ULTIMATE Beginner's Guide to LOGIC PRO X

what's up everyone nathan larsen here with another video for those of you guys who make music at home whether you're an artist songwriter composer producer if you write and record your own music at home this is the channel for you and hey if that sounds anything like you at all you need to subscribe to the channel right now and click the bell for notifications so you don't ever miss a video and in this video i'm going to be basically showing you the ropes for logic pro for those of you beginners other videos i've done in the past have been more for advanced users and more showing these specific individual pieces of what you can do within logic but i've yet to make a video that serves as a primer for those of you people who are just getting started in logic pro so the purpose of this video is to take anyone who is maybe new with logic you're coming from a different daw or altogether new to production entirely in using logic and working on getting you to a point to where you can start producing music now and after you're done with this video it'll serve as a really great springboard into some of the other videos that i have on logic to help take you further and further along in your production journey so with all that let's just go ahead and jump right into logic and let's do it all right so we are in logic now and what i want to do first and foremost is show you the navigational side of logic so you can actually understand where we're going and how we're using logic we're going to start with this empty session here rather than going into a project template you can use templates to get started but templates are not actually going to teach you how to maneuver the program as well as if you start from scratch and if i start building things up from there so first things first i'm going to talk really fast i'm going to go through this very fast i know some people have said i talk too fast i would recommend either slowing the video down you can do the options in youtube or you can just watch this again or pause and and take this in little bits at a time i want to talk fast to make sure that for those of you that do want to pick up on this quickly you can get through this pretty fast okay so very first things first that we're looking at here is this is what i'm going to call simple logic easy logic is what's open right now the very first thing i want you to do in order for you to truly unlock the full potential of logic is to go up here go to logic preferences go to advanced tools okay and make sure that advanced tools is enabled and then enable all these different things now surround sound you're probably not going to need that but everything else you're going to want to enable now notice what that did right away this interface looks a little bit different it added things and it took some things away for example my speaking track here which is what i'm using to talk right now it was hidden because i hid it you can do that in the advanced logic you cannot do that in what i want to call the quote unquote simple logic so i want to jump straight into advanced logic because as a beginner even though you're just getting started out you should be aware of what logic is fully capable of this is not garageband this is logic right so i'm going to teach you how to actually use logic to its fullest capabilities okay so this is what we've got here i'm going to really quickly blow through the navigational stuff and then we'll get into starting to actually create music so we're going to start on the top here and the very top this is where pretty much everything you need to know exists in terms of opening different windows having access to different controls and things like that so first things uh first is if you hover over anything it's gonna tell you first of all what it's called for example this is cycle and it's gonna have a letter or a number or some sort of additional type of key that you can click and that is how you enable it with hotkeys so for example this is cycle and if you hit command key c just c it's going to enable it in the same way that if you go over here to play if you hit space bar it's going to play this is super basic stuff record this is the record button r is going to record and then you can go through here this is to skip back and forward in which case you can use period or comma to do that and then enter goes back to the beginning cool so that's just this right here this is like the most basic stuff you could possibly get into you can also control your navigational stuff with the midi controller if you want then we have this right here and this is going to show you automatically if you click this little drop down window it's going to show you the beats and projects it's going to show you the tempo our key signature as far as c major and then our time signature which is 4 4. and it's going to tell you where you are in the project so right now we're on bar 13 beat 2. if i were to go to here it would go to 11. now for me typically i want to go to custom this is going to give me a lot more options it's going to show me the time that we're at it's going to show me the beats it's going to show me the tempo it's going to show me everything else here as far as the time signature and then down here is going to show me the division which is what the grid is going to be within logic so you can see here as i zoom in it's going to see all these little dot little slashes here that's showing me the division so this is bar 12 and then all these little dots are a 16th note we can change that to an eighth note for example and it's fewer this is really useful when it comes to editing material which we're not going to cover in this video the next thing is um on over here you've got your metronome you can uh this is not sorry not metronome your tuner so if you're