Basic Importing

Let’s take a look at the basics of importing your tracks from one project to another.

Open the Media Inspector and go to the “Browser” tab.

Navigate to your project folder. Double click on the project file — it should be the only file in the project folder apart from the subfolders (unless you’ve saved a Reason file or something else in there). If you’ve got a few files in there, it’s the one with an icon like the selected file in this image:

This is what the media inspector will look like once you open a project file:

Select the tracks you want to import, and then choose which data you want to import. There are five columns with checkboxes:

• Content (this means the audio itself)
• Plug-ins (all inserts and their settings)
• Sends (all sends and their corresponding aux channels with replicated inserts and settings)
• I/O (the track’s input and output routing)
• Automation (all automation data you’ve saved on the track)

Logic will only import the data you’ve checked off. If you just want the audio, ensure that Content is the only checked box.

If you’ve selected a group of tracks, ticking a box in one column will check the same box for all selected tracks. If you want all boxes across all columns checked, make your selection and then Alt+click one box. This will happen:

You’ll rarely want everything but it is handy to be able to bring in a whole swab of tracks including all their data.

Now, press the “Add” button in the lower right corner of the Media Inspector. Your tracks will appear in the Arrange and Mixer views!

We could end this tutorial here if we just wanted the most basic uses of Selective Track Import, but there’s a couple of more advanced issues to cover.

Importing Mixer Settings

Maybe you don’t want any audio, but you know you’ve got the perfect vocal channel settings for this song in one of your other projects. Selective Track Import doesn’t simply allow you to import tracks. It allows you to import settings and content onto existing tracks.

In this case, I’m going to import plug-ins and sends from the “Tape Echo Guitar” in one of my other projects and replace the “Beefy Rock Guitar” settings.

Select the track you want to import mixer settings onto. Make sure it’s got that light gray highlight in the Arrange and Mixer views so it’s definitely the selected track. You don’t want to replace other settings you’ve slaved away to perfect!

Open the Media Inspector again and click on the “Browser” tab. Navigate to the source project and double-click on the project file. In my case, I’ve gone to the same project.

This time, however, I’m only selecting one of the tracks. Tick “Plug-ins” and “Sends” only. Ensure everything else is left unchecked. I don’t have any sends on this track, so Logic will gray-out the checkbox and make it unclickable.

Click the “Replace” button at the bottom of the Browser:

The audio and automation will all stay intact, but the Inserts will change, and they’ll have identical settings to our other project’s inserts. Here’s a before and after:

If you do have sends to import, bear in mind that Logic will create the necessary aux channels and replicate the inserts and their settings. You may need to mix their levels in appropriately with the track.

Snapping Imported Audio in Time

What do you do if the audio you’ve imported is out of time with the track? There’s a good chance that it will be! Flex mode comes to the rescue again.

Select the tracks that need to be quantized in the Mixer so that you can create a group. To create a group, click and hold on the empty box just below the I/O settings on the channel strip (if you can’t find it, check the screenshot below with the yellow “1” in each of the boxes — that’s where you want to click). Select an unused group number — in this case number 1.

Enable Flex View by clicking on the button in the toolbar at the top of the Arrange window (it’s between Automation and Set Locators by default). Your tracks will probably get bigger and you’ll see a new menu in the track headers that says by default “Off”.

Click and hold where it says Off until a menu comes up, and select Slicing. Logic will process for a moment, and apply this setting to all tracks within the group. They’ll look a bit different afterwards:

If you play the project back, everything should sit nicely with the new tempo!

Although Logic’s Environment is reputed to be its ‘dreaded’ window, after some understanding and use it can quickly become an inseparable part of your productions. In this tutorial, we will take an introductory look into Logic’s Environment to create a multi-instrument that will help streamline your productions as well as begin to dispel any myths about this extremely useful and often overlooked aspect of Logic.

Step 1

Let’s say you have found a combination of three bass sounds that you want to play in unison to form the main bass element of a current project. You have mapped out your MIDI pattern and decide to copy and paste the region into your remaining bass tracks to get everything playing together. Everything is fine, until you realize there are a few tweaks you want to make to the MIDI.

At this point, you have to derail your creative flow by making edits in one region, deleting all corresponding regions in the other tracks and then pasting the new region in the now empty tracks. All of this is necessary before you can hear an accurate update across all three sounds of even the smallest change. This process quickly becomes tiresome and monotonous at every stage of the creative process, from experimenting with ideas to finalizing the event data. To get around this, we need to employ the following trick.

To start, I have set up a layered bass sound consisting of three basic bass instruments responding to copies of the same MIDI region; all of which I pulled from Logic’s library.

It is not very interesting, but more than suitable for this demonstration.

Here is what it sounds like.

Download audio file (MIDI1.mp3)

Step 2

After listening a few times, I’ve decided that I want to change the pattern around by making some MIDI adjustments. I want to hear those adjustments as I make them and not have to go through the multiple steps necessary to update each individual region each time I change a note. To do this I need to create a fourth MIDI instrument/channel that I will use to control the existing bass instruments.

The beginning of this process requires me to open Logic’s Environment (Window>Environment or ⌘8) where I will then go to the ‘New’ menu located at the top of the Environment window and select ‘Instrument’.

Step 3

Once I have the instrument object, I need to click/drag the top-right patch node of the instrument (the triangle sticking out of the instrument icon) to one of the bass instrument channels within the Environment that I want to control. As I drag the node over the instrument channels, they will become highlighted to let me know that a connection will be made between the channel and the MIDI instrument object when I release the mouse button.

As soon as I make the first connection, a pop-up dialogue will appear and I will have to choose ‘Remove’ from the dialogue box to remove the channel port that Logic assigns by default.

Step 4

Now I will repeat the connection sequence by click dragging the new instrument patch nodes that appear on the instrument icon to whatever instrument channels I want to control (in this case the two other bass instruments).

Once these steps are done, your Environment should look something like this (I took the extra step of naming the new instrument ‘Multi-Bass’ which you can do by selecting the instrument object and then changing the name field in the inspector, located in the upper left).

