more content like this you can also check me out on social media on Facebook Twitter Instagram and if you'd like to make a monthly contribution to the channel you can also check me out at patreon.com ford slash music tech help guide thanks to the support and thanks for watching

Channel: MusicTechHelpGuy

Views: 220,582

Keywords: logic pro x, musictechhelpguy, mix, control, surface, daw, midi, controller, tutorial

Id: pHHkb6SzXS4

Length: 18min 15sec (1095 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 29 2020