doing vocals and not vocals guitar to tune like your guitar through a di you can do that you've got your metronome settings here so right here since this is highlighted this is the count in okay so the count in is going to give us a four count leading up to recording so if i click record it's going to give me one whole bar of a count in before it actually starts recording something to keep in mind is that it will actually record that bar and so if for some reason you start the performance a little early or something like that you can always back it up and then you've got the metronome over here which you can turn on to play the whole time or if you hold down there you can click while only recording only during count and you have all sorts of different things you can do there if you want more of the details on this you can watch my 30 advanced tips and hacks in logic as well again this is more of a beginner's guide this is now over here on the left side these are all the main kind of most important controls that you're going to actually use on a daily basis the first one on the far far left hand side is your library so what i have here i'll just show you this is what we're looking at right now this is my speaking track so this is just a microphone that i have hooked in and then this down here these are all basically presets that i can use to start actually impacting this this audio here so for example right now i have as the loudoun 208 because that's the microphone i use and this is the preset that i use for this mic but let's say i go down here and say i want to do i don't know dance vocal dance vocal yeah sounds kind of weird right obviously the lauten let's turn those off the lauten is obviously gonna sound better so it created a couple effects buses there as well which uh we'll worry about a little bit later and so you can do all sorts of crazy stuff preset wise here so if you record an acoustic guitar rather than doing all of your own effects you can use presets here to get you started especially if you don't fully understand how this stuff works okay the next one over here is your inspector window which if you just hit i on your keyboard that's going to open up the inspector window now this is basically giving you a snapshot of the individual track that we're on which in this case is my microphone on the left hand side and you've got this little break here and then this on the right hand side is the stereo out which is in other words the basically everything is going to stereo so if you had you know 10 different tracks all them playing all 10 of those are being routed or fed to the stereo out where everything is going to go now you can add effects onto your stereo out and then you can also of course add effects on your track so all these here are individual effects that i've loaded in to impact my vocal you can add them by going to the bottom where you see that kind of gray darkened you can click and then you can now go in and you can pick which effects you want to use now this video is not meant to show you all the various effects you can use so i'm not going to jump into that but you're going to have all the logic stuff right here at the very top or kind of in the main window here so this is all the effects that come into logic standard so you're gonna have access to every single thing in here but if you go down to audio units and open that up this is all the third party stuff you can use in other words these are all paid products essentially so everything from baby audio to native instruments to output to sound toys valhalla you can buy those and then they will load up into logic where you can then use those uh those additional plugins okay now within the win the uh um inspector window here this is where you're going to be loading most of your effects for individual tracks okay and basically again just gives you a snapshot and uh that's what i'm going to cover here we'll get to buses here in a little bit but let's move on to the next window and then if you hit hit this uh quick help button then it's based gonna show you everything that you hover over it's gonna show you everything that you hover over um as far as what it does so you can see the quick help is showing you what it does so if you ever want just kind of a quick reference on what everything does you can do that and then this button right here this is going to open up basically all the different markers you can do you can add articulations track zoom it's pretty straightforward as far as what it does to be completely honest with you i rarely use this because i just i just don't find it as intuitive as some of the other stuff this button here this is going to open up the basically what they call smart controls so you can control a lot of the effects within the individual tracks from here so if you click eq you can start doing all the effects adjusting in here so this is compression this is your eq i also never use this because i just prefer using the inspector window and actually opening up these plugins that way instead okay then right here this is your mixing window so this is going to show you everything that you have so as you start adding more instruments everything is going to populate in here where you can have instead of a screenshot or a snapshot no screenshot of the track and the track inspector like this instead we can see everything all together this is really great for mixing obviously you can if you have two screens you can make this all like one screen there's a lot of stuff you can do as far as that goes then of course you can start adjusting things with volume and then we can start mixing things in here you can see all of your plugins that you've got in here as well your busses again we'll get to here in a second or sends and then there's that then finally this right here is your editor window so