Step 5

Now I have to go back to the Arrange page and create a new track. It does not matter what type of track it is as I will be converting it in the next step. The only important thing is that it is there.

Step 6

Now I need to drag the MIDI instrument object icon from the Environment to the new track header in the Arrange page. To do this I need both the Arrange page and Environment open and then it is just a matter of dragging the instrument object icon to the track header and dropping it. Logic will update the track header and all associated parameters automatically.

Step 7

Now I can move one of the MIDI regions down to the new MIDI track and delete all the others and still have the same output as when I had three regions. Logic will now read the MIDI within the new multi-bass track and route that MIDI information according to the patch in the Environment.

Here is how it sounds with some slight MIDI editing within just the one region.

Download audio file (MIDI2.mp3)

Although it sounds pretty much the same, the key here is that it only took editing a single region to change the pattern and subsequent output of all three instruments.

Step 8

Now I can hide the instrument tracks and edit the MIDI within the single region and all of my bass tracks will correspond to those edits instantaneously without my having to update other tracks or regions. This greatly increases my productivity, and allows me to preview multiple creative ideas without having to change gears to constantly update MIDI in other tracks.

Of course you are not limited to just three instruments, but generally 3-4 is a good number for sake of clarity. Try experimenting around with different numbers and different types and see what happens.

In the next tutorial, we will take things a bit further in the Environment by looking at the transformer object and programming it to control various parameters (cutoff across all three instruments, etc.) of our multi-instrument by using just a single parameter.

A Quick Recap on Recording Multiple Takes

Before we learn how to edit take folders, let’s look at recording those multiple takes in the first place in case you haven’t done so before.

1. Loop the Section You’re Recording

Click and drag on the bar meter at the top of the Arrange window to set loop locators. When you press play, Logic will loop that section of the song repeatedly. Make sure you set locators for precisely the section you need to capture multiple takes for. Your bar meter will look something like this:

2. Press Record

Hit the Record button. You’ll get your four beat count-in the first time, scurry over to your instrument or mic really quickly!

3. Repeat Until Done

After the count-in, Logic will just keep playing back the same section and recording on new take tracks. You won’t get a count-in with every repetition; after the first play-through it loops seamlessly as you’d expect. Once you feel you’ve captured enough takes to make a good comp from, hit Stop.

Here’s the audio I’m working with — I’ve played a chord progression a bit behind the drum beat, which gives the progression a relaxed sort of feeling. I’ve done this specifically so I have something to edit into place later.

Download audio file (1.mp3)

Step 1

Once you’ve got a set of takes, the first thing you need to do is turn Quick Swipe Comping on that region off. This can be done by clicking the little button with three rectangles inside it in the top right corner of the region, or by selecting the menu option that will appear when you click the arrow button next to it. Here’s a screenshot that shows both:

Step 2

Double-click on the region or click the small arrow in the top left corner of the region to expand the take folder. You’ll see each of your takes each on their own tracks.

Step 3

Select the tool you wish to use to edit the tracks. Not many of the tools will work at this stage, such as the fade tool, but for now all you really need are the scissor and pointer tools. Split the regions with the scissors where you plan to move the tracks.

Here’s what my tracks look like now — quite a bit of cutting going on:

It’s important to note that splitting regions creates new regions — a fairly obvious point, but you will need to remember you’re also separating the comp groups. This makes it easy to swap one chord out for one from another take, but you can just switch the whole thing over to your fifth take or whatever without going through each region’s comp controls one by one.

Step 4

At this stage, delete unneeded regions and shift them into place. I’ve decided that my guitar track feels too relaxed and I’m putting everything back on the accented beats where the average person would expect them to be.

Because of the simplicity of my edit I can remove the silent sections to create a cleaner track and simply move all the regions over half a bar:

Step 5

Comp the edited tracks. At its simplest, this is basically a matter of using the drop down menu to select the take you’d like to use in each of your segmented regions. For a more detailed look at comping, refer to this tutorial, but bear in mind that there may be some changes between Logic Pro 8 and 9 when following the instructions.

Move on to the next step once you’ve turned the best part of each take into one track and you’re happy with it.

Step 6

Are you sure you’re happy with it? Because we’re about to flatten the takes down into your one comp, and once the Undo history runs out you won’t be able to change your mind easily.

Click on the arrow button in the top right corner of the window to bring up the comping dropdown, and select Flatten. Repeat this process for each region.

Step 7

My flattened but separated comps sound pretty choppy:

Download audio file (2.mp3)

Now that the comp is flattened we can use our tools again, so I’m going to fade the regions in and out to take that sharp edge off them.

I had to fade in pretty heavily to make the chords smoother. If I was working on a proper project I would’ve edited much more carefully but since this is a tutorial I just made cuts right on the beat. So how far you need to fade will depend on the type of audio you’re working with (these are quite percussive chord hits so they come in loud and hard) and how well you’ve edited the regions.

Download audio file (3.mp3)

(I am of course aware that the guitar is in desperate need of some reverb, but that’s for another tutorial!)

Step 8

Merge the regions together if you’d like to have a solid block for that chord progression just like when we started. This is simply a matter of selecting all the regions you wish to include, then going to the Region > Merge menu and clicking on Regions.

And there you have it: one comped, flattened, edited and merged region.

This style of programming is really addictive and can be used with pretty much any form of electronic music. Once you have put a sequence together using your synth of choice why don’t you upload the result for us all to hear?

Step 1 – The Tools Needed

All you really need to get this sound is a DAW capable of MIDI sequencing (which is pretty much all of them!) and a synth with glide or portamento and a legato voicing mode. If your not sure what these are just yet, don’t worry I’ll explain as we go.

I have chosen Disco DSP’s Discovery synth, which is a software emulation of the classic Nord Lead 2. Of course you don’t have to use exactly the same synth, I just happen to know this particular instrument handles this sort of sound pretty well. If you want to try a demo of Discovery you can pick one up here.

