If you are a blind user of Apple’s Logic Pro and would like to trigger your samples from your MIDI keyboard, this screen reader friendly tutorial explains how to get it done with VoiceOver.
Whether it’s a sample you found on Splice, Cymatics or elsewhere,, Whether this be an acoustic or electronic kick, snare, clap, ih-hat or even an 808, the process works the same. Oh and if you would like to grab the snare sample I used in this demo, you can find it in the description of this video.
You will start with importing the audio sample you want to use into Logic. Once in aLogic Project, you can use Command Shift I to import audio into Logic, or just copy and paste it from finder. For more details on the process to import the samples into Logic, see the Importing Audio or MIDI files into Logic Using VoiceOver blog post.
Once you have the sample imported, you can select it. In this case since it’s the only thing on the track, its as simple as navigating to the new track that it was imported onto. Once you have that region selected, then you can press Command E to bring up the window where you can choose which method (region or Transient Marker) and which sampler (Sampler, Drum Machine Designer or Alchemy) you would like to use. In our use case for this tutorial, region and sampler would be the choice to make. You will also be able to choose whether or not the sample will be triggered as a one shot or not, be given a chance to name the instrument, and choose which key on your MIDI keyboard to assign it to.
Once you make these decisions, a new Software Instrument track will be created with an instance of the Sampler loaded on it ready to play. If you select that track in the track headers, and press the appropriate key on your keyboard, you should hear the sound of the sample you just imported. Beware that it will also create a MIDI region with a single note on it. So if you press the space bar, you will hear one hit of your sample play. You may want to delete this region before you record anything on the track yourself.
Don’t forget to save the Sample as a preset in the sampler, and you can also save it as a patch in the library if you would like as well. This will make it easy for you to reuse the same sample in a different project should you choose to later on.
Hopefully this tutorial gets you started with using samples in your projects and bringing in samples you find from places like Splice or Cymatics into your project. There is a lot more you can do with samples and I’ll be covering the QuickSampler in a future tutorial, and a lot more in an upcoming course. If you’d don’t want to wait and/or would like to fast track your knowledge of the sampler and all the different ways to take advantage of the Sampler, QuickSampler and DrumMachine Designer, book a one on one session and we can go deep on all the tools to super charge your beat making.
