in this video i'm going to show you how to make a beat with logic pro x
and i'll be using logic pro 10.5.1 as the most recent version to date of logic pro x my promise
to you is that by the end of this video you'll have hopefully a much stronger understanding of
how to actually make a beat and we're not just talking strictly about electronic beats but
if you're actually a singer-songwriter or you're into folk music or whatever how do you make drums
when you're not a drummer and how do you put drums and beats into your tracks and your music
by the way quick question if at the end of the video you're wanting to know more about logic
products and how to record acoustic instruments and vocals and a bit more of an extensive course
on logic prox i do have that it's about an hour and a half long and it's really a full
free course on my youtube channel i'll leave a link in the description you can check that out
if you'd like three or four ways that we can make a beat and we'll go through each of these
ways in this video are to actually use our midi controller and record the beats as we play them
the second way is to actually draw or paint the notes in right inside the daw with logic pro
x and we'll go through that way too and then the third way is using drum loops and audio loops that
logic pro x gives you for free and the fourth way is using kind of a mix of all of these
ways and so we'll do that as well let's do the first way though where we're actually going to
start a software instrument track and use the midi controller to actually record a beat
as we play it so here i am in logic pro x with an empty window and i have a software instrument
added and this is instrument one this is the default software instrument that logic products
gives you and so we're not going to be using this because this is a synth as we can see so we're
going to want to choose a drum sound that we like this can be an electronic drum sound or this can
be like a typical rock singer songwriter drum set it's up to you on how you want to sound like and
it doesn't really matter at the beginning because we're recording in midi we'll have the chance to
um switch that after we've recorded our actual pattern and then we can choose the different
sounds we like and how we're going to get there is through the drum kit designer if we want the
more electronic drumkit sounds we're going to go to the bottom here to the drum machine designer
so let's first look at the drum kit designer we'll go stereo and then we'll look through
the different drum kits that logic has and so you see the picture of it here and this is the factory
default that's loaded up and then we can go down here to all the different drum kits that are
available and you know you'll notice that these drum kits here are the same as these drum kits
on the side and so those are the stock drum kits that logic gives us so if we go to this sunset kit
this is what it actually looks like and then i can go over to my midi keyboard here and play those
this kit i'm just kind of playing notes looking for things and then you can play exactly what you
want to play and record it in that's what we're going to do let's say we don't want this natural
drum sound this is what the electronic kit sounds like we'll just press in them these top and bottom
arrows to switch our instrument and go down to the drum machine designer and this is where we
can get typical kind of 808 sounds more electronic style instruments if we just x this and then go to
our electronic drum kit here here we have different libraries of kits and the ones that
are grayed out i just don't have those actually downloaded natively on my computer the ones that
are on white are downloaded as the library of sounds so this 808 flex is a drum kit here we go
so kind of cool right actually it's a nice sound the one thing you're going to want to keep in mind
is the tempo of the song because you will want to get a lead in click um by pressing this one two
three four and we'll want to have the metronome on here right now i have this set at 105.
let's do something even right now you know maybe something a little slower 100 and that will be
so that's a good little tempo to start a beat i'm going to record and by pressing
r on my keyboard or this little red dot here so super simple right and we don't have to get over
complicated we can make things more complicated and more complex later by adding elements now
we're going to draw and paint the beat in with logic so how we're going to want to do that is
make we'll make some space here by removing this library on the side by clicking this little folder
and then we're going to double click on the 808 here to open up the editor so what we're going
to want to do now is quantize our beat and then make it a little better clean it up and maybe add
something so it sounds a bit more interesting how we're going to want to quantize is because i did
eighth notes on the hi-hat i'm gonna want to command a and then quantize over here if
i just make some space i can see quantize by one-eighth notes and then press the q
and that's locked everything in place with with the notes here by one-eighth notes and you can see
all the hi-hat notes here are falling nicely on the grid and one-eighth notes means that there's
actually eight hi-hat notes here in one bar this one bar has eight hi-hat notes how we're going to
want to make this beat a little more interesting now is we have a few different options we can use
what we call the pencil tool or the paint brush tool and your tools are up here by these drop
downs and the tool on the right you can quickly get to this tool just by holding down command
and that will turn into this tool so it is pencil here if i switch that to the glue tool and if i
press command it will be the glue so i'm going to have the pencil tool on the right side here
and then on the left side i'm going to have the default tool which is going to be my paintbrush
tool and so you'll see i have paint brush and then i can press command to get to pencil
and those tools you can quickly erase add things and extend different midi notes to get the beat
that you like as quickly as possible and with the paintbrush tool you can just be
