In This tutorial, we take a look at building out a drum track for a song. We start with no drums and use the drummer instrument included in Logic Pro to build the entire drum track for this song. I’ll take you through how I choose a drummer, (I.e the style of the drums and sound of the drums used), and how I go about using the various parameters of drummer to fine tune the parts to match the various performances throughout. If you are totally brand new to drummer, then first check out this Introduction to Drummer tutorial.
Also, normally Command Option U should load a drummer track with an 8 bar drummer region on it for you, but if when you load a drummer track it’s blank, here’s how to fix that.
Though it is a members song I am working on here, it’s pretty similar to how I use drummer. Generally I’ll load a drummer track into the project, and record and arrange all the guitar and bass parts. This allows me to still play in time, all be it with a basic back beat instead of a customized drum part. Once I get all the recording done, I’ll go through and customize the drums to work with the performances. I’ll typically lay out the entire drum track first with drummer, then go back through after converting to MIDI and customize it further.
TO understand the difference between drummer and Logic’s software drums, see this explainer.
Remember when you have a region selected, you can press command U to set the cycle range to the selected region. The Command U key command saves you having to manually set the left locator at the start of the region and the right locator at the end of the region, and then pressing C to turn cycle mode on. It does all that for you. When you are ready to turn cycle off, you press c to toggle cycle mode off.
Command U is perfect for when dialling in drums for a certain region to just have it on a loop while you make adjustments. It’s especially useful for the X/Y pad as you are unable to restart playback while adjusting the X/Y Pad.
When I am going through the Piano Roll at the end to take out hits I don’t want, I mute VoiceOver Speech with Right Option Slash. This is the key command I currently have set to mute speech. Check out this tutorial to see how it’s done.
Throughout the tutorial, I showed you how if you are having a hard time hearing things like cymbals or percussions, you can adjust their volume while editing the Drummer or MIDI regions. Just remember to turn those back down to a level where they blend in with the rest of the Kit when you are done editing. Let me know what you’d like to see next. Want me to build a drummer beat with a different genre? Want to see what’s next after building the drum track and turning it into MIDI? Have other questions? Leave them in the Comments and let me know.
That was interesting to see how you actually worked with the track. There are some things i wouldn’t do that you did but peoples preferences are different and it’s fun to see what other people are doing. One question though, when you’ve gone in to the midi part, if i want to add a note i think is missing somewhere, how would i go about doing that?
Curious to know what you would have done differently. That’s the best part of making music with others though is that different people would do things you wouldn’t have thought of. That’s one of the reasons I like using drummer, it’s almost like having that option for parts you may not of thought of yourself.
For adding notes, I would use the event list, Select the region you would like to add the note to, put the playhead where you want the note and then open the event list with Command 7 and press Command Control Option Shift E to add a new event. you can then transpose that note to th the note you would like it to be. Alternatively in the piano roll you can duplicate a note with command D and then move and transpose that note to where you would like it to be and transpose it to its new value. I’ll make a follow up on this one explaining how to do that.
Thanks for this. I’ve always extended Drummer regions using the Track Contents handles but this is an extra method. If I copy a region I use the refresh option in the menu button to introduce subtle changes. I didn’t know it is so easy to copy a Drummer track to midi and make it into a Producer Kit. Can’t wait to try this. Would this work with Drum kits from 3rd party providers? Thanks again.
I generally will try to find ways to do things that doesn’t require me to go into tracks content as its a time consumer I like to avoid when I can. However, as you saw in this tutorial sometimes you just have to go in there lol.
Producer Kit’s is the Logic team taking the time to create a Multi Out routing for all the acoustic (and some of the electronic) kits and saving them as patches in the library ready to go. Creating Multi out routing, the act of making a drum instrument output each kit piece to its own channel strip, is generally in accessible in most all Drum instruments. Yes this at the time of writing this includes all the drum instruments you can use inside of Komplete Kontrol.
A work around some will say to use is to separate each MIDI note to it’s own track, and while this will give you the kick snare and etc on their own channel strip, you still won’t gain access to the rooms, overheads and etc.
So the fact that all the Logic Drum sounds are already Multi out routed for us is a great time saver. The fact that you can still swap kit pieces and tune the kit pieces that are available is a nice addition as well.
