New Electronic and Hip Hop Drummers
In this tip, Pyramind instructor Dave Earl (aka SFLogicNinja) goes over the new drummers that have been added in Logic Pro X 10.2. He walks you through the new electronic and hip hop drummers and what makes them different and unique from the existing rock, alternative, songwriter and R&B drummers.
SFLogicNinja talks about these new electronic “drummers” within the plugin and teaches you about the specific parameter settings while previewing their functionality. Drum Machine Designer is what Dave calls Logic’s first meta plugin, a massive container that brings you all sorts of sounds (not exclusively drums & percussion).
Adjusting the complexity range settings on the drummers, Dave then demonstrates how to single out a drum and pinpoint the amount of pattern variation and complexity you can get from each particular drum for the ultimate in flexibility. He notes that “in electronic music, you may want the kick to be very solid” while giving “tremendous variety and humanity” to the other instruments, such as shakers and hi-hats.
Save Vocoder as a Patch
In this tip, Logic expert and Pyramind instructor Dave Earl (SFLogicNinja) goes over setting up a vocoder effect and saving the setup (including the required bussing!) as a patch for easy future use.
In order to modulate Logic Pro X’s EVOC 20, you need to set up a sidechain input. Dave demonstrates the setup using his voice as an audio source to modulate the vocoder. Since the setup can be a bit complicated, he walks you through saving the setup as a patch, a feature that has been available in Logic 10.1 and 10.2. By creating a summing stack consisting of three tracks (Vocoder, Vocoder Feed, Sidechain Feed), you can save the stack as an instrument patch – effectively saving the entire setup.
The patch will retain all the bussing you configured, so you won’t have to set it up it each time you want to modulate the vocoder. This will save you a lot of time and improve your workflow, especially if you do a lot of vocoding!
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Tempo Changes
Learn to control and tame tempo to fit your production needs! In this video, Logic expert and Pyramind instructor Dave Earl (SFLogicNinja) demonstrates a quick and easy way to extract tempo information from a song that isn’t “on the grid”.
First he walks you through the popular beat mapping technique, before transitioning into a “quicker and dirtier” way to get tempo information from audio by tapping it in. After tapping in the tempo, apple loops will sync with your audio and the tempo will change as required.
Dave doesn’t stop there. What if you want to produce around the audio to a fixed tempo? In this tip, he shows you how to do just that. By exporting the tempo information into the audio, all of the tempo changes can be baked in regardless of what you set your session tempo to. Dave then creates a new tempo set and fixes it to one solid tempo. The audio file now knows when to speed up or slow down and plays naturally even at the new fixed tempo.
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