it's a scissor right there this is where you're going to do all of your editing um with audio you can edit within the arrangement window and when i say arrangement window i'm just referring to this main big window that you've got here so the editor window you can click e to open that as well and then at any point if you want to make things bigger or smaller you can just drag until you get that little expander icon and then as we start getting stuff in in fact i'll just go ahead and record some audio here so this is just a test so you can have a pretty good idea of what we're doing recording wise okay so i've got that and now what i can do is zoom into this which there are a few ways of doing this you can either go over here and click and zoom that's the not intuitive way or you can do command and then arrow keys side to side or you can do option and then use your mouse side to side if you have like a magic mouse or a track pad that'll do that up and down is going to make it wider let me show you this so command up and down or option scroll up and down does that or if you want to just use these buttons over here you can adjust them that way okay you can also open up this editor window by double clicking on any audio or any midi okay so we have this audio here this is what the editor window looks like so this is just a test so you can so you can hear what i just did there and then within this editor window we can start doing things like trimming so i could grab where you can see that how my cursor changes here i can grab that and shorten it so then now we've just got rid of some of that audio at the end we can do the same thing we could maybe trim at the end here say i don't want that little end piece maybe i do kind of doesn't matter and then we've got our different tools up here that we can use within the editor window we've got a lot of options i'm not going to cover every single one of these the main ones you're probably going to want to have are your pointer tool on the right hand and then you can have some sort of auxiliary tool whether that be scissors the marquee tool marquee tool is super useful it can do just about anything and the way to activate this second tool this is by the way only available in the advanced editing mode which is why you have to enable it you're to click command and then you will notice that that tool now becomes activated this is now the marquee tool so i can select stuff like that and then if i were to do the delete key it would only delete that now i don't want to do that but let's say that i highlight that and i want to isolate this then you can just oh go back so let's say grab this audio here and i want to isolate it all you have to do is click and then it will now make a cut at the beginning and end of where you were or you can do command for the marquee tool and then go to where you want to cut and there's double click double click and we've created a cut and now we can move this audio independently of that other audio cool so that's how you use some of these different things here now within here you can enable flex which is flex time and flex pitch and things like this i have an entire video in using flex pitch so i'm not going to go into the all the specifics of that but let's say i sang something in and i wanted to you know do some pitch correction you can click on you're just going to ask you want to turn on flex yes now it's going to have multiple options all these options show up here you can do flex pitch or you can do all the rhythmic stuff so i'm going to do flex pitch and now it's going to basically do its best it can to identify the pitch that i'm using now it's not going to do a very good job because i didn't sing anything i only spoke but you can see these bars here are basically this best guess on what pitch i'm singing or what pitch i'm saying and then we can now manipulate this in full again i have an entire video breaking this all down cool so that pretty much gets us through all the main navigational stuff over here on the right hand side here this is your list menu where you can do different things in terms of events marker tempo and signature so if you want to change your time signature or your tempos you can do that within here and you can add them by doing this so if you wanted to add a different time signature at a different point the song most of you are probably never going to use this but you can also say you change the tempo in the song again probably not something you're going to use a ton if you're doing mainstream production you're going to want to have the same tempo throughout the entire thing over here you have your notes now you can do this on the project or the individual track i use this all the time a lot of times i do my songwriting within logic and so i'll write my lyrics within the notepad i'll write notes within here so i never forget where i'm at in terms of the project so if i know i'm getting ready to finish something for the day or for take a little bit of a break i'll make notes here of what needs to be done still you can open up your loops from in here i never use this because i just don't make music using loops that's not how i work but if you click on it it's going to basically play it for you you can go in here and do it by genre by instrument to find different things so if we wanted like a drums and then we could drag that in to the arrangement window and i'm not going to do that and then lastly you have your files so you can have the project file so this will as we start adding more and more audio more and more stuff all that stuff's going to populate in here you can also look for different things within your computer whether that be media or other files that you want to drag into the project you can basically do all that from within here but you can also import stuff as well okay so that covers