Making Music in Logic Pro X: Quickstart

1. Intro: Welcome to my class, making music in Logic Pro ten, Quickstart. My name is David and I'm a music producer and sound designer. And for the past decade, I've been living and working in China. I've been making music as a guitar player for more than 25 years. And I still think nothing really beats playing in front of a live audience. But over the past few years, I've also been producing music for television and video games like this trap that you can hear now. And some others like these. The cool thing about this is pretty much anyone can do it and it's really quite easy to get started. So I made this class to show you how I'm going to help you get started making music in Logic Pro ten. Quickly. We'll look at the basics of logic. How to form courts, how to make chord progressions, melodies, baselines, drones. How to properly mix the different elements of your soul, how to use it. That's plug-ins like reverb, EQ and compressors. And how to master a song to get a professional sound. The best thing is you can do all of this without having any experience of Logic Pro or any other music production software. And without knowing any music theory or being able to play any musical instruments. This course is for anyone who wants to get started making music in logic content. Whether that's because you want to start a career as a producer or you want to make beats, or you want to make unique music for your TikTok and YouTube videos. Or if you're just looking for a new creative and rewarding hobby, you don't need to buy an expensive extra equipment or third party plugins or fancy lighting or anything like that. You can do all of this just with your computer and a copy of Logic Pro Tem. So if you're ready to start making your own professional quality music, I'll see you in my class. 2. Workspace: Hi, thank you for joining my course. I really appreciate having you here. Now for the first few lessons we're just going to focus on the basics of Logic Pro ten. Because in the beginning it can feel a little bit overwhelming, a little bit intimidating. So in this lesson we're going to be having a look at the workspace itself. We're going to look at how to create tracks. We go into audition a few different instruments. So when you start a new project in Logic Pro ten, this is the first option that comes up. Choose a track type. Now by default it will probably be on audio, which is very, if you're using an external microphone or you're plugging in a keyboard, something like this. We're going to be using the instruments that come with logic. So go ahead and click on software instruments on the left-hand side. Don't worry about these settings for now, you can click Create, and you've made your first track. So here we can see the logic workspace. On the right-hand side, you've got your track list here. This is where your different instruments, your tracks or show up. Over here. This is a timeline. This is where the notes that you record will appear. On the left-hand side. This is the library. This is where you're going to select an audition different instruments. And this middle section is the inspector, which we'll look at a little bit later. This is where you'll be choosing things like effects plug-ins to change up the sounds of things later. Now these two regions, you can toggle them on and off for more room. This one will close the library, this one will close the inspector. This third button is useful. This is the Quick Help button. If you toggle that on wherever you point the mouse cursor, this box is going to give you some information. So it's going to tell you what the different buttons do. That's really useful when you're first getting started. So you've got your first track and you've got your first instruments. You're going to want to listen to how it sounds so you can audition it. Now if you have a midi keyboard pressing the keys will let you hear it. But if you don't have a midi keyboard, don't worry, you can press Command plus k and it will bring up what's called Musical Typing. Now this is like a tiny, tiny piece of a keyboard. And you can see that the keys here, they have the letters from your computer keyboard. So if I press some other computer keys, you can hear the notes play. And if you want to shift down an octave, you can use the Z key. And x will shift up. The tab key is going to act like the sustain pedal on a piano. So if I play a chord that is sustained, but maybe it's not a piano we're looking for. We can go to the library, we can start looking at some other instruments. Let's say a base. Maybe I want to write studio base has happened. Listen, a little bit too high pitch has shifted back down. Or a liverpool bass is going to Paul McCartney type vibe going on. But you probably want more than one instrument and to have more than one instrument, then you're going to need another track. To create a new track. You can press this Plus button. Here. You'll see we have the option again from the beginning that choose a track type. I'm going to create a new software instruments again. And it's going to bring up the default patch, which is this classic electric piano. And I can switch between the different instruments, different tracks just by clicking. But there's another really useful instrument that's kind of, it's kind of hidden away in logic and I don't know why. It's called the alchemy synth. So I'm going to show you a different way of choosing an instrument and show you the alchemy synth. So I'm gonna go ahead and close the library. And I'm going to create a new track. This time, instead of the default patch, I'm going to click empty channel strip and creates. Now we have an empty, an empty track. You can't hear anything when I press the keys. And instead of using the library, I'm going to go down to the inspector and I'm going to click on instruments. And it will bring up this menu here. Now if you have some third party instruments, if you start buying some libraries with different sampled instruments, they'll appear down here at the bottom. It's kind of hidden, difficult to find it first. We're just going to be focusing on the ones that come with logic. So at the top here you'll see alchemy click on stereo. And here is the alchemy synth. Now this is a really powerful little sense that comes with Logic Pro Tem. And it has a whole bunch of different presets. You can see over here 3,299, so lots of different sounds going on and you choose between them with this menu on the right hand side. So if I just select the first one within the instrument, there are different presets They've dialed in. So if I click on one of these buttons down here, we go for stutter, vocal melody. So they've already dialed in these different presets for you, but you can still play around. You can mess with these settings. You can't break it. Has an experiment, see what sounds you could find. It's a filter through other instruments. They have these different category sections. So if I was looking for a pad, I'll click on pads. I can filter by subcategory or genre. Let's go for a, an ambient pad. Something complex above the clouds that so they should not. And again, it has different variations on it. Let's try this rich lead. So a whole host of different sounds that you can find inside alchemy. And let's say you find one that you like, but it's not right for the particular song you're working on. What you can do is you can assign it a rating. Now, this means that later on you can come back and you can filter through the different sounds that you've already listened to. The ones that you like or you didn't like, and you can quickly find them again. Or you can use this search feature if you're looking for a particular sound. So now you should be feeling a little bit more confident in the Logic Pro ten workspace. And you know how to create tracks, and you know how to audition instruments. So the three main takeaways from this lesson. Now more familiar with the workspace of Logic Pro Tem, have a look around. There are all kinds of other features and functions that we didn't talk about. You might find some of them useful. Try using the Quick Help button so that you can learn more about the different features in Logic Pro. And try creating some tracks, add some extra trachs to your project, or addition some different instruments. Try to find some sounds that you like to use for making a song. In the next lesson, we're going to be having a look at how you can set the tempo, how you can set accounting, and how you can start recording instruments in Logic Pro ten. I'll see you there. 3. Recording: So in our last lesson, you looked at auditioning different instruments and creating tracks. So by now you're probably ready to start recording some music into logic. So in this lesson, we're going to have a look at time signatures, setting the tempo using the metronome and we're going to start recording into your projects. We'll also have a look at cycles, so you can start getting loops going with your music to make it easier for you to build up different layers of instruments. To record in logic, all you need to do is press this red record button at the top, or press the R key on your computer keyboard and it will start recording. You can see that the playhead tons read starts to scrub along to the right. And to stop the recording, you can just press space bar or the stop button to play it back. You Space-bar again. Now when you're writing a song, you're going to want to decide on the tempo. That's how fast or how slow it is. And you can change the tempo with this value here if you click and drag upwards, so you can increase it, click and drag down. You can decrease it. Here the tempo, you need to turn on the metronome, and that's done with the metronome button here. So now if I press Play, you'll be able to hear this tempo. And I can increase it or decrease it. If you double-click here, you can set a specific value. Now by default, the project is going to be in 44 time. Most music these days is in 44. But if you wanted to do something different, like a waltz in 34, you can change the time signature by clicking in the panel here. And then you can scroll up here are some standard time signatures, or you could enter a custom one if you're feeling a little bit different. Now because it's not easy to press the Record button and then instantly have your hands in the right place to stop playing. There's what's called the counting function. So if you highlight this button here, now when you press Record, you'll hear 1 bar of the tempo before it starts to record. And that gives you time to get your hands in place to get ready and also to have a feel for the tempo, like somebody counting in to start a song. If I hit record now, by default, it will give you a one-bar count in. But if you wanted longer, you could right-click and you could choose to have more past accounting. Now if like me, you're not very confident keyboard player. One really useful trick is if you set this tempo to something slower. So if I put that down to 100, then you record it's a slow tempo. And then after