Chapter 9

Making Beats with Drummer and Ultrabeat

In This Chapter

\Creating beats with your virtual drummer \Producing drum sounds

\Designing grooves with Ultrabeat \Sequencing drum patterns

Did your drummer get lost on the way to the studio? Don’t you just hate it when that happens? Oh, you have Logic Pro X? Never mind.

Listen, I love playing with a live drummer. Some of my best musical partnerships have been with amazing drummers. But I’ve kept my greatest rhythm relationships private because I haven’t wanted to hurt any of my drummers’ feelings. Because I’m putting my own feelings in print, I might as well go all in. I love Drummer and Ultrabeat. There, I said it.

In this chapter, you discover how to use the new virtual drummer and Ultrabeat, the groove machine. You create beats, build custom drum kits, and use a pattern sequencer. Drummer and Ultrabeat make Logic Pro X an amazing songwriting tool and a music-producing powerhouse. But whatever you do, don’t beat on your computer. It only sounds like a drum — it’s not built like one.

Playing with Your Virtual Drummer

New to Logic Pro X is Drummer, your virtual session player. Drummer is a combination of a new track type and new software instrument. The track type does the drumming and the software instrument provides the drum sounds. As described in Chapter 4, a drummer track is a special MIDI track that looks like audio in the tracks area.

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The drummer track comes with its own drummer editor, which chooses the style of music and the player, and tells the drummer how to play the track. The editor is so simple that even a drummer could use it. Okay, no more potshots at drummers. Promise. I love Drummer so much because I wish I could play the drums. Honest.

The Drum Kit Designer software instrument is added to a drummer track automatically, but you don’t have to use the Drum Kit Designer. But Drummer and Drum Kit Designer were made for each other, so I won’t separate them in this chapter.

Creating a drummer track

To create a drummer track, choose Track New Drummer Track. A new drummer track is added to the track list, and two default eight-bar regions are added to the tracks area, as shown in Figure 9-1.

Figure 9-1:

A drummer track and regions.

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Creating drummer regions

Drummer automatically creates two eight-bar regions, but you don’t have to live with them. By using several regions to build your project rather than one big region, you can more easily change what your drummer plays during different song sections (as you’ll soon see).

To create a drummer region, select the pencil tool in the tracks area and click where you would like the region to begin. By default, drummer regions are eight bars long. If you want to change the size of the region, drag the lowerleft or lower-right edge of the region to resize it. You could also split a region (making two regions out of one) by using the scissors tool.

\If you want to force the drummer to hit the crash cymbal at the beginning of a song section, create a new region. You may need to adjust the Fills parameter,

as you learn next, but getting Drummer to play a cymbal crash at the beginning of a region is a good reason why you want new regions to start at song sections or groove changes.

Choosing and directing your drummer in the editor

The real power of Drummer’s artificial intelligence–like personality is in the drummer editor. To open the editor, double-click a drummer region or choose View Show Editor (E). The editor opens at the bottom of the tracks area, as shown in Figure 9-2.

Figure 9-2:

The drummer editor.

The drummer editor is filled with personality. The left side of the drummer editor is where you change settings for the entire drummer track. At the top of the area is a style button. Click the button and a drop-down menu appears so you can choose between Rock, Alternative, Songwriter, and R&B. Each style has several

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variations of the groove. If you select the Follow check box for the Kick and Snare slider, the slider changes to a drop-down menu and you can select a track in the project that the kick and snare will follow.

\\Fills: The Fills knob, shown in Figure 9-4, adjusts the number and length of

fills. Click the lock icon to freeze the fills setting when changing presets.

\\Swing: The Swing knob adjusts the amount of shuffle feel. Click the lock

icon to freeze the swing setting when changing presets. You can also click the 8th or 16th buttons to decide whether the swing is based on eighth notes or sixteenth notes.

\\Details: Click the Details button to open an additional editing panel, as

shown in Figure 9-4. Use this panel to change Feel, Ghost Notes, and Hi-Hat performance. The Feel knob adjusts how Drummer plays relative to the tempo. You can pull back the performance so that it plays behind the beat or push it forward so it plays in front of the beat. The Ghost Notes knob adjusts how loudly or quietly Drummer plays ghost notes (notes that are played at a low volume between the loud notes). The Hi-Hat knob adjusts the amount of closed or open hi-hat that Drummer plays. The panel has a lot of personality, so don’t forget to make use of it.

Figure 9-4:

The Details area of the drummer editor.

Selecting producer kits

Each drummer has a default kit connected to the drummer. The kit is automatically loaded into the stereo Drum Kit Designer software instrument. You can upgrade the kit to a special producer kit that has more tracks and channel strips for ultimate control. To select a producer kit, simply do the following:

\1.\ Choose View Show Library to open the library.

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Figure 9-6:

Drum Kit

Designer.

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Click any drum to play it. As you click a drum, the left side displays the Exchange panel where you can choose different drums. The right side displays the Edit panel where you can control the selected drum sound, as shown in Figure 9-7.

Each type of drum or cymbal has different parameters. You can tune and dampen every sound, and you can adjust the volume by using the gain knob. If you’ve loaded a producer kit (refer to the previous section, “Selecting producer kits”), you can select whether the sound should be included in the overheads and room microphones or should leak into other drum mics. For the room mics, you can select between two mic setups by using the A/B slider.

At the bottom of the software instrument screen is a disclosure triangle that opens the additional settings shown in Figure 9-8. In this area, you can adjust the volume of the drummer’s percussion instruments.