Curious About Logic Pro's Drummer? Watch me build an entire Drum Track from Scratch!
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.