Disco DSP’s Discovery soft synth

It will prove pretty useful if your chosen synth has some kind of built in distortion or overdrive. A built in delay effect would also be helpful. If your synth doesn’t have these features you can use extra plug-ins for the effects, so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Step 2 – The Sound

The sound we are looking to recreate is that of classic acid machines, namely the Roland TB-303. Obviously the result we’ll get won’t be exactly the same as the magic silver box, in fact it maybe very different but if you get your head around how these sounds are created, the outcome will most certainly have that acid edge.

A Roland TB-303

If we want be authentic the sound should be based on a single saw or square wave oscillator. This will then be fed into a low pass resonant filter and a simple decay based envelope. The classic acid glide is produced by using a mono / legato voicing mode in conjunction with portamento and come overlapped MIDI notes.

Once all these elements are in place we can add some distortion, delay and extra effect such as unison or a phaser for extra depth. So now we know what’s in store lets get started.

Step 3 – Our Oscillator and Basic Sequence

On the original TB-303 there was a choice of either a saw or a square wave oscillator, so to keep things as close to the original as I can I’ll go with a single saw wave here. Although the 303 was only capable of producing one voice we can always double up to create a thicker sound later in the process.

A single oscillator set up on the Discovery

The single saw wave oscillator:

Download audio file (3.mp3)

I have my synth loaded in Logic Pro 9 so this is where I will create my sequence. I have programmed a very simple step based pattern at 127 bpm. This was originally played in, then quantised and finally some extra notes added for pace.

Simple pattern programmed in Logic 9

The basic sequence:

Download audio file (3b.mp3)

With our single oscillator pattern playing back we are about ready to move on to the next step and start spicing things up a little!

Step 4 – Creating the Glide

Adding glide effects is arguably the most important part of creating an acid sequence. It’s this effect that gives acid machines their distinctive character, so we have to make sure things are right at this stage.

In a lot of synth patches that feature portamento the glide effect is on all the time. This is not what we are looking for here as we want only specific notes to glide and these gliding notes should be programmable. To do this we have to use a legato mode. Make sure your chosen synth has this mode available, it should be in the voicing section where you choose the instruments polyphony.

The glide set up in Discovery

When legato mode is engaged and our glide / portamento is turned on the notes should only glide when they overlap. You can test this by playing a note on the keyboard, holding it down and then playing another. This should may the note glide. If, however you simply play the notes with no overlap, no glide should take place.

It’s worth noting at this point that some synths will require ‘auto’ mode to be engaged in the portamento section. On some synths this is the thing that makes notes glide when overlapped. Some experimentation will be needed from synth to synth as they all work in different ways.

Going back to our MIDI sequence, we can now start to choose which notes will glide and which won’t. You can see in my sequence I have just picked a bunch of random notes but of course you may want to be a little more scientific in approach! I tend to find that notes towards the end of bars, or going from low to high work very well here.

The sequence with some notes overlapped for glide effect

The sequence with the glide effect:

Download audio file (4.mp3)

Step 5 – Filters and Envelopes

With our sequence playing nicely we can start to add an extra edge using a resonant low pass filter. The addition of a good dose of resonance is pretty important if we are to achieve that famous acid squelch.

A dedicated filter envelope is also pretty important here and you’ll want to use a fair amount of decay, with a low sustain and release setting. This will clamp down on each note and add real dynamics and movement to the patch. This filter can then be added when needed and even automated for sections of the sequence.

The filter and envelope set up

Your amp envelope will also have to be reasonably close to the filter envelope settings. Of course they don’t have to be matched exactly but a decay based signature does tend to work best here.

Step 6 – Adding Extra Effects

Once you are happy with the way the sequence is firing you can start to add extra effects to add a little spice. Distortion does tend to work very well with resonant sounds and will add new harmonics, making the whole thing richer and fatter. As I said earlier, many synths have distortion built in and many even feature it at the filter stage. If yours doesn’t, pick up your favourite overdrive plug-in … tube emulations can work wonders here.

The sequence with distortion and delay:

Download audio file (6.mp3)

Delay is another effect that can really add to sequence like this. Try something that has a high pass filter so the bottom end remains unaffected. This was all your lovely glides and squelches will be repeated but those all important lows will remain untouched and clear.

The final patch with effects playing back with some drums

The sequence in action with some drums:

Download audio file (6b.mp3)

Why Use Varispeed?

Varispeed isn’t the sort of tool you’ll need to use every day, but it’s the sort of tool that you like to know is available to you. Every now and then you’re halfway through a project when you decide that the tempo just isn’t right and the song should be slower or faster. Varispeed allows you to determine which tempo suits the song better, quickly and easily.

Alternatively, you may be having trouble recording a difficult part in the song. While Varispeed may not be your first port of call, after struggling with the part for too long it’s convenient to be able to slow the whole project down, record your part, and snap it back to normal speed afterwards. Your new part will be in time with everything else.

If you feel like a cheater recording the part slower, at least you can practice at a slower tempo before working your way back up.

And, for maximum fun, Varispeed can be used as an effect as well.

Step 1

Varispeed isn’t instantly available from the transport bar on a default installation of Logic Pro 9. If you right click anywhere on the transport bar you’ll get a menu option that says “Customize Transport Bar…” — click this.

This is what you’ll see:

Tick the box that says Varispeed in the second column, and then click OK.

Step 2

You should now see this button among the group of buttons on the right hand side of your transport bar:

If you click this button, Varispeed is enabled, and you’ll see a section of the transport bar’s information panel go orange.

Step 3

Your project still sounds the same at this point. Varispeed is on, but the change in speed hasn’t been specified yet.

Before we start tempo-shifting, let’s listen to the original piece. I didn’t want to record a bunch of music for this tutorial so I’ve just arranged a little tune from stock loops. It’s a bit busy because I wanted to demonstrate how well Varispeed tempo-shifts multiple audio and MIDI tracks all at the same time.