pretty much everything on the top here um i didn't mention this but this is just your basically your master volume you would never use this you'd be using it more likely when you're within your mixing window here or within your track inspectors or your inspector window here so those are the two places you're going to want to do that most the time okay so let's actually talk about more of the specifics of actually getting going on making some music here so we're gonna go and delete that audio here let's go ahead and create some tracks now you can do this a couple different ways you can go up here to the plus bar to create new tracks or you can do option command n and that is going to open up the new track basically selection now we can create a software instrument which is midi you can do audio their drummer their guitar bass or external midi now i'm nine literally a hundred percent of the time i'm only using one of these two i never use the drummer if you use this it's basically here i'll even just show you what this does okay so it's literally going to go ahead and open up an actual drum set with a kit that's already made and we can go in here and start changing things we could change what yes you can change what the drummer is doing you can have this kind of x y axis thing and you can start changing how that drummer's playing again i never use this because it's just not it's not really something i do in my workflow i like starting and creating things from scratch but if you want to be using that you can certainly do that so again option command n to open up something new so we already have an audio track open here i'm going to open up a new one okay so now we have an audio track and let's open up the inspector window now if you have your audio interface plugged into your daw which is how you're gonna get audio in whether that's through a direct line in with your guitar or whether like what i'm doing is with a microphone you need to understand inputs so let's say you have an audio interface with two inputs you have input one and input 2. and let's say input 1 is where you have your microphone connected and input 2 is where you have your guitar connected now when you create a new audio track one of the biggest things that you need to make sure you do is make sure that you have the correct input set so that when you start recording you're not you're actually recording and capturing what it is that you want so for example when i open this up here this new audio track let's say i want to do guitar and i'm going to do a direct line in with a quarter inch into my audio interface to record guitar but the problem is if i have it as input 1 where you can see right here that's my microphone line which is where i'm speaking into right now so if i were to hit this button here which is the monitor button you're now seeing the audio show up because that's the microphone it's not the guitar so if i were to start playing the guitar you're not going to see anything going in here so you're going to go up to here where it says input and hold it down and then go down to your inputs and you want to choose which input it is so probably input two for your guitar and then you can now play your guitar cool and that'll work so you need to make sure that's the first thing first i know that's super basic for a lot of you guys potentially but you wanna make sure that you have your input set correctly or else you're gonna run into problems okay so now we've got that open let's go ahead and open up a midi instrument so if we go over here to software oh and by the way if you go to audio you can create or you can decide what the input is right away at the beginning on my interface you can also do combinations of inputs as well okay but i'm gonna go to software instrument and then same thing you can go down here and open up what you want to open and start with something already created so for me a lot of times i'm gonna start with something third-party like native instruments where i can you know go use my complete control i could do output i could do east west it doesn't really matter but what i want to do is open an empty channel strip okay so what happens here is this is a midi track but there is absolutely nothing on here at all it's completely empty so if i have my midi keyboard plugged in right now you can hear me hitting it nothing's happening at all but you can see up here it's registering that i'm playing but nothing's coming through and that's because i haven't actually selected an instrument so this is where if you don't have any third-party instruments or plug-ins or anything like that you're going to just use what's within logic right so you're going to want to go into your library and this is where you can start browsing for sounds you can make this bigger as well now we can start browsing to start creating some things so let's say we want to start with a drum kit and start actually creating some percussion or whatever it is we want to do so let's just go ahead and pick one i haven't downloaded all these so okay we got after party [Music] you can obviously switch them [Music] and now i can play my midi controller in here which i have two different ones i have a novation launch pad and then i also have my keyboard okay and now within the drums you can actually use this little button here and this actually opens up a whole array of basically it's a track stack so you can individually manipulate and change these things so for example you've got your kick here you can actually go in and actually change the kick change here sure and now we can actually uh go back up here into the main one and now it's actually a combination of and now we've got this kick here instead so we can change things individually within these kits this is really cool came with the new logic update that happened not too long ago now