Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hey there. Thanks so much for
joining me in this course. My name is Will, and I've been running my own home
studio where I've been doing production work
of all kinds for many, many years, about 15 years. And this has taken me on a tour of production
software techniques, even live sound that I've
done on numerous occasions. In this section, what I really want to focus on and help you understand is a specific tool in base called the
logical editor. Now if you have base Pro, then you have two
different versions of this logical editor. And they're extremely
powerful tools, but they can be hard to get your head
wrapped around them. So in this section,
what I wanted to is talk about what they
do and give you some actual real world examples
that I think will start to not only help you
understand how it could maybe be useful for
your specific workflow, but also learn how to use it without just too much
trial and error, right? Because I think a lot of
people get hung up in that phase of trying to figure out exactly how the
logical editor works. So if you are a producer who's working
a lot with you know, like huge projects
in base, you've got dozens or hundreds
of tracks if you're doing orchestral work and you've got these enormous templates. If you're doing a
lot of work with Midi and you're trying to do very specific manipulations to either controller
values or velocities. Maybe go through and randomize all the high hats that aren't on beats 1.3 things like that. Then using the logical editor can be really, really helpful. I'm going to show you a few
examples in this course where I finalize my projects
using the logical editor. We're also going to
talk about macros which are an older
feature in base. That was an early effort
to try to help producers, engineers do some of the heavy lifting without having to surf through
their menus all the time. So we're going to
talk about macros and we're going to see
how actually you can integrate macros not only with the logical editor and
project logical editor, but also how you can integrate that with mini controllers. So you can have a
push button effect that is going to run a whole bunch of commands
within base for you, save you a ton of time
and can potentially really for your
workflow with Base. Thank you so much for
checking out this course. I hope that you continue on with the rest of the lessons.
So let's get started.
2. Logical Editor Use Cases: Now we're going to get started
with a logical editor. This is kind of the
original logical editor. Later on they added a
project logical editor. What the logical
editor does really, is it allows us to
manipulate Midi, or at least that's
its main designs. Main purpose is to
manipulate Midi. And the logical editor, as we'll find out
in the next lesson, is a little bit more
oriented towards the project window if we want to do things to manipulate tracks, if we wanted to rename tracks
or that sort of thing. Logical editor, More project. Logical editor, more about
project window related tasks. Let's just take a look at
what the logical editor is and start getting
oriented with how to use it. You can download this
project along with this lesson at any point
in time, actually, any one of the lessons
in this section, you can download
the iteration of this project that is most appropriate to the
lesson that you're on. Okay, let's talk about
the logical editor. Let's go up here to my Miti menu and we're going to go down
to logical editor. We have two options. We have
set up and apply preset. If you're just applying a preset that you've
made in the past, this is your simplest option. It just brings up a window
here with all the presets. I've got my presets down here. These are my custom presets. But there's also a bunch
of built in presets. However, we're not really
at that point yet, I want to help you understand
better how to use it. We're going to go
to set up and this is where you can actually create your presets and see what
the individual steps are. This is available in base. It's important that
students in this course understand that if you can't
find the logical editor, it may be because of
your version of base. This is not a
standard feature in all versions and has
changed over time. It may not be there for
you, but hopefully it is. Hopefully you've got
base Pro and you're able to dive into this.