But unfortunately while you can load a 3rd party drum instrument to a track and Logic accessibly lets you add the additional channel strips to that instrument track for the individual kit pieces, unfortunately the process of selecting the different kit pieces, rooms, overheads etc and routing them to the additional channel strips inside the plug in’s interface is inaccessible in most if not all the popular 3rd party drum instruments I can think of at the moment.
There is one I know of that’s accessible but it’s just a snare and not a full drum kit. I should do something with it on the Youtube channel soon.
And in case you are wondering about all the other electronic Kits not in the Producer kit category, that’s because the electronic drum kits is already set up for Multi outs so to speak.
Hi Mr. Oreo,
Once you’ve loaded up a producer kit, how much milage do you get if you switch the tracks from Drummer tracks to MIDI, then, for example, load up a Native Instruments patch onto each track, then remove the Native Instruments effects, so that you get the effects Logic has set on the tracks? In other words, each track would be a dry sound.
Producer Kit tracks are MIDI Tracks not a Drummer Track. Copying the drummer regions from a Drummer track and pasting them on to a MIDI Track like a producer kit track will convert the regions from Drummer regions to MIDI Regions.
To answer the second half of your question, Multi Out kits only use one instance of a software instrument. So for example the producer kit track stacks only have one Instance of Drum Kit Designer. There isn’t a separate instance of drum kit designer on the kick track, and the snare track etc. There is a single instance of Drum Kit designer and in the plug in the kick, snare, room over heads etc are then routed to individual outputs and those outputs show up on the other aux tracks in the track stack. So the kick in, Kick Out Snare Top, Snare Bottom, Room etc tracks you see in a producer kit track stack is just a AUX track being fed with the output of the single instance of Drum Kit Designer.
So if you wanted to do this with Native instruments complete Kontrol, you would on the track that has drum kit designer, replace it with a Multi Out version of Complete Kontrol, you will then have to go into the Complete Kontrol Plug in interface (which as of this writing is not accessible) and then route the kicks, Snares, etc to the aux tracks.
Because the plug in interface isn’t accessible and Complete Kontrol doesn’t give you a way to handle Multi Out Routing from the KK Keyboard, unless you got sighted assistance you wouldn’t get very far with this endeavor.
There are work arounds you could do to replace or blend kicks snares etc with 3rd party sounds like those found in Complete Kontrol, addictive drums etc but you still wouldn’t get the rooms, or over heads etc so it may make more sense to blend the 3rd party sounds with the Logic sounds than to replace them entirely, but that process could be a bit involved.
All things I could do a tutorial for in the future. Hope this answers your questions.
Yes. Then you would also need to make sure that yu go through and change things so that the drum maps match up, which would mean you’d need to go into the Inspector and play with the note ranges for the tracks. Come to think of it, can you make Logic see a note and play a different note, as in when it sees a C1, play a C#2? As I get into it a little more, I’m enjoying using Logic drums. If I want to add MIDI notes, I’m starting to simply add a new track and use another drum kit instance, rather than try to put everything on one track. It makes things faster. I’m just doing things like adding cymbal crashes where the software doesn’t put them in. I’m also going to experiment with making smaller regions, 1 or two bars, turning the fills slider all the way down, removing the snare or kick, or adjusting the complexity, then adding in MIDI notes on a new track, so I can make my own home-made fills if I want to. Another thing I want to explore is patterns.
Sounds like you are off to the races over there. Yes you can use the MIDI Transposer Plug in, but that will transpose all MIDI incomingg notes. I believe the MIDI Modifier plug in may let you only change a specific note to a different one. I’ll have to investigate further on that one. I believe Scripter also have some remapping presets for the drums as well that may prove useful when using other E Drums to play Logic Pro Drums.
I enjoyed following that session on the Drummer, I recently created a drum track and did a similar workflow. What I didn’t know to do. Was to create it as a midi track which was a great idea to further edit the track. Awesome! I do like the freedom of finger drumming too, but this is also a great option 🙂
The ability to convert to MIDI is the icing on the cake! It’s also nice to be able to play in specific parts or see what Drummer comes up with, all using the same sounds so you can use both seamlessly in the same song.
I accidentally found a way to make the process of converting a drummer track to MIDI after you copy it. If you go onto the copied Drummer track and press R as if you were going to record, Logic will ask you if you want it to convert the track to MIDI. Tell it you want to do that. All done.