let's actually create a new track again option command n let's do another software instrument now we've got uh drums i'm gonna put that at the bottom we can now go in here and start browsing around for other things you obviously have it's broken down by instrument set so you know pianos percussions synthesizers all this stuff and you can really get experimental and the nice thing is they do have this organized pretty well to get you started and logic i truly think logic's one of the best daws because of this alone there are so many sounds available you just there you're gonna you're not gonna run out of sound ideas very quickly um not to say that you should never buy third party stuff because i do think that's a worthwhile investment okay so now that we have that kind of figured out to start creating stuff let's actually start recording something and actually building something from scratch now the tempo here is at 120. okay i'm going to keep it there just for the time being let's just go ahead and create something simple now i don't actually like starting on on bar one because i like to give myself a little bit of space so i'm gonna start on bar two just because i like to i'm gonna just go ahead and start with the b here i'm gonna hit r for record okay so i played like multiple different things and not all that's the same and i recorded probably more than i'm going to want to use but what we can do is go into individual pieces i like and start piecing it all together so i like that so i have my marquee tool here like i already showed you i'm gonna do command double click okay so what i'm gonna do first is double click on the midi itself remember how i said if you double click on it it'll open up your editor window now this is what we call piano roll so you already saw what it looked like when i opened the editor window with audio this is what it looks like when you open it with midi okay and this is basically showing you what i just played in now if we click on this it's going to show you different stuff that i just played right okay so we're going to go up here and what i want to do is you can select we can select everything by clicking and dragging here like that or the easy way is just to do command a that'll select everything and let's actually kind of drag this like that and now on this side here this is showing us quantization where we can actually start quantizing things now quantization is simply to correct everything tempo wise and make sure everything is locking in so if we zoom in here for example this grid here that we see which is 16th notes let's change it to eighth just so it's a little easier so you can see now there's eighth notes one and two and three or okay you can see this block here which is what i just played for the kick it's not landing directly on the grid it's a little early right now we can drag it and move it on right we can fix all this stuff individually we can even take these notes and expand how big they are or how small they are we can even change the volume that these individual notes are hit i'll talk about that in just a second but what we want to do is fix it and we want to fix all of them because this is a drum part it should be accurate so i'm going to do command a now you can go over here and you can select how much you want this quantized at what note value so i'm going to do 16th notes because that's just i'm not going to do anything more than 16th notes and then i'm gonna hit q and it just bumped everything to be 100 accurate you can also hit this button right here well that does it it's the quantize button and there's a queue for quantize so that helps if you ever forget what the command is q for quantize okay now as far as the velocity which is how hard we played something in how loud or soft everything is color coded so you can see all these are kind of different variations of color red means it was hit as hard as possible so you can see here if i click on this you have velocity down right here it says 127 which is as loud as you can play something it goes from zero or one not zero because zero would be nothing it goes from one all the way up to 127. now what i want to do here is zoom in so you can see this so we're talking about this note right here right now watch the color as i change the velocity yeah the color starts changing so it goes from purple which is the very softest to kind of a light blue-ish kind of green yellow orange kind of red so this right here 107 is a little more orange red is super super loud now you don't necessarily want all these at the exact same value because that's going to sound artificial and fake but we also want to make sure that it sounds good right so we can adjust the velocities you can also adjust velocities a couple different ways you can watch my advanced video to get some more of that stuff but we can also go in here and i did that wrong and i can just do delete delete we can also grab that and move it around to actually start changing what we did here and this is where you can start fixing stuff okay now i really like this part of the performance here bar sixth through the end of bar seven cool so we're gonna use that i'm gonna go and get out of here and i'm going to do again command and double click and that just cut it now i'm going to delete this because i don't need it and then i'm going to shorten that just like that i'm going to put this up bar 2. now what we can do as far as making sure this continues you can go up here and drag and this will create a loop okay or what you can do is do option click and drag and this will just create duplicates that's usually what i prefer doing i just don't like using the loop as much and let's go ahead and actually start talking about adding something else here now what i want to do instead is to use a third-party plug-in so you can see how to do that so