How does it work? First, we've got
this filters area, right? Event target filters. This is a way you can decide the criteria for
selecting things. Let's say that I could go for Midi that was on
channel one, all right? That's an example of a
filter I could go for. Property is selected, right? I could looking for Midi parts where they are
selected in the screen. Then in the lower section here, you have the transform actions. Now, depending on what you have selected down here in
this dropdown box, this event, transform actions may or may not become
active, right? If I select delete
here as my action, then the transform actions don't take place because it's
just going to delete it. But if I select transform, then I can create
different things here. And I could say,
okay, let's go back to my original setting here. Any Miti that is on channel one. And I could say I want to
change that to channel two, then I can remove those two. What's going to
happen when I hit Apply is that Midi that is going out on channel one is going to be
switched channel two. Let's take a look
at an example here. Let's create a Midi
channel right here. Add Midi track. I'm just going
to call it channel test. I can see that my Midi channel has been
set to channel two. I'm going to go ahead
and set it to one. I think I have another
Midi channel up here as well. This
is set to one. We'll probably go and
change both of these now. I'm going to go ahead
and apply this. I don't see the
channel changing. This is because the
logical editor is actually about
midi manipulation, not about track manipulation. So let's take a
Midi example here. I'm going to grab
this Midi here, and I'm just going to grab it down to my channel test track. Again, the reason that
this did not change channels one to
channels two has to do with the fact that
manipulating tracks is really more going to be the domain of the
project Logical editor. And we'll see that we'll learn
about the logical editor, or PLE, in the next lesson. But the logical editor
is really about mid. If I open up this mitre, I look at individual notes. Now, I could say
select all of this. And I can see here that
the channel is set to one. Now when I apply this, the
channel got changed to two. And that's because
the logical editor really manipulates Midi. I need to have some
Midi selected. Now, I didn't actually have to open this up and drag over. I could just select
the part like this. Just make sure I have
the Midi part selected. Let's try that again
and change it now. 2-3, All right. Now when we apply it, all I have is selected
is this mid part. I can see that the channel
has been changed to three. So just keep that in mind that the logical editor is really
about manipulating Miti. And if you don't
have Miti selected, then you are going to maybe
have some confusing results. If you want to change
the channel values, you want to change information
about your project window, then you need to use the
project logical editor, which we're going to talk
about in the next lesson. It very much functions
the same way. Before I close up here,
I'll just point out that once you've made a
preset like this, you can go ahead here
and you can save the changes as a preset so
you can recall them later. And we'll be doing more of that. So let's move forward
in the next lesson and look at the project
logical editor.
3. Project Logical Editor (PLE): So we've started our exploration
of the logical editor, seeing how the logical editor itself is really
aimed towards Midi. But we often want to accelerate our workflow in the
project window as well, and that's where the project
logical editor comes in. This gives us a chance to select and find
different elements within our project window and manipulate them in order to
accelerate our workflow. So let's check that out now. Again, the project logical
editor is only available in base Pro and you're going to access it from your
project menu up here. And you go down to
Project Logical Editor. And again, you have set
up and apply preset. We're going to go to
set up so that we can actually set up our own. It looks very similar. It's not exactly the same. There's this new pre and post commands which I will
explain in just a minute. Let's say that actually
I just want to select this Track, Mi track. I want Miras that are being routed to my
chord track instrument. I can go ahead and add
another filter here. And I'm going to choose
output name, channel. And I can see here the
different kinds of outputs that are in
use in my project. So I could look for tracks that are going to
Groove Agent for example, and just manipulate those
or change their channel. But I'm going to go with
this chord track instrument. And what I'm going to see now
is that when a hit apply, it selects both of these tracks. It selected my track
and my track Miti. Now instrument tracks and
Midi tracks both register under this first line item of media type is equal to Midi. There's not a distinction here between instrument
tracks and Midi tracks. Although instrument tracks are their own track within base, they're essentially
led up Midi tracks. The project logical editor is going to find
them with it has the parameter there
if you ever need to have more distinction
between these. For example, let's
say you wanted to get just your instrument tracks
or just your miti tracks. The channel name is going
to be your friend there. I've actually named these core track instrument and
core track Midi. So that I can
differentiate them with my project logical
editor presets. For example, if we were to add another filter here and
we were to go down a name. I'm going to say a name contains
and under parameter one, I'm going to type in Midi. Now when I select, I
only get my Midi track, and that's because I had
already put that in the name. There are a variety
of different ways you can select your channels
in the project window. The project logical editor,
just as a reminder, is for the project window, while the regular logical
editor is for Miti. Let's say that I wanted to change this track channel here, 1-2 What I'm going to do
now is select transform. I've already have
this default event transform action set, and I'm going to select
Track operation. I'm going to go down
here to connect output. I'm going to click here
under parameter one. And I can choose the output
that I want to send it to. I want to send it to
chord track instrument. But this time I want that to be on channel, let's say three. Now when I hit Apply, we'll see that this over
here changes to three. So let's just go
ahead, hit that. And we can see that it changed
the channels to three. So this would be really helpful. Let's say you've got a
really large project and you've created
a new drum bus. Let's say you've
recorded a rock band. You've got, I don't
know, a dozen tracks. You got your snare top, snare, bottom overheads,
right and left. You've got your kick, you've got all these mics set
up on the drums, and you've created
a new drum bus with a bus compressor
and some effects. And you want to route
everything to them. You want to use your
event target filters to make sure that you are
selecting all your drum tracks. And then you can
connect the output to your new bus using this
set of options right here. Much easier than coming in here and clicking into the inspector. And you have to choose your
outputs for each channel. That's time consuming,
a little bit error prone with something like
the project logical editor, you can do that very quickly. And then you can save
it as a preset as well. And you can develop a workflow in which the drum mixing stage, you always create a new
group channel as your bus, maybe even from a track preset. And then you run this
project logical editor, preset, and you're all done, so it can be a real time saver and get more consistent results.