Download audio file (Original.mp3)

Go back to the orange panel on the information bar. If you drag the bottom section with the numbers in it up or down, you’ll change the tempo. The default view measures the change in percentage, and that change can be between -50% and +100%.

I have to say that I’m pretty impressed with how well Logic retains the tune’s cohesion at the most extreme ends of the spectrum. Here are the -50% and +100% versions, respectively:

Download audio file (Minus50.mp3)
Download audio file (Plus100.mp3)

Step 4

That’s cool, but modifying the tempo by percentages doesn’t quite give us control that’s fine tuned enough for a real song. We need to be able to modify the number of beats per minute directly.

In the top half of the orange section of the transport bar’s information area, there’s usually text such as “Speed Only”. Click and hold here to bring up a menu, and select “Resulting Tempo”. The percentage is gone, and now you can set a specific tempo, which gives you much less comedic and more useful results.

Here’s our song at 130 BPM, up from a base of 120 BPM:

Download audio file (130BPM.mp3)

Step 5

I mentioned that Varispeed could be used as an effect. Most features that allow you to speed up or slow down entire songs try to retain the original pitch of the track, which is what makes using Varispeed to record difficult parts possible.

But Logic gives you the option to change the tempo and the pitch in parallel. If you lower the tempo, you lower the pitch. If you increase the tempo, you increase the pitch.

This allows you to crank the tempo and create one of those silly chipmunk songs that I always see in American movies or create a dark, warped effect by bringing the tempo and pitch down low.

Here’s an example of each, at 66 BPM and 178 BPM respectively:

Download audio file (Pitch66BPM.mp3)
Download audio file (Pitch178BPM.mp3)

To do this, hold down on the top row of the Varispeed information section on the transport bar. This brings up the menu again. Now, switch from “Speed Only” to “Varispeed (Speed and Pitch)”.

At this point you can change the tempo or speed change percentage and laugh at the results.

What you might not realize though is that it’s a surprisingly easy effect to achieve. All you need is a source track and an Auto-tune plug in (or an Auto-tune clone, in this case we’ll use Logic Studio’s built in Pitch Correction).

First I’ll explain the parts of Pitch Correction that we’re going to use. Next I’ll walk through two different examples of how to put the effect to use. In this tutorial I’ll use the term Pitch Correction to mean the same thing as Auto-tune.

Pitch Correction

Pitch correction is mainly described as a way to “correct intonation”. If a singer is a little off pitch it can correct this error and make the performance sound better. But the effect can warp the sound of the audio, so for it to go unnoticed it needs to be applied subtly. Eventually someone figured out that the warped sound can actually be pretty cool, and by applying pitch correction heavily you can get some interesting effects. At last, gone are the days when you actually have to be able to sing to be a singer!

When you first instantiate Pitch Correction on an audio track you see the following window:

The only parameters we’re going to work with in this tutorial are Response and the individual pitch keyboard. What we’re essentially going to do is choose which pitches are allowed to pass through (using the keyboard) and then decide how much of the effect to apply (using the Response parameter). The Range on the left side we’ll generally leave on “normal”, unless you happen to be working with a particularly low pitched source.

The keyboard allows you to choose which pitches the source sound will be tuned to. If you have every note selected (which is the default setting), then the plugin will determine which pitch the incoming signal is closest to and adjust to it accordingly. Sometimes if you’re original signal is especially “pitchy”, the plugin can misinterpret the intended pitch. (For example if you sing a C but it is so flat the plugin thinks you meant B, it will “correct” the pitch to B).

Therefore it’s generally a good idea to only allow the pitches you want to be heard. If you’re original signal only uses Cs, Ds and Gs, then only highlight those three pitches.

The Root and Scale settings allow you to set an entire group of notes with just a few clicks, rather than have to go through and individually select every note that we want to pass through. In this case “Root” is the key you’re working in, so in C major your root is C. Scale is obviously the scale. In almost all cases you’ll want Major Scale or Natural Min Scale, but you have plenty of options available. It can be fun to click through the different choices to see what kind of result you get.

The Response parameter allows us to determine just how much of the effect we want applied. This is determined in milliseconds. The less obvious you want the effect to be, the longer it should take for it to apply which means a higher response setting. For our purposes, since we’re going for a very affected sound, we’re going to set the Response time all the way to 0ms. That way the pitch correction will be applied immediately, giving us the robotic effect we’re looking for.

For Effect

Now that we’ve seen the basic parameters let’s see how they can be applied. For our first example I want to create a downtempo electronica track. I want to use a pitch corrected vocal not as a lead singer, but more like just another sound in the overall texture of the groove. I’ve chosen the following samples from the Deep India library as my base vocal sounds:

Download audio file (1a_DI_Dry1.mp3)
Download audio file (1b_DI_Dry2.mp3)
Download audio file (1c_DI_Dry3.mp3)

The first thing we’ll do is apply Pitch Correction, so I’ll instantiate the Pitch Correction plugin on the audio track. The default setting is a chromatic scale with a Response time of 122ms. As I mentioned earlier, we need the effect to be applied immediately to give us the specific “vocoded” sound we want. I’ll set the Response to 0ms, which gives us the following effect:

Download audio file (2a_DI_Pitch1.mp3)
Download audio file (2b_DI_Pitch2.mp3)
Download audio file (2c_DI_Pitch3.mp3)

I don’t really hear much of the effect, mostly because every pitch from the chromatic scale is being allowed through. Let’s bring them all in towards a cohesive idea by limiting the pitches. In this case I’ll limit them significantly to only 5 notes, a D minor pentatonic scale.