we're going to open the inspector window and we're going to go to instrument because this is where it's going to basically decide what software instrument we're actually going to use so i'm going to click that in there and it's going to give us all the options now again everything in here is logic it comes in with logics there's tons and tons of options to choose from up here it's going to show you the most recently used you can see i've used labs contact play the bbc symphony orchestra and alchemy most recently but what i'm going to do is go down to au instruments and this is going to show me everything that i have that is third party in other words stuff that i've bought i'm gonna do native instruments because i use native instruments the most and you can see all the different things that i have there i'm gonna go to contact we'll go ahead and open up a mono track and this is gonna load for a second okay so now that's loaded i have all my options within here i'm not going to really go into all the details here but i'm just going to pick one that i like let's just do this one hybrid keys and now we have an instrument pulled up that is not like a logic only instrument we can play it now and uh of course i can do some [Music] different things within there now what i'm going to do is just go ahead and create a part for this and so i can double click in here so i can name this let's do just hybrid keys for the time being until i figure out what i'm doing and i'm going to go ahead and click record [Applause] [Music] okay so now i have this keyboard part and i can double click in here again go to the beginning and here we go this is what i just played in via midi and what i'm going to do first and foremost is command a ooh command a to select everything and then do q to quantize aha so you can see here it actually made a mistake and i'm really glad this happened because this demonstrates that the quantization is not always perfect it's going to be a best guess to what's the closest you played it so when i did this when i quantized it actually got it wrong so i'm gonna have to move that to make sure this is actually happening at the right time and now that is correct and now again we can start adding and manipulating things within here and so if you have the pencil tool here selected which is automatically going to be your secondary tool you can do command and start dragging and adding stuff in now something to keep in mind is that if you click on one of these bars one of these pieces of midi information let's just click on that one if i now create a note it's going to create it with the exact same settings as that one watch this so i just added something and it just copied it in terms of the velocity and in terms of the length of that note so let's delete that let's say i wanted a shorter one we could go down here it's now going to create a shorter note exactly identical to that and then i can just adjust all the pitch within there so if you play something wrong when you record it let's say i did this instead obviously that's wrong i can grab those two notes and just fix them and if you want you can also look at your score here which will show you what you played um most of you don't really have any real reason to do that um so that's now we've got this uh keyboard part that we've done and then we can start creating other layers to start building upon this okay and once we've started building things then we'll want to start making adjustments to the rest of it so you have these knobs here this is for panning so check out what happens if i hand it to the hard right so that's obviously going to be what ear you're listening to if you're listening on a computer speaker you're probably like i don't know what just happened nothing happened but if you're wearing headphones it's very obvious what happened and of course you can adjust your volume in here as well you can you can solo things you can mute things and you can add more to this as well i have more of that in the advanced features video again that's in the description down below cool and you can change the color of things by going in here by control click and assigning a track color you can also track do a track icon so this is you know keyboard part so i pretty much never do this but let's just do a keyboard we could just do that and then now it's got the icon there we can change the track color do i don't know that color there and then we can go into here and then do color name and color color regions by track or if you know the hotkey it's just shift option n or shift option c sorry for color and most of that stuff like you don't need to know that to make music obviously now that we have this um really the next thing you would want to start doing is starting to learn how to use effects you can add those effects within the inspector window here you can you know add eq that might be something you'd want to do you could add compression let's do that just add a compressor now again you need to actually you know mess with the settings and here you're not just going to like slap them on and call it a day and if you don't know how these things work you should really learn how they work instead of just kind of shooting in the dark and then from there we can actually use sends now sends and buses this is kind of a confusing topic but this is where you can do it so just really the most basic of ways that i can explain it is let's say that we've got this keyboard part and i want there to be a reverb on it and let's say i have five other keyboard parts let's just add a couple others so we've got these other keyboard parts here as well and we want all three of them to have the same reverb instead of doing three different reverbs on here what i'm gonna do instead is go down here to bus i'm gonna just arbitrarily pick one it doesn't matter just find one