you've recorded, you can increase the tempo again. That means that you don't have to play the keyboard as quickly as you want it to In your finished. So let's try that now. Let's try recording something that's a slower tempo and then speeding it up afterwards. So I'll hit record. I stop. Okay, So if we listen to that back this tempo, 120. And that was much easier to play because it was only playing on the recording at 100 bpm instead of 120. So now that we have some music recorded, what we can do is we can cycle it, we can loop it over and over. And to do that, we can use this cycle button, or we can click in this region, or you can use the C button on your keyboard. So what you can see is this area is lit up. And that means that this part is going to cycle over and over. And we can move this around or we can stretch the region out. I'm going to make it 8 bar. Now when we press Play, it's just going to repeatedly play through this 8 bar. We could add another instruments on the top. So I'm going to add the same sense, but maybe with a different preset. Maybe this bright up. And that's a record. Just hit the record button. Now you'll notice that it's not quite in time. I didn't have the metronome on. I didn't press the key at the right moment. So we can correct that. We don't need to go and record it again. We can correct it using the editor. You can access that either by double-clicking on this clip or clicking this little button here. So now we can see the notes that I played. And you can see the timeline. You can see the bars across the top. If I wanted to change this, I can literally just move them into the right position. If I'd hit the wrong notes. It's moving back into the right place. Something else that you can do if you want to make it in time, is if you highlight these notes. You can use the quantisation button here. Now what that's going to do is it's going to lock that note into the closest beats or fragments of a beat. So in this case it's one-sixteenth note. So if I hit Q now, you can see they're all nudged a little bit so that on the beat. Now be careful with quantization because if you do it too much, if everything is to perfectly on the beats, it doesn't really sound natural. It doesn't sound like a real human. So it's useful for getting things closer to the beat. And to do that, you can reduce the strength of the quantisation. That way at 100% fixed the timing of your notes, but it will fix them. Let's say if we go around 50 per cent and then it's going to be more accurate, but it's not going to be too robotic. So let's listen back to that and hopefully this will be more in time now. I still don't think it's quite right. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to nudge this. Let's try again. Now another really useful function of Logic Pro Tem I'd like to share with you is the capture recording feature. Now it's kinda hidden away in the menu. But if you go to the top and you right-click on this menu bar and you choose Customize. Here you've got capture recording. And if you check that, you'll notice you'll have a second record button next to the first. And what that does is, let's say you played something on the keyboard, you liked how it sounded, but then you thought, I missed it. I wasn't recording that button is going to recall the things that you've just played. So if I add another instrument to demonstrate this, let's just go for a lead and 70s synth. And let's say I'm messing around on the keys. And maybe I like the sound of that. I hit this button and you can see the things I just played. Let me mute these trucks. Those become available for then you can edit them, you can move them around, you can drop them into your sound, really powerful feature. So now you know how to record into Logic Pro ten. And you're more familiar with the metronome setting the tempo using the time signature features. What I'd encourage you to do is to use the record Functions and Logic Pro gets a little bit of practice. Set the metronome, set the time signature, use the counting if you're going to be playing in live and get used to using the cycle region so that you can have a piece of music playing on repeat in a loop so that you can start adding extra layers. So now you're pretty much ready to start making your own song. But you might be sitting there thinking, well, that's great David, but I'm not a musician. I don't have any music theory. I don't know how to make those courts. In the next lesson, I'm going to be showing you a really simple way for inputting chords into logic that you don't need to be, you don't need to be a music expert. You don't need to be a musician or to play the keyboard. Anything else? 4. Chords: In this lesson, I'm going to show you a different way of putting notes into logic without playing a keyboard, either a physical one or on your computer. I'm going to show you something called poured codes, which is a way for you to build up chords without knowing any music theory. And then I'm going to show you how you can make those chord sound a little bit more natural, a little bit more human, as though they really have been played by a musician. So let's dive straight in and start inputting some notes. You can see I've got some cello has loaded up from the library. I'm just going to hide the library and I'm going to hide the inspector. So we have a little bit more room. And then in the timeline, I'm going to right-click and choose create a midi region. And this will give us a blank space to start inputting some notes that's only one byte long, so I'm going to click and drag that out. So now we've got 4 bar. And then I'm going to click on the editor to bring up this section at the bottom called the piano roll. I'm going to resize that so we can see what's going on. Than the left. You can see the piano keys and the note C is marked at every octave. If you click these notes, you can hear them play. To add a note to the timeline. I'm going to press and hold Command and then click. So you can see that's created a note here. I'm just going to shorten that down. So you'll notice here we've got two little tool tips. Now, the one on the left hand side is showing what your left-click on the mouse is going to do. The one on the right hand side is showing what's going to happen if you hold the Command key and then click. So in this case, I'm using the pencil tool that's going to lead me to draw the notes in. Here if I add a couple more notes. And just the left of here, you can see the velocity. Velocity is how hard or how soft the note plays. If I click the first note, can I change this and increase the velocity? You can see the color changes to show us that it's become a higher velocity is going to play harder. This one, I'm going to reduce the velocity. Now you can hear the difference. So let's try adding a chord. A chord is just a group of notes together. We're going to start with a C major chord. So our root node is going to be C. So I'm going to go ahead and click in here. And now we've got the C, that's the root nodes. Now if you look on the cord codes that I've provided, you'll see that a major chord has the code 047. So zero is our root nodes C in this case. And now we're going to count for lines up from here. So this is zero, here is 123.4. So I'm going to create a note here. And then I'm going to add one at seven. So this is 4567. And here we've got the notes, the chord of C major. So let's make that code a little bit longer. I'm just going to drag these notes out. Now let's try changing that to a minor chord. And we can see from the code codes that a minor chord is zero, three-sevenths. So I could just change this note here. We've got the zero. This is a 4.7 because this is major. Change it to minor by changing this to three. So now this will be a C minor chord. So using those code codes, you can program in just about any of the codes that you might need for making a chord progression in Logic Pro. So let's put together a really simple and common four chord progression, which goes C major, a minor, F major, G major. The first thing I'm going to do is change this C minor chord back to a major. So instead of 037, we're going to go 047. So I'll just click and drag this now. Now we need an, a minor chord here. So I'll move the scrub here. So to find that a notes for our zero position, I'm going to count from C. So just counting the white keys, we've got C, D, E, F, G, a. So I know that this is a. And I'm going to add a note that's zero. It's a minor. So 037, we've got 01234567. And I can check that that's a minor by clicking, dragging and highlighting, and then looking over here on the left, it will tell me what the court is. So now I've got C major, a minor. I'm going to add an F-major. Let's scroll across so that we can see the key is easier. So we've got C, D, E, F. So here is the zero. 1234567. And then g is just going to be OneNote up from there. So if this is F, the next white note is g01 234567. We can check That's a G-Major. Now if we listened to that sequence, now keep in mind that the code codes I just giving you the basic chord. They're giving you three or four notes. Now, in a chord, as a musician might play it, they might double up on some of those notes. So e.g. this first C major, we might have another C up here at the top. So we'd have four notes in it. So feel free to add extra notes as long as they're within the cord or reposition these notes. So you might want to move this note down from this G. It could be here instead. And that would give us a slightly different sound. So feel free to play around with the chords in that way so that you get different voicings. Now there's nothing wrong with this code sequence, but it doesn't sound particularly natural at the moment. And that's because all the notes of the same length and all the notes of the same velocity. So I'm going to make a couple of tweaks. The first thing I'm going to do is I can see this C note is being repeated in the second and third bars. So I'm going to delete those. And then we're going to stretch out this firstNode. It lasts longer. Now the next thing I'm going to do is select all of the notes or pressing Command and a. And then I'm going to go into functions. I'm going to go to middy transform and down to humanize. That will bring this menu up here. Now, this menu is going to randomize a couple of different features. So first of all, it's going to randomize the position of each node, is going to randomize the velocity of each note, how hard or how soft it is. And it's going to randomize the length. Now I've set it, so it's only going to randomize them by a small amount. You can fiddle with these settings to make it more or less drastic. But we've got all the notes selected. So if I click operate only, you'll notice that all of the notes have changed their velocity and they've slightly changed their duration and position. So now when we play this progression, it will sound more human. So now you know another way of putting music into Logic Pro that doesn't involve using a musical instrument. And you know how to manipulate the notes that you've either played in or programmed in. Now the key things you can take away from this lesson, how to input notes into logic. How to use chord codes to build up those notes into chords. And then how to manipulate those notes and chords to make them sound more natural. In the next lesson, we're going to have a look at some common chord progressions. How you can make one chord flow into the next one, into the next one and make it sound like a good piece of music. 