4. PLE Examples: It's often the case that when
I'm producing in my studio, I want to make a change or an alteration to a variety
of different tracks, or parts, or events
in my project window. And I don't really want
to have to go through with my mouse and do
a lot of clicking. That process usually starts for me with a project logical editor that selects different
elements within the project window based
on a set of criteria. You find all my mitt parts, find all my audio parts, select all the parts on this
track, that sort of thing. So let's look at a
few basic examples, but which I think will help you understand
how you could use the project logical editor to
do more complicated things. These are certainly
foundation for a number of my more complicated presets. So we, in the last lesson, selected this chord track and we changed its Midi channel. Let's try selecting a track just based on its name, right? So I go up to my Project menu. Down to Project Logical Editor. I want to make sure
I have set up this. Gives me the window
where I can create my own presets and I'm going
to clear out my last preset. I'm going to change this
down here to select. I'm going to drag this window over here and just zoom in a little bit more so we can see better what it
is that I'm doing. Let's start by
selecting some tracks. I'm going to insert here. I'm just going to say, okay, I want all tracks that contain
the instrument name piano. Now when I hit Apply, I can see that it selected
my sketch piano. If I wanted to change this
to viola and hit Apply, it selects that track. Now let's say that I want to actually select all
the events, right? So I want to select this Midi event that
is on that track. How do I do that?
I'm going to need to add a few more target
filters up here. We can see that I actually
have two events here. One which I copied from
this track down here. They're both called piano. These events, these Miti
parts are both called piano. Unfortunately, looking for items with the name viola
only gets me the track. What I'm going to do
here is I'm going to actually add another filter. I'm going to change
media type here to container type equals track. This is selecting only the
track but not the miti part. If I were to have this on piano again and I
were to hit Apply, I can see that actually
the parts get selected. Just to be more
clear, I'm going to start with a slightly
modified example here. I'm going to change this
parameter one to part. Now when I hit
Apply, it's going to select all the
miti parts, right. Hasn't really selected tracks. You can see that I actually have a variety of parts here
that are all labeled piano. This one here, this one
here, and this one here. When I hit Apply, it
selects all three of those. But I only want the one that
is on my piano track here, my sketch piano
track right here. How do I differentiate this
miti part from the other two? In this case, I need
to group together a few filters to
be more specific about the parent or the container of the part
that I want selected. I'm going to insert
another filter here and zoom in just a bit. Now, over here, under
this column here, there's a little parentheses. There's another one over here. I can use this to actually
group things together. I'm going to say, okay. On the one hand, I want these two things to
be grouped together. Where the thing that I
select is named piano. And it is a part, meaning a Midi part,
in my project window. What's between these
two parentheses? That's one constraint. That's two different filters. But they're, they're
being linked together, they're grouped together within
this pair of parentheses. To be one thing, both
of these must be true. The name must be piano and the container type
must be a miti part. If that's true, then now I can go and create another group
which defines the parent. I'm going to put in
parentheses here. I'm going to say container
type is equal to track. The name contains piano. Now, I want to finish
off here so that I have this opening parenthesis here and this closing
parenthesis here. There's the first two filters
here are added together, grouped together within
the parentheses to represent one set
of constraints. All those things must be true. The and here, as opposed to or means that both things
have to be true. I want to select the part. If it's called piano, it is a miti part,
those two are true, then separately, it's container
type needs to be a track. And it needs to contain the
name piano. Let's go ahead. All right, let's start
this lesson over. Let's take a look at an
interesting example here, although I have a sketch, piano track, viola track, and this channel test track. These three tracks, let
me just select them all. Oops, all three of these tracks are
different instruments or have different purposes, but the Miti parts that are
on them are all titled piano. As you can see here, each of
the parts is titled piano. So if I go ahead and I
use the project logical editor to select parts