Now listen to how the 0ms Response time and restricted pitch makes the samples sound like they actually belong together:

Download audio file (3a_DI_Pent1.mp3)
Download audio file (3b_DI_Pent2.mp3)
Download audio file (3c_DI_Pent3.mp3)

The Pitch Correction is now where I want to, so I’m going to color up the sound a little. I’ve chosen a Guitar Rig preset called Phase Wurli (Believe me, there was no science behind this decision. I chose Guitar Rig because I figured it would give me a wide range of interesting choices, and then I clicked through presets until I found something I liked). Here are the vocal samples with the Guitar Rig effect applied:

Download audio file (4a_DI_FX1.mp3)
Download audio file (4b_DI_FX2.mp3)
Download audio file (4c_DI_FX3.mp3)

Lastly I’ll apply a touch of reverb and delay. I mentioned that I want this sound to be a part of the overall texture, so the reverb and delay will help make it feel a little more washed out and part of the background.

Download audio file (5a_DI_Dly1.mp3)
Download audio file (5b_DI_Dly2.mp3)
Download audio file (5c_DI_Dly3.mp3)

Here’s how the final result sounds in actual context:

Download audio file (6_DI_Example.mp3)

Lead Vocals

The next example will be more of an upbeat dance track where the vocals are actually the lead, rather than just a background effect. We’ll start with the source track, which is a lead vocal for the song’s chorus. For this song the chorus has actual pitches that need to be matched, so I am going to select those notes individually. Like before, we’re going to set the Response time to 0ms.

To save myself from public humiliation and to save your ears from bleeding, we’re going to skip listening to the “raw” vocal track. Just take my word for it that it needs tuning. Here’s the sample with pitch correction:

Download audio file (7_LIBT_Lead.mp3)

To keep to the conventions of the style I’m going to heavily compress the vocal. I’ll start by instantiating Logic Studio’s Compressor and choosing the “Opto Vocal 01″ preset. I want to take it further though so I’m going to set the Threshold even lower to -18 and the Ratio even higher to 5.4:1. I want it to be so squashed you can taste the compression.

Here’s the compressed lead vocal:

Download audio file (8_LIBT_Compressed.mp3)

Next I want to beef it up a bit more so I’m going to sing the same line an octave down. Again pitch corrected with the same pitches. and with the same compression applied.

Download audio file (9_LIBT_8vb.mp3)

And finally I’ll add a harmony above the top line.

Download audio file (10_LIBT_Harmony.mp3)

Now that there are so many parts going on I don’t feel like the lead is cutting through as well as it could. I’m going to add a Stereo Sample Delay plugin to the lead vocal. The Sample Delay will split the signal to the left and right sides, with one signal delayed just a little. This gives us a “doubling” effect which makes the original sound feel much thicker. I’ll set the right side to delay by 800ms. Too low a setting and you wont notice the thickening, but too high a setting and the split signals wont feel like they still go together.

Here’s how our full Pitch Corrected vocal ensemble now sounds:

Download audio file (11_LIBT_Vox.mp3)

And finally, here it is in a the context of a real song:

Download audio file (12_LIBT_Example.mp3)

One More Time…

Using Pitch Correction for warping vocals doesn’t give you the same level of control and nuance as a traditional vocoder, but it does allow you to get an interesting effect with just a few simple clicks. All you have to do is turn it on, pick out your notes, and viola: you sound just like any other electronica diva.

You don’t have to restrict your use of Pitch Correction to vocals, of course. What happens when you use it on a guitar solo? Or even a drum loop? These tools are here for fun and there are no rules. Experiment!

I’ll walk through a few examples of how gates can be used this way using various DAWs. Even if your software isn’t featured here don’t worry, these techniques are generic and can be translated to pretty much any gate plug-in.

Step 1 – The Basic Gate

As most of you are probably aware the primary use for a gate is to reduce noise and any unwanted signal that is present in your recordings. For example you may have a vocal take with rumble, computer noise or heavy breathing in between phrases. A gate is the perfect tool for removing these problem areas, often with zero impact on the parts you want to keep.

As a gate is really just an automated level control they use very little to no CPU to run. Most DAWs include one or even two gates as standard and these will often be bundled with a number of pre-sets to get you going.

Propellerheads Record’s built in noise gate

As the process of gating isn’t particularly exciting and is often seen as purely a problem solving exercise, the gate can be somewhat overlooked as a creative effect. Let’s run through a few examples of how we can think out side the box, from a simple alternative use for our gate to something a little more special.

Step 2 – Using Gates as Transient Designers

First up let’s take a look at using our gates in an almost traditional way, but instead of reducing we’ll try using it in a similar way to a transient designer. This basically means that we can actually remove parts of a drum track or loop. This can be really useful for cleaning up our overall sound.

Let’s start by choosing a loop with a fair bit of noise present. Here I have chosen a .rex file for speed but of course this technique can quite easily be applied to a drum group / buss and will work equally well on acoustic drums as it does on electronic sounds.

The untreated loop used

The untreated loop:

Download audio file (2.mp3)

As the loop has been loaded in Cubase 5 I have used the standard, bundled Steinberg Gate plug-in. I have started by initialising the plug-in so that no gating takes place and no signal can be heard, this is a good starting point and is often the best way to go when using dynamics processors in general.

The Cubase Gate

The next step is to bring the gates threshold control down until you can hear the peaks of the loop come through. In this case the first peak to show its head is the top of the kick and snare. Keep pushing the threshold until the majority of these major elements are playing but the other sounds are still gated.

The gates threshold being altered

Although we can filtered out many of the sounds in the loop, to make the remaining sounds a little more realistic we have to alter the release and hold times. When doing this try to mimic the actual release times of the drum sounds themselves. In doing this you may get some ‘bleed’ from the other sounds in the loop but this is to be expected and shouldn’t be too obvious in the mix.

The final gate settings

The gated loop:

Download audio file (2b.mp3)

When comparing the before and after you should hear a dramatic change in the loop and using this technique you can slightly clean up your drum parts or completely transform them depending on the intensity of your settings.

Step 3 – Creating Your Own Gated Reverbs

Most fully featured, modern reverb plug-ins will contain some kind of gated reverb effect and they can work really well on short percussive sounds or drums. Although these presets can work well you can gain much more control over this effect if you can create it using your own processors.