5. Chord Progressions: So last time we looked at chord codes, how you can put together chords just by counting up a sequence of numbers. In this lesson, we're going to have a look at chord progressions. We're going to take a little dip into music theory. Don't be worried, don't be intimidated. It's all going to be presented very simply. You can use the handout that I provided on chord progressions. And we'll have a look at how to make something really musical. So a piece of music are normally have more than one chord. And chords can be grouped together in families called keys. So in the example from our last lesson with the code codes, we started with a chord of C major. C major is the first chord in the key of C major. And there are six other chords in that key that we can use, and we can put them together in different orders to make a progression. Now at the end of that lesson, unquote codes, we actually made a progression. We had a C major chord followed by an a minor chord, followed by F-major, followed by G-Major. Now another way of saying that is that we had the one chord followed by the six chord, followed by the four chord, followed by the five chord. Now you could use that same progression in a different key. And the only thing that would change would be the chords that you used. That same progression in the key of D major. Our first code will be d. A second chord would be B minor, or third chord would be G major. And our fourth chord would be a major. And it would have the same kind of sound, but it would be in a different key. So one thing to note is that even though you're in a major key, a major key is still going to have some minor chords in it. And that's true of minor keys to minor keys will have major quadsim. And it's the relationship between these different types of sounds that give each key is particular flavor. Now the other thing that you might notice is that when we call the one chord, the two chord and so on, these will be written with a Roman numeral. So if it's a major chord, it's going to be a capitalized Roman numeral. And if it's a minor chord, it's going to be lowercase. There's also this peculiar one at the end of the seventh chord here that's a diminished. You don't need to worry about what diminished means. It's getting further into music theory. But just, just be aware that you'll see this little circle above the six. Now another thing to note is that every major key is related to a minor key and vice versa. So if we have a look at this major key here of C, and we have a look at these chords. And now if we take a look at the minor keys, you'll see that the first key in this list is a minor. Now that's the relative minor of C major. And you'll notice that these seven chords are actually the same chords. We've got a minor, B diminished, C major, D minor. Let's have a look at C again. We've got the same chords. It's just they appear in a different order. Now something you'll have noticed on these charts that I've put together is that some of the chords are highlighted in this pinky purple color. Now, the highlighted cords are just the main chords of the key. So these are the most important chords. They're the ones where you're likely going to want to start or end. They're the ones that have the most effect within the key. So in the major key, you can see it's the 14.5 chords, minor keys. It's the three, the six, and the seven chords. It's also quite common for a key, a progression in a particular key to start on the first quarter, end on the first chord. And there are various different emotional effects by going from a four chord to a one chord, or a five chord to a one chord, e.g. so how do you use these tables? Well, the first thing to do is to decide a major or a minor key. So let's say I want a minor key. Now I'm going to choose my root chord, my one chord. So just for simplicity's sake, I'm going to say a minor. A minor is my key. Now, I'm going to have a look at the different progressions. So let's choose a minor progression that starts on the one chord. And we've got one down here at the bottom. We've got, uh, 154.1. So if I take that back to my table, I can say I've got a 1a5a4 and a one. So I'd be saying a minor, E minor, D minor, a minor again. Now, these aren't, all of the chord progressions have cost, there are tons more. Or you have to do is do a search for common chord progressions. And you'll get tons of results with different chord progressions for famous songs. There's also quite a funny video by a group called Axis of Awesome. They have a video on YouTube about a four chord progression or four chord song. And basically it's a musical performance where they play all kinds of songs using the same four chords, same four chord progression because these are just so common throughout all popular music. Another thing you might find useful for making your own chord progressions is this table, the table of usual route progressions. Now this is an analysis of music and where chords go after starting on a specific chord. So we have a starting code in this first column. So there are seven different chords in a key could start on. And then here are the different kinds of probabilities of what chord might come next by analyzing most music. So when you start on the one chord, usually that'll be followed by the four chord or the five chord. But sometimes it'll be followed by the six chord. And very rarely it will be followed by the second or the third chord. So you can use this to start building your own chord progressions based on how, how accessible, how common you want your progression to sound. Do you want it to sound very poppy, something that people can listen to and they recognize the progression? Or do you want to make something that's a little bit left field, a little bit weird. You could use this table to see which chords are the most or least likely to follow a particular chord. Now I know that's a lot of information to take in, in one go. What I'd like to stress is you don't need to memorize all of that stuff. You don't need to know it all. It's just there as a reference point for you when you're trying to put together some chord progressions. Now, I'm a guitar player as well as a music producer. My music theory, like a lot of guitar players, is probably my weakest points. And that's fine. Because as long as you know how to put together some courts that sound good together, you can make something musical. So what can you do with this information? Well, like I said, you don't need to memorize it all. Just try some other progressions out. Get a feel for the ones that you like. Forget about the ones that you don't like. Just experiment putting together different runs of chords. You could try putting one progression after another progression so that you can develop something that has a little bit more variety. You don't want to be stuck in an endless cycle of the same four chords. And you can experiment with your own progressions. Use the table of root progressions as a guide. Pick a chord, pick a key, and start putting some codes together in sequence. So next up, we're going to have a look at melodies. And I'm going to show you a couple of little hacks that you can use to make it easier for you to write a melody on top of the chord sequence. 6. Melodies: Let's start with a little experiment. I want you to think of a famous piece of music. I just want you to think of a famous piece of music and hold it in your mind for a moment. Now, I'm going to bet that the thing that you're thinking of is the melody of that piece of music, the hook or the main vocal line or the main instrument line. And that's because melodies are usually the most important part of any song. In this lesson, I'm going to show you a really simple way of making a melody to go with your chord progression and making sure that it's in the same key that you're playing the right notes. I'm writing little piece of music for an RPG game. And I put together a chord progression. It's in B minor. And I put together a progression which goes 1765. If I put that on a loop, we can have a listen to it. So you can see I've already humanize that. I drew, I didn't play this in. I drew this in with the notes. And I've changed the length of the notes, I've changed the velocity, abstract some of them across the chords. It sounds more natural. And I've also chosen an instrument for the, for the melody. I've chosen this since it sounds like this. Lots of echo on there, lots of delay, lots of reverb because I wanted something that sounds a little bit mysterious. Now for the melody, I want it to be longer than 4 bar. I'm going to do an eight bar melody. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to loop this chord progression so that it plays twice. So if I hover the mouse here, you can see when we have this little looping icon, I can click and drag, that's out. There we go. We have one full loop. We have two loops. The progression two times 8 bar. And the next thing I want to do is start trying to write a melody. But I'm not going to play the keys. I'm not going to play this melody. I'm going to draw the melody in with the pencil tool. And my music theory isn't very good. So that can be a little bit challenging. So I'm going to share with you a hack which will help you to know which notes you can use and which notes you can't use. Now the first thing I'm going to do here is I'm going to duplicate this track. I'm going to duplicate this since I've got to do that, I'm going to press Command D, or I could click on this duplicate button. And you'll see I've duplicated this synth. What I'm going to do is right-click and I'm going to create a midi region. So now you can see I've got 1 bar with no notes. In here. I'm going to select the range of notes that I'm going to use for my melody. So let's say from, from about C3 upwards, I'm just going to mute this track as well. You'll see why in a minute. So I'm going to pencil in a notes. I'm going to pencil in every nodes in the range of notes that I want to play for my melody. Okay, If I were to do it. Now, you see the reason I muted that are so you didn't have to listen to all those notes. So now I'm going to press Command a to select them all. And I've got all of those nodes highlighted. Now that's useless. That's going to sound awful. What I'm going to do is use this scale quantize because I know the key, because I chose it. I chose a progression in B minor. So on this scale quantize, I'm going to select B. Down here at the bottom. I'm going to select natural minor. And you can see what it's done is it's changed the notes, so he's got rid of any notes that don't belong in that scale, in that key. So now I've got the notes of the B natural minor scale, and they're all here. But that's not very much use because that's just going to be every node. It's going to sound awful. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag this middle section out. I'm going to loop it. I'm going to loop it so that it's 8 bar long, so that we've got four loops. We've got five and we ignore the first one. We've got four repetitions. We go, we've got eight repetitions. Now, this top track with the cello is, I'm just going to bump that along. So we're going to ignore this first bar. We're going to start from the second bar. So now I'm going to select the track that I want my melody to be on. And I'm going to right-click to create a midi region. And I'm going to stretch that out so that it's 8 bar long. He noticed the cursor here. This is for changing the length of the midi region. If you put it at the top, that's for looping. Okay, so now I'm ready to start writing some notes in there. But I want to see these notes that I did below. What I'm going to do is I'm going to hold shift and click this region as well. Now, if I scroll up, you'll see I can see. The ghost notes of that chat that I created before showing me all the notes that are available in that scale. So this is going to act like a guide. If I click on these, nothing happens, they just show up in the background. But I can add notes and on top, and I can use it as a guide to where I could put notes. So now I'm going to use this as a guide and I'm going to try writing a melody. I'll speed this section up because normally you'd spend a little bit of time putting notes in, adjusting how long they are changing things around. So I'm going to speed this up so that you don't have to sit around waiting for me. So let's have a listen to what we've got. Okay, so that's a decent stats. And now I can get rid of these ghost notes which were there in the background. I'm just going to delete that region, delete that track. I'm going to highlight both of these and move them back to the first bar. So you'll see that ghost notes are a really useful way of quickly writing a melody which is in the right key, using the right scale to go with your chord progression, but without actually having to understand the theory behind it, really, really useful little hack. Now in terms of writing a melody, a couple of tips would be, it's always good to have big jumps in your melody. So I've started with this big jump from the first note to the second nodes. And then it comes back down. And that's just forming the b minor chord. But having that big, big jump in the melody always makes melodies more appealing. Now another common feature of good melodies is having a call and response pattern. If you listen to this melody in notice actually it's the same thing repeated twice. So same phrase or idea repeated twice, but the last two notes, the second time, a slightly different. So this is cold, call and response are called an answer. It's also a good idea to leave some spaces in your melody. You don't want to have a note on every beat. You don't want to just be throwing notes all over the place. Leave spaces, leave gaps between your notes. Have some other notes longer than others, sometimes have long holding notes. Other times have notes play very short and quickly at this kind of variety to your melodies, and it will make them so much more interesting. So you can see using ghost notes is a really effective way to quickly and simply make a melody that matches your core progression. Now there are a few things I can recommend for writing a successful, memorable melody. Try using the call and response structure. So if you have 8 bar of melody, have the same four bar melody repeat twice, but the second time, maybe vary the ending or vary the bit in the middle. Try to make it like a conversation between two people. That's why it's called call and response. Don't forget to include jumps between notes in your melody. If you're using the scale as the basis, the foundation for your melody, you don't want it to sound like somebody who's just running up and down that scale, it'll be more musical, more melodic. If you have big jumps between the notes you choose. Remember to leave space between the notes. You don't need to have a note on every beat or every half beats. Includes space, have some notes that are longer than the others. Some notes that come quicker, some notes that come slower at this kind of variety. And it will help your melodies be more interesting and therefore more memorable. So now you've got a chord progression and you've got a melody that goes with it. The next piece of the puzzle we're going to add is a baseline, and we'll do that in the next lesson. I'll see you there. 7. Basslines: Baselines vary depending on the type of music you're writing. Some types of music have the baseline, almost like a melody in itself. And in this lesson, you're going to free cats. In this lesson, I'm going to show you really quick and effective way to put the baseline down following your chord progressions. Ben, he's going to join us to. Once you have a chord progression in place, it's really simple to quickly add a simple baseline. It's your song. The first thing you're going to want to do is create a new track. I already chose the base that I wanted. So it's an alchemy synth and I gave it a rating so I could find it easily later. If I click on this field. Dark heavy base. Here we go. I thought this was quite an interesting sound. So I'll show you how it sounds. Really dark, really low. Now, all I'm going to do to make this baseline is I'm going to click on the chord progression. I'm going to hold the option key. I'm going to click and drag down to my race track. Now I don't want the base to be playing chords. So all of these notes here, I'm going to get rid of them. I'm just going to leave the root nodes. So if I highlight these and delete these last two. Now if we listen to those root notes with the rest of the song, what you'll notice is that third note isn't really, it's not really biting. We're not hearing that come in. And that's because in our chord progression we've made it more natural by overlapping these notes. And that works for the cello, but it's not working on the base. So I'm going to highlight that nodes. Just going to reduce it down. Once gave a little bit of space at the end. Now we'll be able to hear them more clearly. Okay, So as a really simple baseline, that's alright, but let's try making it a little bit more interesting. So I'm going to select the second notes, and then I'm going to hold shift and select the fourth notes. Now, I'm going to go to the Edit menu here. Then this drop-down, I'm going to click transpose. I'm going to select plus 12 semitones, so that's one octave higher. That means there'll be the same notes is just there'll be a higher pitch. So now we're going to have the base moving between these very low notes in an octave higher. And it's going to sound a little bit different, a little bit more interesting, like this. So there you have it. That's a really fast and effective way of making a baseline out of your core progression. So remember, copy your chord progression and put it on your bass instrument track. You can remove the notes apart from the root notes, keep the root notes there, and that will be the foundation of your baseline. And then add some variation to those notes. You can add notes in-between them. So you've got like a walking bass line, or you could just shift notes up or down an octave, like we did in the example. Now our song is really starting to take shape. You've got a chord progression, you gotta melody, and you've got to baseline. The next part we're going to add is the drums. I'm going to show you a really fun way of adding drums into Logic Pro ten. I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. Drums: There are several options for creating a drum track in Logic Pro ten. But in this lesson I'm going to show you what I think is the most fun and also underappreciated way. And that's using the drummer function. Now the reason I think it's so cool is because it simulates how you would really work as a music producer in a studio with a session drummer. And by that I mean, you wouldn't be sat there telling the drummer exactly which drum to hit on exactly which beat. You try telling any drummer in the world how to hit the drums. They're not gonna be very pleased with you. So in logic, what it gives you as options to talk to the drama. It's like a conversation. Say, I want this section to be more complex, or I want this section to have a little less of the hi-hat. It gives you the options to manipulate the drums and make them sound how you want without having to program every single hit of the drugs. Let's jump in and take a look to create a drama. All I have to do is make a new track, select drummer, hit Create, and then the library, I have a different set of information. I have some genres on the left. On the right from each genre, I've got some mugshots of different drummers, and if I hover over them, I get a description of their style. So here's Gavin, Indie rocker. And down at the bottom I have different drum kits that I could choose from. They all come with their own default drum kit that matches their sound. So if I preview gap in here, let me just select them. And on the left-hand side and the edits, there are different rhythms that, that drama can do. So if I want more control over that, I can use this x-y grid to move between louder and softer. And more complex and more simple. See how that changes the waveform up here as I, as I adjust the complexity and how loud it is. I could switch out this drum kit while he's playing. So I could change to Manchester, get over here. I can select the different elements that I want them to play and how much I want him to play them. Let's go back to Brooklyn kit. On the right-hand side, I have this style here. This is how many films he's going to play. So how many little drum roll so make? This is saying is the swing. So how jazzy like how before or after the beads He's gotten to me. And I can select between whether that's going to be 16th notes or eighth notes. If I click Details beneath up, I can go into finer detail on that point. So if I want them to play more ghost notes or less, I want it to feel more push or pull. And I can choose how he's using the high hats here. Okay, So one thing that's quite useful here is you might be playing around and you might have got the sound or the loudness and softness and complexity that you like. But then you want to change to a different drummer. When you change to a different drummer, it's going to reset these settings, but you can change that over here and beat presets. If I click this, I can say keep settings when changing dramas or keep drum kits when changing dramas. So I could highlight both of those. Now if I change the drama, I could go for a completely different drummer. Let's go for deaths. Now he's still playing the Brooklyn kit and he's still playing with this instruction that I gave to the previous drama. Another