that are titled piano, we're going to get all
of these parts right. But what if I want parts that are only on
this piano track? Let's look at that example. So I'm going to go up to my Project menu Project
Logical Editor and Set up. Then if I were to say okay, name is contains
piano, I hit Apply. I've got chosen down here, I get the piano
track gets selected, but also these three
Miti parts get selected. But I only want
this one here to be selected and it's
selecting all of them. Oftentimes what I'll
do here is I'll use two different project
logical editor presets. The first one I'll have
just select the track. I actually have a preset
here under my user presets. I'll look at this example. It says Select Track Midi. But this is really just
selecting based on a name. If I were to change
this to Sketch Piano, it selected that track. Now I have another
preset here which I've saved called Select parts. What this does is if the
parent object is selected, in other words the
track is selected, that's the parent object of
all the parts on that track. The container type is a Midi
part. Then select those. What I get then is just the selection of
this one part, right? Let's say I select
no parts here. I've got the track selected from the previous PLE preset,
and I hit Apply. It just selects this one part. In this case I'm actually using, it's a joint effort
between two presets. The first preset selects
the tracks that I want. The second preset selects
all the parts on the track based on the fact that the parent object
here is selected. Let's look at another
one of my presets, which is show only
instrument tracks. When I apply this, you actually see that
all of my tracks on the project window that were not Midi tracks or instrument
tracks disappeared. Now you do see the folder tracks that contain them
and that's normal. And the track opt operation to hide these tracks is toggle. So when I apply it back, it goes back to my full view. I can see all of my channels. And to look a little
bit more closely, I'm saying when the media
type is not a Midi track. So if it's audio, if
it's a tempo track, if it's chord track, any other kind of track besides Midi. And remembering that Midi
and instrument tracks are both included here
under this Miti heading, and the container
type is a track. It's not a part,
it's not an event. So I'm not hiding things that are in my project
window over here. I'm hiding only tracks. So they must be tracks, and they must be tracks
that aren't Midi tracks, which means Miti or instrument, in that case, hide them. And the action is toggle based. This would be a great preset
to map onto a Miti button, maybe on a touch screen
controller, like an ipad, using something like
Metagrid or maybe just a button on your keyboard or a drum pad or
something like this. Just just switch between instrument tracks
and all your tracks. If I were to change this container type
to unequals track, what I'm going to find
is I'm going to get all my specialty tracks up here, like these ruler tracks. And my tempo and time signature. Those kinds of tracks
are going to stay and all the other musical tracks are going to disappear.
And there they are. So you can manipulate the view, the visibility of
what you're seeing in the project window very easily using the project
logical editor. And this toggle feature makes
it nice to switch back and forth just to accelerate
your workflow. Now in the upper part of
the track window here, this Track Visibility
agents button here looks like a
little house shape. If I select that
or click on that, I mean and I choose
Show all tracks, that's going to undo whatever this project
logical editor has done. There are some built
in visibilities. Show tracks with data, show data at the
cursor position. This is one of my favorites because what it's going
to do is it's going to hide anything that
doesn't actually have data right at that time. So if you have a huge project of 30 or 200 tracks and
you're wondering, okay, well what instruments are actually playing right now? You know, not
everybody's playing. Maybe I've got 70 or 80 tracks in my project that
don't have any music. And I just want to
see which tracks have some event
under the cursor. Then I'm going to choose that
Show tracks with data at the cursor position or show tracks with data
between the locators, which is up here in purple. These visibility agents
can be really useful. I use them often just
to show all tracks, just to reset the view, But there are a few built in there that are
really helpful. And you can always
get to the project logical editor from there as well to open up the window and start
building your own presets. Now let's just look
at one more preset because we're going to be
using it a little later on. And that is a custom
preset I've made called Select All Tracks Here. We're looking for container
type is all types, so any track and I
have chosen down here, when I apply that, it
selects all my tracks. And we'll see in
an upcoming lesson why that might be useful.