In this example I’ll use a single snare sound. You can hear that in it’s dry form it’s not particularly interesting and is maybe a little too dry. By adding a gated reverb we should be able to make the sound a lot more useable.

The original snare

The untreated snare:

Download audio file (3.mp3)

In this instance I have decided to load the sound up in Live 8 and because of this I am using Live’s bundled gate and reverb plug-ins. Again this technique can be achieved using pretty much any reverb and gate combo.

The first thing I did was to add a pretty standard reverb patch to the snare. The decay is pretty long and although the sound is nice as an effect it would be far to long to use throughout a mix and robs quite a lot of the direct power and snap of the untreated dry version.

Basic Ableton reverb patch

The snare with reverb:

Download audio file (3b.mp3)

So that we can achieve the effect and size of the reverb we need to add a gate to the end of the chain. With a super fast attack dialled in, you should be able to play with the threshold to allow the majority of the sound through. The reverb tail will be cut off and stop the sound from becoming to washed out.

The Ableton gate used

The final gated reverb effect:

Download audio file (3c.mp3)

At this point you’ll want to play with the reverb mix, gate release and gain reduction amount. This will allow you to match the reverb time to the snares release and also ensure there are no unwanted clicks and pops introduced by the gating. You can hear that the result is a lively, stereo snare which will really find its own place in the mix.

Step 4 – Rhythmical Gating and Gated Patterns

One of the most creative ways to use your gate plug-ins is to produce rhythmical patterns with them. As a lot of DAWs now feature native side chaining, you can now feed your gate with just about any signal you like. This allows you to use the gate as a sort of automated tremolo or pattern generator. Some really excellent results can be achieved with a little imagination.

Moving over to Logic 9.02, I have loaded up instrument and percussion loops. I have used the more fully featured of Logic’s two gates here as this will allow us a little more control over the finished sound.

Keyboard loop:

Download audio file (4.mp3)

Percussion loop:

Download audio file (4b.mp3)

Untreated basic mix:

Download audio file (4c.mp3)

The two loops used

The gate is placed on the instrument loop and the percussion loop is set to control the side chain circuit. This will allow us to use the peaks of the percussion pattern to activate the gating effect. Once this configuration is set up start to bring the threshold of the gate down until you hear some gating occur.

The sidechain routing

The mix with gating taking place:

Download audio file (4d.mp3)

Once the gating is taking place try sending the percussion to loop to ‘no output’ or a muted group. You should now hear the instrument loop with only the gated effect. This will allow you to make more exact adjustments to the gates settings. Of course you can always leave the percussion loop out of the mix and just use t as a trigger. if you prefer you can program your own trigger part using midi, this will allow a more personalised pattern to be produced.

The Logic noise gate plug-in

The gated loops in isolation:

Download audio file (4e.mp3)

Recently we showed you how to use Logic Pro 9’s Drum Replacer. This tutorial covers a technique that allows you to fix drum tracks by replacing the drums using previous versions on Logic.

In the following tutorial we’ll be looking into
Logic’s Audio to Score function as a way to replace drums. We’ll see
how to transform your drum hits to MIDI and then replace them with a
better sounding sample.

Let’s start by listening to the drum
part we’ll be replacing. It’s a pretty simple beat, which lends
itself easily to drum replacing.

Download audio file (drums.mp3)

We’ll start by replacing the kick drum,
which doesn’t have the necessary oomph it needs. We’ll be needing all
the audio information from the original track and by converting it to
MIDI. Logic makes an estimate of how hard the kick drum hits by
scanning the amplitude of the waveform, and transforming that
information to a respective velocity value. That way, we get a fairly
realistic human feel to our MIDI.

Step 1 – Clean Up Your Track

If your drum tracks were recorded all
at once I’m guessing there is some amount of bleed from other drums.
You might be hearing a little bit of the hi-hat and snare through
your kick drum mic, and a little bit of kick drum from your snare
mic. Focusing on the kick, I think the best way to clean up your
track is to start by gating it.

Try to gate it as much as possible until
only the kick drum comes through, and it doesn’t open up to the snare
hits. You could also re-record the gated track so that Logic only
sees the gated waveform and doesn’t get confused with snare and
hi-hat hits. I gated my kick and routed it to a new track to be
recorded.

I put the output of the old kick drum
to BUS 1, created another track and
put the output to the new to BUS 1 as well. That way I get a really
clean kick drum sound without bleed from the other instrument. We
don’t really have to worry about the sonic quality of the kick drum,
nor the gating as we will be replacing it completely in the next few
steps.

Listen to the kick drum before gating:

and after gating:

Download audio file (kickgated.mp3)

Step 2 – Create a Destination MIDI Track

Create a new
software instrument track below the intended track you want to
replace. We’ll be using this track later for our new kick.

Step 3 – Use the Audio to Score Function

Double click on
the whole audio region. This should pop up the sample editor window.
In the sample editor window you will find the Audio to Score function
in > Factory > Audio to Score.

This should pop up
a window that has a lot of buttons. Don’t worry, we won’t be using a
lot of them for now.

Select Drums Fast in
the preset box, or depending on your song you might want to pick
Drums Medium or Drums Slow.

Using the threshold button you can
fine-tune which hit is converted to MIDI, based on how much amplitude
it has. If you have an un-gated, bleedy track, then this serves as a
way to filter out the unwanted noise the mic picked up during
recording. But we have a very clean bass drum track so we don’t have
to worry about that for now. We’ll come to it later.

Before you click on Process be
absolutely sure that you have clicked and selected the empty software
instrument track below. If you still have the audio track selected,
Logic will just create a MIDI track over the audio track and delete
the audio track. It’s a hassle if you don’t realize it, and then come back
to see that your audio tracks are gone.

So when you do click Process
Logic should create a MIDI file in
the software instrument track. It should also open up a window with the
music score, but we can close that as we won’t be using it.

Step 4 – Transpose the MIDI Track

After using the Audio to Score function to transform your audio to
MIDI, you will end up with something similar to this.