cool thing that I can do to change the sound is if I go to the library and click on the kits or a select drum kit here in the Inspector. I can change out the parts of the kit. I have a choice between different kick drums or maybe I want to tune the snare. I have all this control over the kits. Let's stick with this drummer. I'm going to stay with deaths. We're going to change the kit. I'm going to go for a trap kit is more suitable for him. Okay, Let's preview this. Okay, So that's an interesting, what I'm going to do next is I'm going to try it in the context of this song. So I'm going to close the library, give us more space. I'm going to un-solo this. I'm going to have the drums coming in after the introduction. A little bit too. Okay, so now I have something which I think is okay. I'm going to add a second region. This region, notice that this is separate. I can, I can change the rhythm on that. So I could make this become a little bit louder and maybe a little more complex. I'm going to increase the fills quite substantially. And you can see in the song this is quiet section next. So I'm going to create another region. I'm going to shrink this down. This one. I want it to be much more simple and much softer. But I'd like it to have like a big ending. Maybe. I'm putting the fills up and then I'm going to hold Option click and drag this to the end of that one. Now let's have a listen. I actually think I want to change this section to something more substantially different. So I'm going to ask him to buy a different kind of beat. Let's see how this one sounds. Yeah. So you can see this is a really quick way to start putting drums together. And you have a lot of control over the sound. I can say that control even further because this instrument here you'll see it has a little drop-down. And this is what's called a track stack. So actually, this one track is made of lots of different parts. And each of these parts, I can edit them. I can change the gain, I can change the balance. And over here in the Inspector, I could add any plugins. I wanted to change the sound of each separate part of that instrument. So it's a really powerful tool for editing the sound of your drums. We don't have to stop there either, because if we're happy with this drum sound, what I can do is convert it to Midea, and then I have control over each individual note. So to do that, I will create another track. And I need to put instruments on. It's going to be the same one, this trap door. So let's go to the library drum kit. Down to the bottom. There we go. Now I'm going to highlight this audio, and I'm going to drag it down onto the track below. Now you'll see it's converted all of those notes into midi. So I have control over the individual sounds. So if I wanted this to have a higher velocity, I could just bump that velocity up. So that really gives me ultimate control over what started as a session drama that it felt like I just dropped it in and it was doing its own thing. Actually, it's provided me with a framework to change every single note, every single sound within that drum kit. It's a really powerful tool. A quick notes, if you're using a traditional drum kits, is that it doesn't come with a track stack in the same way that the drum machines do. So if I look here, there's no drop-down letting me adjust the separate pieces of the kit. I can have access to that. I just need to go to the bottom of this list here. And I select producer kits. And you'll find all of the same traditional drum kits, but where the plus at the end. And that's going to load up the more extended kits. And here you can see this is a track stack and I've got control over each individual part of the kit. So if you're really picky about your drums, you really want complete control over everything. That's the way to access it. So that's how you can use the drama function to create the beak for your song and then manipulate it so it's just to your taste and how you can convert it into midi so that you have extra fine control. If there's something that you want to change or something that you want to add. So key things to take away from this. Find the right drummer for your song. There are different dramas for different genres. So pick the one that matches the type of music you're making. Or if you want to do something a little bit unusual, pick one from a different genre, mix things up a bit. Remember to create extra regions and vary the drum patterns to keep it sounding realistic. A real drummer doesn't play the same rhythm, the same beats all the way through a song. Even if the changes are subtle, it adds interests. It makes your drum sound more real. If you're looking for very fine control of your drums, remember to convert your drum track into midi. Once you've finished adjusting it, then you can use the producer kits so that you have ultra fine control over every element of the kits, how it sounds, any effects you want to apply to it. So now you have all the fundamentals of how to make a song. You can create a chord progression, melodies baseline at the drums. The next thing is we're going to cover, are about how you bring those elements together, how you can mix them, use Effects, use automation to get it sounding really professional. I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Mixing: Now that you have a bunch of different instruments in your song, it's time to think about mixing. Now, mixing can seem almost like it's one of the dark arts. Especially if you've been looking at music production tips on Instagram or YouTube or anywhere else. But what we're going to do is really have a look at the essentials of mixing. How you can make your song sound good with the correct levels quickly and easily. We're also going to have a look at panning. So positioning instruments within the mix. And I'm going to show you some tricks with automation so you can really get creative. Mixing is all about getting the levels of your tracks or instruments right relative to each other. But you're going to need some kind of reference point for the overall level of the whole mix. Now, if you look down here in the inspector, you've got to volume meters and two Thetas. So the left hand side, you'll see is the cello is, the right-hand side is the stereo out. Now on the stereo outs, this is going to be the level of the overall mix. And I want that to be between minus three and minus six dB for the peaks. Now, having that level is going to make my mastering step much easier. It's going to give me some headroom. So the first thing I'm going to do is go to audio effects here. I'm going to go down to metering. And I'm going to put the level meter on my stereo output. And this is going to show me the peaks of the overall, the overall song. So as long as that's peeking in between minus six and minus three, then that's good for when I'm doing my mastering. With that out of the way, we can start mixing the song. The first thing I recommend that you do is decide which instruments or which track is going to be the main part of your song. So which part is carrying the emotional content or the meaning? Where do you want the listener to focus on? And because this piece of music is a background track for a video game, I'm going to use the chord progression in this song, That's the yellows. I've selected cello as my main content, my main emotional content for the song, and all of the other tracks. I'm going to build around that so that they're relatively at the right level. So I'm going to add a level meter to my cello as well. So that's on the left-hand side of the inspector. I'm going to click below this channel EQ. And because I use level meter just before it's in my recents, I'm going to add a level meter here for my fellows. Now from my main instruments, I want this to be peaking somewhere between -18 dB minus three dB, depending on the style of music that you're doing and what the instrument is. So I'm going to have a listen to this cello. The cello is on their own and see where they are on this meter. You can see they're peaking somewhere around minus nine dB and that's fine. I'm going to set the other tracks to try to match up with this so that they sound right relative to the yellows. So let's listen. When the other instruments start to come in. Straight away. You can here, you don't even need to look at this level meter. You probably noticed that it's peaking above zero. But you can hear that the base is too loud. So I'm going to select the bass track. And I'm going to go back and listen. And as I listen, I'm going to keep an eye on the volume meter down here. And I'm going to adjust this fader to adjust the level of the base. Okay, I think that's a lot better because now I'm feeling the base, the base is there. I would miss it if it's gone. But it's not so much in your face. The base isn't the main part of this song, so I just need its presence in the low end, but I don't want to overwhelm me. So I'm gonna go ahead and start adjusting the levels of the other instruments too, starting from here with these staccato apps. So you've probably noticed that the ops were a little bit loud and lead line, I felt it was a little bit quiet. So I've adjusted those accordingly so that they sit right in the mix. Now, if we go back over here and we have a listen and have a look at our level meter overall to see where the peak is. So we can see that's leaving us some headroom for when we're mastering later on. I think I also want to bring those drums down a bit. I'm going to listen and adjust the drum track. So notice that it's good practice to be listening to the whole song and also keeping your eyes on the volume meter at the same time. Don't just try to set it by eyes or ears alone, use both of those senses. And you've probably seen reference charts online telling you that your kick drum should be a certain number of dB and the vocal should be another number. And your snare is this and whatever. Now those are okay as jumping off points, remember different genres will have different sounds. Your song should sound like your song. So identify the main instrument, the main track, set the level between minus three and -18 db according to what you feel sounds best. And then set the other tracks to match it. This way you're going to make your unique piece of music at the right levels. Once you've got your levels roughly where you want them to be, you can start to play with the balance or the panning. That's how far to the left or to the right particular instrument sounds. You can control that with this style here. You can move it to the left and over to the right. So if I play this from the start, I can move the cello. If you right-click this control, you can change the type of balance to stereo pan, which is going to give you a more broad stereo feeling. The most fun version, I think the most fun setting for the balance is if you select binomial panel. And this changes the control to a little radar screen. If you double-click this, it will bring you up this control. Now this lets you choose how far away the direction that a track is going to sound and how wide