5. Designing Your Own: Now we're just about getting to a look at macros and how we can use those in conjunction with project logical
editor presets. But before we do that, I want to just talk about how you can use the existing presets as a way to explore what's possible
with a logical editor. And I'm going to show you
what I mean when you are designing your own presets and you're trying to figure
out what you can do, right, what's going to
facilitate your workflow. I'm going to direct you
to the project logical editor and start looking at some of these factory presets, parts and events is a
great example here. Let's say you
wanted to colorize. We can see here that this
preset is looking for Midi parts where the
media type is Midi. The ***gth is less than 1 bar. This preset is called
Colorize Small Midi Parts. But if you were to
take this value away, then it would be all Midi parts. And they would be set with
this color color number eight. And you can choose
the different colors. Let's take a look at this. If I were to apply this, now the colors don't change because these parts are
all 2 bars in ***gth. If I were to just remove
that and now hit Apply, I can see that actually
they've all been colorized. If I wanted to make
just the parts labeled piano a specific color, I'm going to go ahead
and choose red. I'm going to add a name filter. Here contains piano. Now want to hit Apply the
parts named Piano Turn red. But this part down here
is called Drums Didn't. If I wanted to change it so that the drum parts were green, then I could come over here, select Green, and hit Apply. Now the drum parts are green. This is a great way
learn how to write your own project
logical editor presets by looking at existing presets
and seeing what they do. Let's take some
more examples here. Let's look at tracks and
see what they've got here. Enable all disabled tracks. Enable disabled Midi tracks. This is looking for
tracks that are disabled, they are Midi tracks. If I switched this audio tracks, I would be finding all the disabled audio tracks and then you can run
this track operation. Let's look at a few of the
other track operations that we have available folder. This is a great way to open
or close or toggle folders. If I were to change this, I need to change this or I'll
just actually delete it. I'm going to remove that as well and change this
to folder track. Now I am toggling my folder
tracks open and closed. There are so many different
presets in here under different categories naming
mixing presets, Toggling E, Q bypass for selected tracks is a great example of
a workflow enhancer where you might
want to listen to your orchestral
project play back, but you want to disable the EQ on all the strings or
all the percussion. That sort of thing disable
sends to a specific event. You can find presets here in the factory presets
collection that will give you a robust sense of direction no matter what kind of creativity you have in mind. Whatever kind of
workflow enhancement you're trying to use the
project logical editor for designing your own presets often starts with checking
out a factory preset. Also using the select option down here is a great
way to test what's going on in your target
filters to make sure that base is finding the
right parts before you. For example,
colorize everything. Maybe just use the select here, hit Apply, and then
you can see if it selected the things you
thought it should select. Then you're ready
to do something more dramatic like
delete or transform. Now in the next lesson, let's just take a quick look at the post process
and pre process. Understand what's
going on there, and then we're going to look at integrating macros after that.
6. Pre & Post Commands: The pre and post
commands that are in the bottom section of
the project logical editor give you a way to integrate some of the
standard menu choices. Standard menu commands either before your transformation
takes place or after. It can be a little
bit like a macro, but more encapsulated within your project logical
editor presets. So let's take a look at
how those work so you can integrate those into your
logical editor presets as well. When we finished
our last lesson, we were looking at different
existing factory presets. And some of them
you're going to see have this pre and post commands. This section you can sort of toggle open and close down here. So in this particular case where we're looking
at this preset, create random tune per note before anything in the event transform actions takes place. Which actually there's
nothing here on this preset. So first it's going to remove any note expression
and then it's going to process two logical
editor presets. I can see in here, if I were to click
on this plus sign here in my either post or pre, it brings up essentially
the regular menu, one of which includes
process logical preset. There's also process project logical editor preset, right? So this is the logical
editor and these would be project logical
editor presets. So I can add logical
editor presets as pre and post within a project
logical editor preset. And if I wanted to
know what either of these items here does, then I could go and look them
up in my logical editor. Pre and post processing
can just be a nice way to encapsulate several
steps and keep the whole thing kind of wrapped
up in one preset so it's easier to track what the intention was
behind your preset. You know, sometimes
these presets can become so convoluted and complex that it's hard to remember all of the steps,
everything that's doing. Seeing the pre and post
processing here helps to make it very concise and easy to get an overview when you're
looking at the preset. All right, let's
move forward and look at integrating macros.
