Optimize Your Music Production Workflow with Cubase Logical Editor | Will Edwards | Skillshare

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Optimize Your Music Production Workflow with Cubase Logical Editor

teacher avatar Will Edwards, Artist. Creative Problem Solver. Musician

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      2:42

    • 2.

      Logical Editor Use Cases

      6:28

    • 3.

      Project Logical Editor (PLE)

      4:54

    • 4.

      PLE Examples

      12:15

    • 5.

      Designing Your Own

      4:23

    • 6.

      Pre & Post Commands

      2:21

    • 7.

      Integrating Macros

      3:24

    • 8.

      Remote Control

      3:58

    • 9.

      Extracting a Chord Track Voice

      6:02

    • 10.

      Troubleshooting Macros

      3:27

    • 11.

      Wrap-Up & Project

      3:15

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About This Class

From managing tracks to massive time-saving shortcuts, Cubase Pro's Logical Editor (for MIDI) and the Project Logical Editor (for Projects) can perform tedious, repetitive tasks and help you get back to you uninterrupted workflow.  In this course, you'll learn how to build your own presets for both the Logical Editor and the Project Logical Editor (PLE).  This tools are game changers that many Cubase pros don't fully understand, but which offer real time-savings and they're useful in literally ANY workflow... If you understand how to design your own presets.

Often, the best way to design your own presets in the Logical Editors is to start by looking at the factory presets.  In this course, you'll learn how to do that as well as learn how to integrate traditional macros with Logical Editor and PLE presets for even more time-savings.  You'll learn how to trigger presets and macros from a remote MIDI control and we'll look at an example for extracting specific MIDI events to a new track when composing new music!  This course will wrap-up with a project focused on bringing all that you'll learn under one project, so that you can take ownership of these powerful tools moving forward.  Don't wait to learn these features - they will save you hours of time and make many of your complex, tedious work faster and more exact.  As with all of my courses, I'm available to answer questions and support you by answering any questions you have.  Thank you for checking out my course and I hope to see you in there :)

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Will Edwards

Artist. Creative Problem Solver. Musician

Teacher

I'm a fulltime media composer with a passion for music and programming. I have honed my skills as a production engineer, gigging artist, and I'm an academically trained film composer at Berklee College of Music. I delight in crafting powerful and immersive audio experiences for TV, films, video games and media. Dedicated and curious, I possess over 20 years of expertise in computer programming, proficient in C#, Java, and Lua, as well as experience with implementation software (game audio), sound design tools, and techniques.

Core Competencies:

Music Composition Sound Design Audio Editing & Mixing DAW Proficient (Cubase, Pro Tools, Ableton) Middleware/implementation (Wwise) Production and Adaptive Score Techniques

I specialize in bridging the gap between music and techno... See full profile

Level: Intermediate

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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.