We want to have each
MIDI note play the same note – i.e. a drum hit. We will have to move all
of these tiny notes to one specific note on the piano roll. Luckily
there’s a much easier way of doing it than having to move each and
every note to the same key.

In the piano roll window, select every
note by either dragging your mouse over the notes selecting them, or
just simply click CMD + A. Now go to Functions > Transform >
Transposition.

This will open the Transposition
window. We want each note to have the same fixed value so click on
where it says Max and we change it to Fix. After that we can select
which key on the piano roll will discharge the sample. I’m picking C1
since it is where the bass drum is usually located. Click Select and Operate, and then close the window.

You should en up with something very
similar to this. Notice that each MIDI note is now in the same place.

Step 5 – Load the Sample

Now that we have our MIDI
information, we need a sample to go with it. In the software
instrument track, load Ultrabeat as your synthesizer in the input
path. Ultrabeat is an extremely powerful drum sequencer that has so
many that buttons and features that you can play along with it
endlessly. For a completely different perspective on Ultrabeat, check
out Toby Pitman’s tutorial on creating
gated sequences.

I’m actually not going to use any of
Ultrabeat’s features right now. I’m just going to use it to load a
sample. Obviously Ultrabeat comes with a lot of different drum kits,
with loads of different samples and sequences to work with. But right
now I’m going to show you how you can load your own samples into
Ultrabeat’s powerful drum engine.

In the OSC 2 section, Sample should be
selected. We click on the little arrow above the waveform and select
Load Sample. Ultrabeat lets you load whatever sample you happen to
have in your possession, and I loaded a tight modern rock kick I
thought suitable for the song.

Now, if you have followed each step
closely, and have transformed and transposed your audio to a MIDI note on
the correct key on the piano roll, the sample should playback once
you hit play, following the exact same kick drum pattern as the
former audio.

So we have replaced this:

With this:

If you have a sample that you like but
it doesn’t quite have the low end oomph you want, check out my other
tutorial on sidechaining
a sine wave to your bass drum. That’s a good trick to get a tight
low end to your kick. Also, if you want to completely change the
feeling of the song, you can put weird sounds instead of drum hits.
That way you can have the feeling of a human drummer with radically
different electronic sounds.

Step 6 – Replace the Snare

The snare has an annoying ringing sound to it, so we want to
replace that as well. We might be able to salvage the snare with some
radical EQ, but sometimes it’s just easier to replace it completely.
We won’t be gating it or doing any processing this time around.

We need to redo everything just like before, except for one detail: in the
Audio to Score window there is a parameter that says Velocity
Threshold. We use this threshold like a gate: sounds below
the threshold, like hihat noise and other bleed, won’t be converted
to MIDI.

The screenshot below shows the audio that will be converted
to MIDI when the threshold is at 1. See all the little white lines
that are not as high as the other ones? This is extra noise we don’t
want so we up the threshold until it looks clean.

In the next screenshot, I have put the threshold at 6, which makes all
the extra white lines go away and we’re left with only the necessary
snare information.

That’s two ways of doing it. You can either clean up the audio
track yourself, by gating it and re-recording, which can be time
consuming. Or you can use the threshold in the audio to score feature
to clean up excessive bleed.

In the transposition window, we need to move all the MIDI notes to
the same one again, but don’t forget to change on which key the snare
should sound, otherwise we will only be hearing a lot of bass drum.
Change it to D1 and then load your new sample into D1 in Ultrabeat.

If you don’t like working with MIDI and would like to convert it
over to audio again you can always route Ultrabeat to a new audio
track and record your MIDI files to audio. You do it the same way we
did before with the kick drum, routing Ultrabeat’s output to a bus,
creating a new track with the bus as it’s input then recording the
whole thing again while you grab a cup of coffee.

So by replacing these two crucial drum
sounds, the kick and the snare we have made this drum beat:

sound like this:

Now all we have to do is start mixing.
And when we’ve got good ingredients to mix with, the end result is
always going to be better.

Conclusion

Drum replacement is a great way to
salvage horrible sounding tracks, saving a good song from sounding
bad. Of course, if you are recording the drums in the first place you
should take care that your drums sound good from the get-go so you
don’t have to resort to these measures. But if you get sent badly
recorded drums sounds to mix, there’s no reason you shouldn’t use
every tool at your disposal to make them sound better.

I hope you found this tutorial useful and can use these tricks for your projects. Of course,
this is not the only way to replace drums and I’ve only skimmed the
surface of drum replacement, so if you have anything more to add,
please let us know in the comments.

Step 1

The first thing you need to do is turn on Flex Mode for the tracks you want to edit. First, go to the View menu at the top of Arrange view, and select Flex View. A new button will show up on all your track headers, which will show a drop-down menu if you click and hold on it. Your track headers will now look something like this:

Step 2

In this tutorial, I’m going to adjust a bass guitar, so I’ve set my tracks to Monophonic, as there’s only ever one note being played at a time. We’ll look at the other Flex Modes, as they’re known, in the future. Monophonic is a pretty safe bet for most of the things you’d generally try to edit, where no more than one sound or note is played at one time.

You’ll see that when you set a Flex Mode, Logic analyzes the audio and then you see where it has decided the Flex Markers are (these mark each note that you can shift). Your track will look something like this:

Step 3

To start manually moving notes into the positions you want, you’ll need to select the Flex Tool from the tool selector menu (it’s the first of two buttons at the end of the strip the Arrange view menus are on, and will read Left Click Tool when you hover over it).

Step 4

Now when you hover over areas of the audio where Logic has placed a Flex Marker, the cursor will change. You can now drag the note left or right into place and snap it to a specific beat in your time signature. I’ve moved some notes on my bass track. Here’s what the track looked like, and sounded like, before the move:

Download audio file (1.mp3)

I then shortened the same bass riff so it took up only two bars:

Download audio file (2.mp3)

Moving notes around is as simple as that, at least when they’re clear and isolated from other noises you may have been recording in the room at the same time.