7. Integrating Macros: Macros have been part of
base for a long time. They're very powerful and they
do have a few advantages. We want to look at how they're set up, where you can find them, how you can change them, and how you can learn to
create your own macros. Macros are great if you want to perform multiple menu commands and or integrate them with
logical editor presets. Earlier I created a
project logical editor preset here called
Select all Tracks. It's under my user presets and this is what it looks like. Very simple container
type is all types. I hit a ply and it
selects all of my tracks. Now why would I want this? Because I like to use a macro
to finalize all my tracks. I do a lot of compositional
work with Midi, and I want to
freeze these tracks as an archiving step
to make sure that if I come back to this project in six months time,
a years time, two years time, that even if my instruments don't
load correctly, the freezed feature will preserve my original
composition. So let me show you
how I set that up. I go up to my edit command, up here, Edit menu, down to key commands. If you don't see this
macros area here, you need to click this button. Either's going to say show
macros or hide macros. And it's going to open up
that part of the window. This is where you can
create your own macros. I have a macro called finalized project, and
it does two things. First it processes a
project. Logical editor. Preset this one over here
called select all tracks. Then it just calls a standard edit command
from my edit menu. Freeze. Unfreeze selected
tracks with current settings. When I run this
finalized project macro, it selects all the tracks in
my project and freezes them. It's very easy for me to run. I simply go to my Edit menu, down to Macros, and I'll see
all my macros listed here. I see my finalized project. Let's just deselect
all the files so you can see this working. Hopefully, this
won't take too long. I might have to edit out the
part where it does the work because sometimes freezing a project can
take a little while. But I go down to macro
finalized project, you're going to see
after a second, all of those get selected. And the freeze starts
running over and over again. It's going through
and it's running against all of my tracks. It's working through
them pretty quickly. So there you go. I have
frozen all my tracks. If I were to look at any one of these tracks specifically, I can see that it's been frozen. And now I can
archive this project knowing that all of my Midi
tracks have been frozen. So that's a great
example of how I like to integrate macros
into my workflow. The macro is certainly using
a standard menu option up here in the edit menu
under freeze and unfreeze. But it's also integrating
this powerful capability of the project logical editor to first select all my tracks. I could have also done
this with the pre and post commands within the
project logical editor, but I've been using
this macro for so long that I keep using the original version
that I built using the traditional
key base macros. Now in the next lesson,
I'm going to look at how we could
use remote control to run that macro from the push of a button
on my Midi controller.
8. Remote Control: These days, we all use Midi controllers in our
studio and in our workflow. Just about any DAW is capable of sophisticated learn features. You can just push a
button or turn a ****, and your software will learn the Midi information coming from that **** so that you can
link it up something here. What I'm going to do
is I'm going to use a button on my complete
control keyboard. That button is going
to run my macro. I'm going to show you how
to go ahead and do that. Now if you are familiar with the key commands
window here, you may be familiar
with this ability up here to set a
specific key command. So this is a keyboard shortcut. So for example,
if I were to find my macro here under
the traditional menu, then I could set a
keyboard command up here. I'm going to go ahead
and change this to command option shift, let's say. I'm certainly not using that
anywhere and assign it now. Anytime I hit command
option shift, it's going to run
finalized project. But there's another way to
do this if I want to run it from a Midi controller,
not my keyboard. What I'm going to do there, undo that assignment,
close out of here. This time we're
going to go up to the studio menu and
down to studio set up. Let's take a look over here
under remote devices here. You're going to want to
add a generic remote. Now, I have quite a few
generic remote set up here to work with my
Metagrid software, which is an app that runs
on my ipad that I use as a touchscreen interface
to do a lot of commands. I'm going to go ahead
and I'm going to add generic remote like that. I get this generic
remote number seven. I want to set up my
Miti input and output, which in my case is going to
be my complete control S 49. The main thing here
is my Midi input. Midi output may or may not send messages that are helpful depending on your hardware
and how you have this set up. I'm going to change the
control name here to finalize and I'm
going to check Learn. Now when I hit the button
on my Midi controller, I am going to see the
values here change. So it's on Midi channel 1112. And I can set the
flags here to receive, transmit, relative, or pick up. I'm going to leave
that on receive. Turn off learn in the
bottom section here. I want to change
device to command. This is going to give
me the ability to run a specific macro when
I push this button, then under channel and category, I could choose to process a logical editor preset or
project logical editor preset. But in this case, I'm
going to run a macro, so I'm just going
to do a search for macro, hit macro there. Now under value in action, I'm going to see all my macros. I'm going to choose
a finalized project, I'm going to hit Apply. Now if you want, at
this point you can delete these other options here. Which sometimes I do just
for the sake of knowing that when I come and look at this generic controller
down the road, it'll be a lot easier for me to remember why it was
that I set it up. So if I delete all those, it's going to be very clear
to me down the road what generic remote number seven was used for them.