that's empty these two are already these three are already being used so let's just do bus 10. and then what we're going to want to do is turn this up to zero just click and drag and then we're going to do the same with all these now what i'm going to do is open up the window here grab those so what i did is i just did um click on one of them and then did shift click you could also do command click command click to get more of those selected and then we're gonna do the same bus now there's no name so it's calling it aux 6 and then with these drag those to 0 as well and now aux 6 is showing up right here that's where this exists so let's just call this reverb now what is actually happening is we're taking the audio from this track these three tracks and actually sending it to this track where then it can be manipulated by whatever we do here so then we could put a reverb i'm just going to throw a random reverb on here i can throw a reverb on there and then now everything is being sent to this to be impacted by the reverb let's listen [Music] let's do a more let's do like a crazy reverb like a big one or something so you can just hear it a lot more let's do a chamber with a really huge delay [Music] so you can kind of hear how that works and you can mix it in accordingly this is again kind of a complex subject i have an entire video link in the description also up here in the corner that is the ultimate guide to using buses but it is something you should be aware of the next thing i want to show you is the live loops feature and that is right here to open it up where you can now create individual cells of things that you can then drag and drop into this window here the arrangement window so let me just demonstrate it's probably easiest to demonstrate you can hover over any one of these and click on it to record also i have an entire video on this topic as well um just to go a little deeper on it but let's say i want to create multiple different drum beats and then kind of drag and drop them in and so i just want to get experimental and i want to kind of have them to save to drop and play a little later so i can click record on here [Music] okay so we just did that you can double click in it again command a cue for quantize and then now we can play that okay and then we can do another one one two three four okay something like that then we could do however many as we want and then we can take these and actually drag them into our arrangement window you can do the same thing with the keyboard so we could say here's a hybrid keyboard i'm going to go and mute this for the time being so we can just do this solo it out let's come up with a bunch of different ideas we can do so one two three four [Music] [Applause] [Music] i don't know that was something kind of random but that was an idea i could do another one [Music] so that's another idea and then again we can drag and drop those in here and then the limits there's basically no limit as far as what you can do it's just a matter of what creative things you want to come up with and then we can always uh hide this by getting rid of it there and now we just have our arrangement window and to unmute that let's go over here let's do that there we go and we now just have what we originally came up with okay let's turn those buses off so this is basically how we're going to start creating our whole arrangement and how we're going to start producing the whole thing we're going to be adding more layers adding more elements and of course you're going to have to start mixing things in with volume right this hybrid keys is really loud right now we probably want to add a base some other stuff obviously we probably want to start adding vocals and we can do all sorts of those things within here okay so the very last thing that i want to cover in here is actually recording with real time audio with microphone or a direct line in whatever the case it may be so what i want to do is go back up to this guitar track right we're going to rename it we're just going to call it a vocal track here and what we'd want to do is start talking about how to record different takes and then creating comps i'm going to do this really fast because i know this is already kind of a long video so we've got this track here obviously as it sounds i'm just going to come up with a little random vocal here so i just came up with like one little line i'm gonna record it's like literally two bars long and i am going to go ahead and do that so i've got my speaking mic here i'm going to turn this off so you can only hear it on the vocal part here so it's going to sound a little different okay so this is obviously a lot softer but let's go ahead and do this and what i can show you here just with the preset we'll go to voice let's just do what about bright vocal i sure doesn't sound very good but waiting here for the sun to rise okay so what i'm going to do is now that i've got this preset selected that i'm going to be using what i'm going to do is create multiple takes because you're never going to want to just work with one take you're going to want to do multiple takes and so what we're going to do is record the first take and then we're going to record over that take a second time and you'll see what's going to happen here okay so we got the first one let's now do the second one we're just going to literally record right over this waiting here for the sun to rise okay so notice what happened is once i created the second vocal it automatically it now shows us both vocals so this is what we call a take folder and you can close it and open it here and then let's go ahead and just zoom in make this bigger so we can see this a little bit better we've got kind of two different modes we can be in we can be in comp mode which is this little we can just click here you can go you can see there's