it is as well. So if I play again and start manipulating this, you can see that gives you a huge amount of control of the directionality, the width of the sound for each track. So what if you want to change the volume throughout the song? You want the level of your challenge to go up and down. Or you want the directionality, the panning of one of your tracks to change. You can do that using automation. And you can access automation by pressing the a key on your computer keyboard. And it will change your view to this. In the automation view, there's a drop-down menu here that allows you to select the parameter you want to change as the song plays. So e.g. let's say I want this base to change. So they're in this section of the song where there's only the apps, the bass and the drums. I want the base to be louder. I click in this area. Now I have a line showing my level. I can click to make points, but I can drag them up and down to change the level. Now a better way to do this, to change your whole section is to hold the command key. Select a region. And now I can click and drag this up. And now it's going to boost the base just in this section, like this. And a really fun creative thing you can do is combine automation with the binomial panning. If I choose this lead line here. And if I change the balanced to binaural pattern, I double-click on this. Now in the automation instead of volume, I'm going to go to main and I'm going to choose binaural angle. That's the angle the sound is coming from. What I can do is create points in here to automate. And then I can move them around and it's going to automatically change the angle. The panel. I just move those around just e.g. and now let's listen to that section. So you can use automation combined with panning and volume to get some really creative cool effects in yourself. So those really are the core elements of getting a good mix. And I can't stress highly enough, the main thing is identifying which instruments or track is the main emotional content of your song, which is the part that you want to be at the forefront. And then building the rest of the song around that piece. Define the main elements of your song. So which instruments or which track is carrying the main emotional content? Focus on that first and then set the levels of the other tracks around it accordingly. Remember to use panning so that different instruments can occupy different spaces in the stereo mix. And don't forget to use automation so that you can change the levels throughout the song. Or you could even change the position of the different instruments within the mix is very rare in music production circles to hear about mixing. Without hearing about mastering, those words seem to always be together. But the different steps of the process. In the next lessons, we're going to have a look at mastering how you can master your tracks quickly and easily to make them sound professional. And we're also going to have a look at some effects that you might want to use to really supercharge your songs. 10. Reverb: Before you move on to the mastering step, there are one or two plugins or effects that I think will be useful for you. One of those is reverb. Reverb is all around you all the time. It's the reflections of the sounds that you hear. So e.g. think about how a person's voice sounds in a meeting room compared to if you are in a church or a large hall, The sound quality is different and that's because of the reverb. Now reverb tells your ears or your brain about the space. That's a sound as in where you can use it in logic to give an instrument its own space to make it pop out of a mix or to do something creative with. Here you can see I've got a simple piano track in a project. And the first thing to notice is in the inspector here, there are these two buses. That means this track is sending whatever plays to two separate tracks which each have effects on them. If I click on this one, you'll see it has a Space Designer, which is a type of reverb. And I'm boss for here that has a chromosome that already has a reverb on it. Because most of the instruments in Logic have their own reverb. The alchemy synth also has its own reverb knob on the interface. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm actually going to turn off these buses because we're going to be doing the reverb ourselves so that we can explore how ChromaVerb works. So to add a reverb, all I need to do is go below these plugins, clicking the button space, go down to reverb. I'm going to choose ChromaVerb and stereo. And here is the default ChromaVerb setting. If I hit Play and toggle this effect on and off, you'll hear what it's doing. And you can access different presets in this top menu. This is a quick menu here, but it's not going to change the EQ curve that you see. It's better to access them through this menu. That way you could go, you can say I want to hold, I want Piano Concert Hall. And it's changing this EQ as well represent the space that it's supposed to sound like. So if I press Play now you'll hear it sounding like a concert hall. And down here is a graphic representation. So you can see each of these little dots. It's like a reflection from this space. And you can see the frequency, well it's reflecting. So if I want to cut the low end, I can just click it. You can further customize the presets with the controls down here at the bottom. So the attack is going to be how quickly the volume or the density builds up. The size represents the dimensions of the space you're simulating. The density means how many reflections are coming back. The decay is how quickly or slowly the reflected sound drops off. The distance is how far away from the sound source, in this case the piano, your ears are supposed to be. And on the right-hand side, the dry and the wet. This is the levels of the dry and wet signal. So the dry signal is with no reverb and the wet signal is with the reverb. And you can adjust the proportions of those to get a more subtle effect. Down here, the pre-delay, this represents how much of a delay between the original sound and the first reflections coming back. If you click this little musical note button, what that's going to do is synchronize the pre-delay to the tempo of your track. So then you can choose a value of note length, duration accordingly. And then the same here with the decay. If I click this button, it's going to synchronize the decay with the speed, with the tempo of my soul. The freeze feature down here at the bottom is quite interesting. If you hit the freeze button, whichever noticed playing or code is playing at that moment, we'll just be reflected infinitely. So I'll demonstrate is how kind of hard to explain. That way you can keep that one sound reverberates, creates a drone underneath the music. Really good for ambient tracks. When you're using reverb to place a track in the mix, keep in mind that the more reverb you have on a track, the further back in the mix it's going to sound, it's going to sound like it's further away. So the instruments that you want to be more upfront like your lead lines, they should probably have a more subtle reverb, whereas your pads and your accompaniment, your string section. If you add more reverb to that, it can make it sound like it's further in the background. So that's a good rule of thumb for positioning the instruments in your mix. Bring things forward by having just a subtle reverb, a very slight room reverb. And you're more kind of epic background colors. You have them in the background by giving them more reverb. When you're just trying to add a little subtle reverb to make an instrument kind of pop out. A really good thing to do is to preview the reverb and then slowly back off the wet signal until you can only just notice the reverb that here, this reverb. Now it's a really, really subtle reverb. It's going to help his piano pop out of the mix. If I toggle that off to hear the slight difference. So you can see ChromaVerb is a really powerful and versatile thing to use in your mixes. So here are some things to remember. Many or most logic instruments already have some kind of reverb applied to them, usually on a bus and usually in the form of a space designer. You might want to tweak this before you add another reverb or disable it completely. Reverb can be used to help an instrument pop out of the mix. If you're using it in this way, go subtle with it. Less is definitely more, in this case, reverb on lower frequencies can make your mix muddy. That means your song can sound unclear, like it's drowning out in all these reverberating low frequencies. Use the EQ in ChromaVerb to try to tame some of the low end. So now you know your way around ChromaVerb, I'd encourage you to put it on a track, unexplored the presets, and then tweak the parameters to your liking. Just remember that those huge space void reverbs are best left for more ambient styles of music. I'll see you in the next lesson. 11. EQ: Dq, or equalization, is another one of those things that tends to intimidate people. But it's not really all that complicated. All it is is applying gain to particular frequencies. So boosting certain frequencies or cutting certain frequencies to shape the overall sound. It can be applied to individual instruments or tracks, or it can be applied across the entire mix. In this lesson, we're going to jump straight into EQ, and I'm going to show you how you can control the different parameters. To add an EQ to attract, you need to do is go over to the inspector, to audio FX, go down to EQ and Channel EQ stereo. And it will bring up this EQ Window here. This EQ Window shows you a line which is representing the frequencies of human hearing. So all the way from 20 hz down in the sub bass to 20,000 hz. Now, in real life, you can't actually hear 20,000 hz. And 20 hz is something that you're more likely to feel than here. But all of these frequencies are represented because they're important, even if you can't hear them, they interact with each other. So having control over them as a useful thing, the channel EQ is divided into different bands. So you've got all these different symbols representing the different areas, like the sub base, the base, the low mids, the meds, and then your higher frequencies. You can toggle control of the different bands on or off by clicking on these symbols at the top and anything that we play on this track now we'll be able to see it. We, we have to see the frequencies on this analyzer. So you can see that even just one note is made up of one frequency. It's a bunch of different frequencies acting together. And that's why EQ is important, because sounds are made up of groups of frequencies or harmonics interacting and how the weekend control those, either boosting them or cutting them, is going to shape the tone of a sound. So to adjust the EQ, any of these bands that you hover over, it will light up and you can see a range of frequencies that will be affected if you drag up or down. So if I click and drag this one up, here, you can see I'm boosting these frequencies somewhere just