And go hit Apply. And I'm going to hit Okay, and
now I'm going to zoom out. And now when I press my button, it's going to run
that finalized macro, selects all the
tracks and executes that finalized macro for me from the push of my
Miti controller. Now in the next lesson,
I want to look at how we could use this for
compositional purposes. How we can use a
combination of macros, standard commands, and
logical editor presets to actually do some composition.
9. Extracting a Chord Track Voice: Let's take a listen
to this music. At the moment, I got a very basic
piano part here. This guitar part is coming
from a session guitarist. Pick acoustic, which is a native instruments
contact library. And it's being driven by these chords appear
in my chord track. There is actually no
miti part in the track, it's being driven by the chords. Then I have a groove, a Midi part here, which is really just one. What it's doing is that one
note is triggering a pad in the pattern,
executing it altogether. Just a little musical vamp here. Now what I want to do is
I want to add a viola. And the purpose here is to
talk about how we can use the logical editor as part of
a formula for composition, not just for project maintenance
or finalizing projects. So what I want to do is I
want to take the upper notes from this piano part
and I want to be able to copy them down
into the viola. And I'm going to show
you how you can do that. First I am going to go to my project logical
editor and I have a preset which selects a
track based on its name. I'm going to copy the
name from over here. Sketch piano. And I'm
going to move it in here. I'm not going to
overwrite my preset. Of course, the track
was already selected. But if it weren't,
and I hit Apply, it selects that track. That's the first step.
Say select the track. Then I'm going to select
the events on that track where the parent object is selected and the
content A part, a miti part select. That goes ahead and it
selects this part right here. So those were project
logical editor presets that I could have
added to a macro. Now I'm going to actually use
one of the menu commands, which is up here under my Project menu,
under Chord Track. Which is assigned
voices to notes. Now when I open up this Miti, I'll find that this voice
value has been set. This is an alto tenor,
this is a base. What I want to do is take
all of the Midi notes that are assigned to
the voice of soprano, and I want to run them
into my viola sound here. This is just going
to add another layer to my composition. It's a compositional decision. I'm going to select the
viola channel here. Since I want to make
a manipulation to a Midi part and not the project
window specifically here, I'm going to be using
the logical editor under the Midi menu logical
editor to set up. I'm going to open
this up so we can see it in the key
editor down here. I'm going to leave
this filter target set as type is equal to note, and I want to look for
just the soprano voices. I'm going to insert
here, I'm going to go down to context variable, this is a new one, equals. And I'm going to
go down to voice, and I can choose my voices here. I'm going to go for
soprano down here, I'm going to say
extract to track. I could do extract
to track or copy. Copy is going to create a new track with
just the part on it. Extract is going to do the same, but it's going to remove
it from the original. I'm going to use
extract and that is going to remove it
from the original. I want to just remove this
event transform action here. Now I'm going to hit Apply. And what we're going
to see is that it's going to create a new track, as well as remove the Midi
from this original part. We're going to see the top notes from this Midi part disappear, and a new track appear
with those notes in it. There we go. Now
I'm just going to drag this part onto
my viola right there. I'm going to go ahead and
delete this temporary track. Now we can hear that
the viola part has been extracted from the soprano in
the original sketch piano. Now in this track, I have a Midi insert. Over here I have
an Arpache Pega. It's not exactly playing the
rhythm that we see here, but it's a rhythm that works well in the overall composition, so let's listen
to it altogether. So this is a great
example of using the logical editor
in conjunction with the project
logical editor in conjunction with menu
items like assigning voices to do some heavy lifting during the
compositional process. And once you master using the project logical editor
and logical editor, and you've set up some
of your own presets, you'll start to feel very
confident using them to even do some very heavy lifting on huge projects where you've already invested a lot of time. If you ever make a mistake or your logical editor preset
wreaks havoc on your project, you can always go
up to the edit menu and either use undo or check out the history
window if you want to go and reverse
some of your actions. But generally I find that
if I'm careful about making my logical editor
presets over time, my workflow relies
more and more on them. I'm doing more and
more heavy lifting and it's very reliable and safe. In the next lesson, I
want to talk a little bit about troubleshooting macros and give you a heads up of
some of the lessons I've learned working with
logical editor, presets, macros and touch
screens or mini controllers. And then we'll wrap up
with a project after that.