Step 5

One really cool feature that Apple built into Flex Time is the ability to snap transients on one track to transients on another track, and it’s easy to do. All you need to do is click and hold on the transient you want to move, and drag the mouse up to the track you want to snap it to. Without releasing the mouse, line it up with the transient on that track you want the sound you’re shifting to be in time with. When you see a yellow line at that point, release the mouse and Logic will snap the sound you’re moving so it’s precisely in time with the sound you used as a reference point.

I’ve synchronized some notes on my bass drum and bass guitar tracks. I’ve muted the other drums so you can hear how this works:

Download audio file (3.mp3)

Step 6

I always prefer to spend hours snapping sounds to the grid manually rather than use automatic quantization, but many of you automatically quantize regularly. You can do that in Logic, even with audio. Personally I wouldn’t use the feature unless I had ten minutes in which to straighten out the timing of an entire drum track before tracking the next instrument, but if you regularly quantize MIDI, I don’t see any reason not to do so with audio.

Locate the Channel Strip’s Inspector. It looks something like this, and sits far above the faders in the arrange view:

You’ll need to activate a Flex Mode on that track. When you do, the first dash in the Inspector will turn into a Quantize drop-down menu. Click on it. You will see this menu, with plentiful options:

Click on the degree of quantization you want and watch as the position of your notes change. Hopefully, for the dignity of the musician you’ve recorded, they don’t change too much.

Your audio has been quantized!

Step 7

But what if you want to quantize something based on the groove of another track in your project? That’s easy to do. In the screenshot of the Quantize menu you may have noticed the strange, unofficial looking options near the end such as “KickIn_05″. These are my personal groove templates.

Simply click on the track you want to base your groove template on, ensure it has Flex activated, click on the Quantize menu, and then click “Make Groove Template.”

Now navigate to the track you want to quantize, click on the Quantize menu, and then click on the corresponding groove template in your list.

Quantizing one track to another track is as easy as that!

Step 1 – Project Set Up

I’ve started off by pulling a pretty bad snare skin recording into Logic. The mic has picked up a lot of cymbals and room noise, and to make things worse the tone of the snare is also terrible. Usually you’d mix your recorded drums and your replacement drums together, but in this case it’s safe to say that won’t be necessary. Have a listen:

Download audio file (1.mp3)

Step 2 – Find Samples

Now that you’ve got the track in Logic, it’s time to look for a sample that works with the song. Don’t rush this or you may as well stick with the original recording! You may want to collect several as it can be hard to judge without listening to the sample in place. If you already have a collection of samples ready to be used in Logic, you can just audition those.

To audition these snares you’ll need to load them into EXS24 (which you can learn more about here).

Step 3 – Open Drum Replacement

Select the track you wish to drum replace and click on the menu option Track > Drum Replacement/Doubling. For a moment Logic will analyze all sound files on the selected track and then a settings window will appear. It looks like this by default:

Step 4 – Basic Settings

Now you need to dial in the basic settings. In this case, I’m changing the instrument to Snare, and the mode to Replacement. Doubling mode can also be used for replacement when you intend to mix the two sounds together — the only thing Replacement does differently is it mutes all regions on the old track once you’ve created the replacement track.

Step 5 – Relative Threshold

This is the fiddliest step in the process. You’ll see that a bunch of yellow lines appear across the audio once you open the Drum Replacement window. These lines are linked with the Relative Threshold setting. Relative threshold determines how loud the transients need to be before Drum Replacement recognizes them and adds a corresponding sample to the replacement track.

With well-isolated drum recordings, this part of the process can actually be pretty easy — just drag the slider to the right until yellow lines show up for all the drum hits, but not so far that the quiet hissy bits are included. But with a recording like the one you heard before, a bit of time needs to be spent on this step.

My biggest piece of advice here is a really simple one, and that’s to zoom in on your track like crazy. You want to be able to see clearly where the transients are and how much space is between them. It looks like you can see them when zoomed out, but it’s much easier to tell when 0.1dB to the left is too far when you can see all the transients up close and personal.

Now that you can see closely, play with the slider and get it so that most of the snare hits have a corresponding yellow line.

Step 6 – The Fiddly Stuff

At this stage, some will no doubt be left out as you reach the “fine line” where there’s a struggle to include quieter hits without including background noise. I recommend manually adjusting the numeric value by 0.1 at a time rather than using the slider when you’re at this very picky stage of the process, because the slider tends to move in larger numbers than we want.

There will certainly be some snare hits left out. Bizarrely enough, I’ve seen the software continue to exclude certain hits that are visibly louder while including much quieter hi-hat hits. It’s very frustrating at times but the hits it has excluded have never been too important, so there must be some method to this madness.

You can see here that there’s one snare hit that’s been left out:

And once I jack up the threshold a bit, it’s still left out — but those hi-hat hits you can see in the first image are included:

Step 6 is a prequel step telling you to isolate your damn microphones!

Step 7 – Mixing the Two Sounds

In this example I used Replacement mode because I didn’t want to mix between the two tracks as most engineers will do. You can reverse this if you want to mix the tracks — just right click on the muted regions in the original drum track and click Mute on/off.

At this point you’re happy with the threshold and with the sound of the new drum, so mix the two tracks together until you’ve got a happy medium of the more natural original, and the sampled snare. The reason they’re mixed is that the replacement track doesn’t capture the room’s response to the snare drum at all, and while it does use the amplitude of the original to designate the velocity of the replacement, no MIDI can beat the subtlety of dynamics in recorded music.

Step 8 – Listen to the Finished Product

Go back to Step 1 and listen to our original snare, and compare it to this:

Download audio file (2.mp3)

The tone of the drum is better, the noise isn’t drowning out the snare itself, and the liveliness of the room that we’ve lost is retained by our overhead and room microphones. To show you the difference, here’s what our original drum track would sound like:

Download audio file (3.mp3)

And here’s the same selection of drum recordings at the same levels, but with our replaced snare:

Download audio file (4.mp3)