the little boxes or squares and you can go into more of the cutting mode so commode is what you're going to want to do most the time and so what we can do now is actually drag click and drag and we can basically grab different parts of those takes now in this particular setting this is not something i'd probably want to comp this would be better for let's say i do a whole nother section here now i can pick which take is good for this section which take is good for this section and then we can create what's called a comp which is compiling all the takes to the best take so we can do as many as we want in some cases you know i'll have 10 different takes that i'm going to work with and then i'm going to be going through and deciding which ones work the best so this allows you to get very nitpicky and very very specific and particular about the takes that you're getting because if you want to create really really good productions getting a solid performance is absolutely necessary now this doesn't just work for vocals this is any real-time audio when i say real-time audio i'm just saying not midi anything you record with a microphone or a direct line in so this could be drums it could be guitar it could be any number of things and just so you're aware too you can record enable multiple tracks so let's go ahead and say i'm just going to duplicate this vocal let's say that these two tracks are i don't know a snare with two different microphones say this top one here is a top snare and this one here is the bottom snare so you have a mic on the bottom and the top okay what we can do then is and you would need to set these to two different inputs right so this may be input one we can go up here change this to input two i'm not going to do that right now but then what we're going to wha what we're going to want to do then is record enable both of these tracks so that way when we are actually recording in here it records both those tracks now i don't have two microphones plugged in right now so i can't fully demonstrate that but the one other thing that you're going to want to do is make sure you lock these tracks together now the way that you would do this is you would basically create what's called a group so again i'm just demonstrating if you were recording you know one thing with two in two microphones this could be a drum set or maybe you have a guitar part that's got two microphones to record stereo you would go in here and create a group it's just this little button down here let's go group one new and it's gonna automatically create a grip up here so we're gonna call this snares or whatever it is we want we'll go to the bottom snare and then we'll add that to the group which now you can see here group one snares okay we need to now open the settings here and then we're gonna click editing and then quantize lock audio and you can see this now created a cue that these are selected this now means that when i record audio in here whatever i do to one it's going to do to the other so if i move one it's going to remove both because they are now linked and connected together i know this is kind of getting into a little bit of the more advanced territory but it's something you should know if you're wanting to record you know percussion and drums and things like that within logic you are going to have to do that now once we actually have the vocal or guitar or whatever selected you can click this button here on the a which is what the comp name is so as you create different comps you could do like i want this part that'd be weird to do but now we can go in here we can take that comp that we have and we can do multiple things with it we can set it oh we can flatten it which would basically delete all the other stuff and only show you what we've got there i'm going to do command z to undo that you can also export it to a new track so it'll now retain this but it'll send it to a new track the trick that i do is actually a little bit more advanced you can watch some of my other logic videos to get into that because it would take a little bit longer to do but it allows you to do more within only one track and not having to use comps and sending things to different tracks and things like that but yeah again main point here is you can do all this within here and then you can start doing your pitch correction using flex pitch and more but again this is mainly just a guide to get you started so you can understand really what you can do within logic and then from there hopefully you can start jumping into some of these other videos that i have where i start talking more about the advanced features of logic and more of the specific in detail type features within logic if you haven't already done so make sure you subscribe to the channel for more videos like this more home studio producing videos all together i consistently put out new videos and i'm excited for you to jump along on the channel family if you liked the video give it a like leave a comment that helps me out a ton and if you have any questions anything you'd like me to elaborate on i'd be more than happy to continue the conversation in the comments section down below we'll see you soon

Channel: Nathan James Larsen

Views: 44,506

Rating: 4.9606771 out of 5

Keywords: logic pro x for beginners, logic pro x beginner tutorial, logic pro x tutorial, nathan larsen, logic pro x tutorial for beginners, ultimate beginners guide to logic pro xo, beginner's guide to logic pro x, logic pro tutorial, logic pro beginner, beginner tutorial for logic. pro, everything you need to know about logic pro, nathan larsen tutorial, ultimate logic pro tutorial, ultimate logic pro x tutorial, logic pro x beginner video, logic pro x beginner course, logic pro x

Id: 5t4yEsOZaPA

Length: 44min 15sec (2655 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 03 2020