between about 1 khz and just under 6 khz. But if I wanted that bans have been narrower. I could put two fingers on the track pad and just drag down and it's going to narrow that band. And if I want it to be wider, I use two fingers and drag up. As a good rule of thumb, when you're boosting frequencies, you would boost over a broader range. And when you're cutting frequencies, like in the low mids here, you're more likely to cut over a narrow band of frequencies. That's what's called a surgical EQ. And you'll find people often do this in the lower mids to reduce mod N MIX. Bear in mind that a lot of instruments in Logic Pro ten already have an EQ. So if I select these modern strings here, you can see a thumbnail in the inspector. And that's showing you a rough look of the EQ that's already applied. If I change this from modern strings to a different type of strings. Let's go to Roman strings. You'll see that the EQ changes. It has a different EQ already dialed in. And you can also access presets for different instruments in the preset drop-down for drums, keyboards, guitar, and you've also got mastering EQ tools down at the bottom. One that I find quite useful as a guitar player is in guitar, it has a cleanup guitar EQ. So if I'm recording my guitar into logic, it has this bit here, which is cutting the low frequencies below around 60 hz. So that's getting rid of the 60 cycle hum that guitar pickups have. So here's an example of how you might start to EQ a whole song. So this is a song by a band called The North dimension that I'm doing some mastering for. I really recommend you go and check them out on Spotify or Apple wherever you listen to. This track is called Bloom. And if I play from around here, you'll get an idea of the kind of sound the genre had sin. So it's got this really cool AT is simply going to add an EQ quickly just by clicking in this thumbnail space stereo. Okay, So there are two stages that you might go through on a track like this. The first is corrective EQ. So removing any of the frequencies or the sounds, or reducing the sounds that you don't like. And then the next step will be a sweetening EQ, which means boosting the frequencies or the areas that you do like the sound off. So in the case of this track, I feel like there's a lot going on in the low mids and the base is very kind of bass heavy and it sounds a little bit muddy. But I really like those keys and the ghostly synth chimes and bells more at the top end. So I would apply corrective EQ, trying to cut some notches in the middle close to the base. And then I would broadly slightly boost the higher-end. So something like this. I'll press play and I'll start manipulating the EQ so you could see what I might do. So you can see it's not a very drastic curve anywhere that, but it's a subtle difference that kind of reduces some of the clutter. And it brings out the elements of the song that I liked. I toggle it on and off so you can hear the difference. When you're doing an EQ like this. A really important thing to remember is that if you feel like a certain sound in a mix is missing, say you want more of the top end, you want more of the higher frequencies to shine through. Sometimes it's not a case of just boosting that high-end, but taking away from elsewhere in the spectrum. So it's a good practice to always cut things before you boost. It's much easier to start removing frequencies. So you can listen to what's left than just trying to boost all over the place. Just boosting everything is much more likely to give you a really messy mix. So you can see using EQ is a great way to really get control of your sounds. A few key points to remember them. Logics instruments often have an EQ already and the presets are really useful. Use these as a starting point. As a rule of thumb, when you're cutting frequencies, you should be more narrow with the band on the EQ. And when you're boosting frequencies, you can be a bit more broad. And when you use EQ, tried to have a clear purpose in mind, what is it that you're trying to achieve? So you're trying to make a mix less muddy when you're trying to make a snare drum really HIT. Always have a purpose for using EQ. Don't just apply it because lots of people are talking about it. If you're a bit of a physics nerd like me, then you'll find EQ to be a really fascinating topic and something that's fun to just experiment with. But you can use the handout that I provided to get you started. In the next lesson, we're going to be looking at another one of those intimidating topics and that's compressors. I'll see you there. 12. Compressors: There are tons of different compressors out there, all with different setups applicable to different genres of music. But in this lesson, I'm going to show you a catch-all setting for one of logic seven compresses. It's a way you can use to glue, you'll mix together to make it sound really professional. Let's start with a brief explanation of what compression is. To demystify it a little. All a compressor does is takes the peaks of your waveform in your mix, and it reduces the game. Meanwhile, it can increase the gain on the lower parts of the mix. So these peaks on the top of this waveform get pulled down. And these troughs, the lower parts get boosted up, making your waveform less dynamic or more compressed. And this is a good way of making your mix sound more glued together, if you like. It makes it sound like all the instruments are playing together. So let's add a compressor to the stereo out. I'm gonna go to the inspector to Audio Effects. I'm going to go to dynamics, compressor and stereo. And here we'll see we've got the compressor window. Now you'll notice that there are seven to choose from across the top. And that's because each one of these is a, it's like a simulation of a real hardware compressor. Because back in the day before, doors like Logic Pro, people were using hardware compressors. So each one of these represents a simulation of a real hardware compressor. They all have slightly different sounds and some of them have slightly different controls. But the one that we're going to focus on today is the Vintage VCA. And the reason for that is this one isn't a transparent compressor. It adds a certain sound, the certain warms, and a lot of music producers like that from a compressor, they feel that it adds a certain musicality to the mix. The first thing that I'm going to do with setting up the compressor is to turn off the auto gain and to turn off the auto attack and release. So I'm going to hit this button here and also this one. The next thing that I want to do is make sure that the input gain here on the left and the output gain on the right are displaying the same level. Because one of the things about our ears is we perceived louder sounds are sounding nicer. And when you have an effect plugin a lot of the time, what happens is it adds a little bit of gain and then you feel like it's improving the sound when actually all you're hearing is it's a little bit louder. So by making sure that the input and output gain a level than we know that any changes in our perception of how good it sounds are because of the compression and not because of increased game. I'm going to hit play and compare these to gain meters. We're going to see if it's the right level. Okay, those are pretty much matched. So I can get are with tweaking the parameters of this compressor. So let's take a look at these dials and what they do. Threshold over here is the level at which the compressor is going to start acting. And ratio is the amount of compression that will be applied once it does start acting. These two dials work together. A low threshold and a high ratio would result in very strong compression. And that's not what we're looking for when we're trying to glue the mix. Over here to the right, you'll see the makeup dial. Now because compression is lowering the overall loudness, the gain of your signal by squeezing those high points, What's going to happen is you get a reduction in gain. The makeup dial allows you to re-introduce gain to the compressed signal. Knee down here in the bottom-left refers to how smooth the transition between compressed and uncompressed is going to be. And then these two here, attack and release, really important for getting the sound right of your compression. Attack is how quickly the compressor is going to start reducing those peaks once it's triggered. And release is the speed at which it's going to let go of the signal and allow it to uncompress. These two also work together very closely to dial in the sound. So usually when I start compressing, what I will do is set the threshold to 30. I have a ratio of two to one. I'm going to leave the makeup at zero for now. I'm going to have a neat one. The attack I'm going to pop to 20 milliseconds. And the release I'm going to dial up to 100. Now let's have a listen to this and I'm going to toggle the compressor on and off and we can see what it sounds like. Now the next thing I want to do is I'm going to adjust this release. And a really good way to do this is if you divide 60,000 by your songs tempo, you'll get the rough idea of where your release time should be. So 60000/120, which is my tempo, is 500. So I'm going to dial this up to just above 500 to get the release right. And then while I'm listening, I'm going to adjust the attack to try to change the sounds and get a balance between attack and release. And I won't go into carry on tweaking the different parameters until I'm happy with the compression. So how do you know if your compression is right? Well, really this is all down to personal taste and preference. But a good rule of thumb is that when you're applying compression to the full mix, you should be feeling the compression more than you should be hearing it. You don't want your compressions to be radically changing the sound of your mix. You just want it to be adding that extra little bit of sparkle to your final result. So that's a great place to start your compression settings. And you can go ahead and tweak those parameters to your taste and according to the style of music that you're making. So here are some key things to take away from this lesson. Once again, many instruments in Logic and lots of third party instruments already have a compressor built-in, so it might not be necessary to add an extra one on the instrument track. Check this before you start adding more compression. A great starting point for any of logics, compressors is a ratio of two to one, a threshold set around -30, ni of one, attack of 20 and release of 100. And don't forget to match the input and output gain. And perhaps most importantly, don't overcome press your music. If you use too much compression, you'll lose the dynamics of your song. Next time, we're going to have a look at a really simple mastering chain. And I'm going to show you how you can take your song from logic and then share it with the rest of the world. 