10. Troubleshooting Macros: Hopefully you can
see just how much the logical editor can
improve your workflow. Do a lot of heavy
lifting for you, it is very specific and it can take a little while
to wrap your head around. But I'm hopeful
that these lessons have helped you
understand how to use it. And also how to use things like the existing preset catalog to get ideas and
get inspiration. So when we run macros
from this area, a strange thing can happen
sometimes if we're running a macro that has a lot of steps. And those steps
take time, right? So let's say I were
to add a step after the freeze selected tracks
in my finalized project. It's the case that
this freezing process might take a while and the next command I add might
actually occur too early. In other words, base
macros are not really smart enough to know how long the previous
step has taken. And if it takes too long, then the later steps
might appear to not work. They did trigger,
it's just that they triggered too early and didn't have the effect
that you wanted. So if you create a
macro and you have several steps and you're not
getting reliable results, what you'll want to do is
add some delay type steps. Something very harmless, like let's say punch in, punch out. I'll often use these because
they're totally harmless. They don't transform anything. Delete anything. It can
be a little bit annoying, but you know quite often in an advanced macro where I have steps that take a lot of time, then I will add these
commands like that, like, you know, 2345 of them. And then I'll run
the macro again and see if I get the right results. So what this is going
to do is going to run this step and
then it's going to run this 2345678 times. And that's going to take a
certain amount of time, right? That might take 3 seconds, might take 10 seconds, depending on what
you have chosen here as sort of a time waster. By the time the next
command comes up, you know that all of the
other important commands have had a chance to run.
It's a little finicky. It's not a great solution,
but it does work. Now I also, I made mention
of using Metagrid, which is an ipad app that allows me to set up
remote controls, and it also allows me to essentially run
macros within it. I like that software because I can actually create
pauses so I can have a step and then I can create a pause for
any amount of time, one tenth of a
second, 5 seconds, however long I need, create a pause, then I
have the next step. But this is the only
option if you're working strictly within
macros, within base. Metagrid is a great
alternative option because it allows you to solve this problem much more
gracefully with the proper fix, which is a pause that waits for the previous
step to complete. Just know that if you get unreliable results
from your macros, this is likely a cause that base is taking too
long to finish the previous task
and the next task is misfiring or not firing on the right amount
of information. If you have any
questions about this, please reach out to me with
your specific example, and I'll do my best to help you troubleshoot it and find
a suitable solution.
11. Wrap-Up & Project: So we've covered a
lot in this section. We've talked a lot about the
logical editor and project logical editor and how
you can create presets. We've talked about how you can certainly enhance your workflow, but specifically use the
factory presets to come up with your own ideas and see how the specialists at Steinberg would have you accomplish
certain tasks. So what I'm going to suggest
you try now is create your own PLE or project logical editor
preset that selects tracks, only tracks that
have events on it. So what I'm going to
suggest here is you create two different
kinds of presets. Project logical editor, preset that selects audio Tracks
could be Midi tracks, any kind of track that
you're working with, but only tracks that
actually contain events. So any empty tracks
wouldn't be selected and then hide the ones that
don't have events on them. Right? So it's a way
of sort of cleaning up your project window. Then you can look
up some presets in the logical editor
factory preset collection about deleting
every fifth note and setting velocity to 100. There's a couple of
different presets there on roughly called delete
every fifth note. The other is called
set velocity to 100. And you can use those two
as role models to create your own logical editor preset that will set a velocity on, let's say every third
or fourth note. Maybe this would be
really applicable if you were trying to manipulate
a Midi high hat pattern. You've got a high hat playing through an entire
track or composition. And you want to accentuate the high hat on the
downbeat of the measure, but on beats 23.4 you want them to be
diminished in velocity. Try to use the existing
logical editor presets to come up with your own
new logical editor preset. That does that work
for you to spice up your high hat part
just as an example? It could be something else, but what I want you to do is use two logical editor presets to come up with a new
logical editor preset. I'm suggesting this
particular combination because I think a lot of people can relate to how
that would be useful. But whatever you come up with is fine, share them with me. If you have questions,
please reach out to me. If there's anything
in this course that you wish I
had covered more. If there's anything
I didn't cover. If you have any questions, if you're having
any problems with the downloadable projects,
please reach out to me. I'm more than happy to help. I really appreciate that
you're taking the course. I want to be there for you. I want to help you answer
any questions that come up. Each student has different
needs and different questions, different kind of workflow. And I'm happy to help you configure what you've learned in the last several
lessons in order to optimize your workflow
for what you're doing. Please reach out to me.
Thank you so much for taking this course and I
look forward to seeing you again.
Thanks so much.