13. Mastering: So you've almost made it. You're one step away from having your own finished song. And that step is mastering. But before we dive right in, there are a couple of things that are worth mentioning. The first is that mixing and mastering different disciplines in the music industry. These two tasks are done by different types of engineer. Now when you're making your own music, you'll probably going to end up doing both of those things yourself. And when that's the case, it's important to separate out those two stages. So make sure you're happy with your finished mix before you progress onto the mastering. The other thing worth mentioning is that you should be taking a break every 20 to 30 min during the mastering to listen to one or two reference tracks. Reference tracks are just songs in the same genre as the one that you're writing. That way your ears can be tuned in so that when you're making creative decisions about the sound of your song, it sounding corrects for the genre that fits in with those things out of the way. Let's dive in. So here we are mastering the track bloom by the North dimension. And you'll notice on my Stereo Out bus, I've already got to effect style. Then I've got the Channel EQ, which is the EQ when we were looking at before. And I've got a compressor here. So I've got the Vintage VCA, which I'm using to try to glue these sounds together. And it's important to note that the effects that you put in here, the plugins you insert on the channel are going to change the sound in order from top to bottom. So the order that you put your effects in is going to make a difference. Now there's a lot of argument between people whether they want the EQ to be before the compressor or the other way around. Sometimes people will use more than one EQ and that's really all just down to taste. But I've got my EQ first and then I'm compressing afterwards. The next component I'm going to add to our mastering chain is an optional one. But I think it's a really useful one to know about is the stereo spread. So I'm going to click beneath compressor. I'm going to go to imaging, stereo spread and click stereo. And that will bring up this default setting. Now what this does is it distributes bands, frequency bands from your track to the left and the right channels, so it enhances your stereo field. This default setting is too extreme for what we're looking for mastering this track, we just want a subtle enhancement, but I'm going to skip ahead in this track and press Play so you can hear what this effect is doing. So if I go further along in the song and hit play, you'll notice how it really enhances the stereo field of your track. But like I said, I don't want it to be this extreme. So I'm going to use the presets. I'm going to go down to light high-frequency spread because I don't want the low-end spreading around too much. The low end is going to make everything sound too muddy. So this is just a light high-frequency spread and I'm going to dial it back a little bit more. So I'm going to hit play again. And I'm just going to reduce this and maybe shift the frequencies along a little bit. So by using a really subtle amounts of the stereo spread effects, you can enhance your song and give it that extra little bit of sparkle. So we're using an EQ to shape our sound. We using a compressor to glue things together. And we using the stereo spread to enhance the stereo field. So now we're going to add two components to our chain to make sure our song is the correct loudness. First, we're going to add an adaptive limiter. So underneath spread, I'm going to go to dynamics adaptive limiter, stereo. And underneath this, I'm going to add a loudness meter. And that's in metering, loudness meter. So now I have two components that are going to help to make sure that our song is loud enough, but not too loud. The limiter is going to make sure that our song doesn't go above a certain level. And we can use this to prevent distortion being introduced. To make it more accurate, I'm going to turn on true peak detection. So it's looking for the peaks of ourselves. I'm going to double-click on the ceiling and I'm going to enter -0.97. That's going to give us a ceiling of just below zero dB. And over on the left-hand side, you'll see that we've got again meter here, so we can introduce some gain to boost the level our song, of our song. So make sure it's the correct loudness. But what is the correct loudness? Well, that's why we have a loudness meter over here on the right-hand side. Now, loudness is measured in a different unit to the level loudness is measured in L UFS. And what this is telling us is how loud our song is over time. So not just the peaks, the loudest parts of our song, but how loud do we feel it is based on an accumulation of volume. Now one of the best ways to start an argument online about loudness is to ask how many L UFS you should master to, because a lot of producers will tell you to master to -14. And the reason they tell you this is because music streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music will turn down anything which is louder than -14, our UFS. But to professional mastering engineer will tell you that things should be mastered two minus nine L UFS. So which should you choose? Well, don't worry too much about it. If you master to -14 UFS and then you put your song on Spotify or Apple Music is going to sound fine. If you're worried about your song being on the radio and being quieter than the song that came before it or it comes after it, then yes, you can mask the two minus nine UFS, but anywhere between those two values, you're going to be fine. To use the loudness meter. You press the start button down at the bottom. And then you play your song from beginning to end. And you'll notice on the right-hand side, this is the value that's going to give you the overall average loudness of your song in EFS. So this is going to be hopefully by the end of your track, the -14 or minus nine, depending on which one you're aiming for. If you find that your track is too loud, you can dial back the game on the limiter. And if you find that your track is too quiet overall, but you can boost the game here. You'll probably find that you need to listen to the track and adjust your game a few times until you are hitting the desired loudness. Once you're happy with the loudness and everything else and you're mastering chain, it's time to get your song out of logic and into a format that you can share with people. Do that you need to perform what's called a bounce. To bring up the balance menu, you press Command and B. And you'll be presented with these options. I recommend exporting as a WAV file because that's going to be better quality. But if you check this box, you can share it as an MP3 as well. In the settings down here, keep the mode in real time. That means it's going to bounce your track in real time as you listen to it. And that can help prevent any midi errors creeping in because of computer problems. And for normalization, either choose overload protection only or switches off. Because if you switch this on, it's going to introduce some compression to your song. And you've already dialed in compression yourself. When you're happy with these settings, if you click Okay, it will ask you to select the destination where you want to bounce these tracks to, then they're ready to share with the world. If you're working in a project where you have lots of tracks visible and not just one mixdown tracks like I'm working on here. Then it's useful to add the stereo track to the view and then do your bounds from there. So press shift command and m, and it's going to add the stereo out. And now when you select that track and you press Command and B, That's the track you're going to bounce and you can make sure that you capture everything to shorten the project. If you zoom out here, there's a handle on the right-hand side, and then you can drag that along to select how much of the projects you want to bounce. If your song has a long reverb tail, it might be worth checking this option here include audio tail. That way when you bounce, it's not going to cut off the ending. A different way of doing that would be selecting your stereo out, pressing a for automation, clicking volume. And then here I can choose a point and I can add my own manual fade outs instead. You can use this simple mastering chain to get you started and get your song sounding professional. And then later, you can experiment with using more plug-ins. So some key takeaways. Remember to separate your mixing and mastering steps. Use references to make sure your ears are tuned in. When you're using plug-ins like EQs or compressors, use them with a purpose in mind. Don't just include them because you feel like you have two. And last, but perhaps most importantly, get your levels right. Makes sure that your song isn't too loud and isn't too quiet. So up next is the project. You're going to write, the code, mix a master, your own song. Whenever you're ready. I'll see you there. 14. Project: You made it all the way here. Thank you so much for taking my class and congratulations on completing it. Now it's time to put what you've learned into practice. You'll project task is pretty simple. Produce a complete piece of music using Logic Pro Tem. Now chances are you've been making music as you've gone along with this class. And it's okay for you to use that for your project or you can start something totally new. The important thing is you're using any or all of the things you learned in this class to make your own piece of music. And if a whole song feels like it's too much, that's fine. You can make a simple chord progression. You can make an eight bar loop. You could make a beat as totally okay. The important thing is you go from having an empty project to having created something musical. There are a couple of things that I want to say about music production in general. It's really easy to doubt yourself or to question yourself and start asking things like, what if I'm not good enough? What if somebody else is making better music than I am, especially with all of the social media content creators posting about, Oh, I made six figures this year in music production or trying to sell you the secrets of breaking into sync music licensing. Forget about all that stuff, focused on your own music. Your music is as unique as you are. But all those things aside, don't be intimidated by the people trying to sell you things on social media. And they engaged with other music producers. Ask them questions, learn new things from show support to people who are passionate about the same things that you are. Making. Music is about personal expression. It's not about chasing likes and followers online. Once you've finished your project, don't forget to share it in the project gallery. I'd love to hear what you've made and answer any questions that you might have. You can also suggest any future classes you'd be interested in taking on Logic Pro Tem or music production. And finally, please don't forget to leave a review of this course. If you found any of it useful or enjoyable, it would really help me out. That's for spending your time with me. And happy music making.