typing in anywhere on the grid and it's going to give you these different sounds
with the pencil tool we can it's very similar to the paint brush tool but it gives us a little more
flexibility when we go command oops sorry when we go command and have the pencil we can be clicking
to have notes but we can also be dragging notes to have different lengths three or four standard
and most important elements that you would have in a beat are the kick the hi-hats and the snare and
that's what i have here that's kind of the main ingredients to a beat and then of course you have
a lot of different percussive elements you have toms you have rides and crashes and
tambourines and many different elements that can make up a great beat but a beat without a kick
a snare or a clap and hi-hats you won't you kind of will be listening to i guess maybe bongo types
southern caribbean music in a way we can layer our kicks if we want them to sound fatter not
maybe on everyone but maybe on for example the two and the four and so what i mean by that is we have
on the left side here we have all the elements in our kicks in our 808 kick package that we
can test with so we see we have the down here we have the kick one but we also have this sub kick
so the sub kick might be nice to go maybe beat two and four so let's see what that sounds like
let's add let's add a clap on the snare hits and we can also add claps
maybe a clap here and a clap here on the first and third um snare hits the best way to learn this
stuff is actually just by adding things and seeing what sounds good and what doesn't sound good
two things i'd like to do when i hit a wall and can't find any more ideas are to um change the
tempo of the track because we're in midi we can have the flexibility to do that and
because we are on midi we can also change the sound of the drums as well
so let's say i'm like ah this i'm already in it and i'm kind of like this is an alright beat what
i might do is actually speed this up to 110 at the top here and then i might change the sound
by opening up our library again and then going to maybe analog circuits that's going to load up
a new kit and we've already changed our tempo to 110 so we'll be sound quite different
that's cool so i'm going to add some shakers here
oops see i made a mistake so i'm just going to add just drag on the paint brush on when
it says shaker here to soften out those uh high hats and now we get
maybe another kick some more kicks
that's a little much there but you see what i mean you can quickly start to make a much more
interesting beat by adding different elements from different sound packs and changing the tempo and
also as soon as we start adding synths and pianos and a vocal on this it's going to fill out the
beat and really tie it together so sometimes a simple beat is all you need at the beginning
and even if you think it's maybe a little bare that's probably a good sign we're going to make
a beat now from scratch using drum loops and audio loops that logic gives us so we can open
up our loop browser here and right away we can go to kits or all drums for example and we can
choose different backbeats or um any you just go through them and and take a listen to them
and i'm going to do just something i like the back beats the logic offers so let's see here
just turn that down so i'm going to load that one in and i'm going to use that as a beat
let's say i just really like this snare hit
me this snare hit here and i really want that snare hit on maybe the analog circuit speed
that i did earlier or i want to save that as a sample to use somewhere else
and so i can quickly have the star sorry i have the scissors toolbar and my command option here
so i can press command and i can actually just cut this up and have this as a separate
sample here of a snare so i have that as a snare now and i can use this snare i can copy
and paste this snare wherever i'd like i can mute this track here that we just had or i can
completely get rid of it and now i have this snare hit that i could add
to my analog circuits so this is what that would sound like if i had the snare here
and i can just copy and paste these snares so i put on the wrong track there
into the right spots where the snares are happening in the track above
and maybe i might not want to have that many snare hits but that gives you an example of how you can
take different elements not only of the drum loops that apple gives you but you can actually
cut those up and use samples of them another way to make beats and drums in logic pro x is to use
the drum yellow tracks i like to call them that logic gives us so let's mute these two tracks
go to our loop browser and if we go back to yeah drums or kits you'll notice that somewhere in blue
and then some of these are in yellow so these ones are in yellow let's go just to the let's
say is that chorus and we'll load this one in and so this is a drum loop that's been
made for us to pack from logic and then we can edit these presets on quite a deep level
so if we just make some space here we're closing this so we can see this if we solo
that's what this drum track sounds like under this custom preset so if we have these different
presets here feedback for track no base one take street street team and you're seeing that
all these custom elements are changing so if we go to this three chords preset we can customize this
on how we please based on tim all these elements that you can actually visualize by looking at the
the drum set so if let's if we don't want hi-hats we just click the hi-hats off we don't want kick
just click the kick off if we like the kick to this preset and we don't want the kick in our
analog circuits we can go and mute that kick in our analog circuits and use the kick kit here kick
of this kit in the detroit garage zach so let's take a quick listen to what this looks sounds like
so not bad you can go and customize it here using this kind of quadratic
fills so you can see how you can get quite customized into these presets because not only
do you have this quadratic but you also have these different option elements for the kick
and snare so you have one up to eight different options of kick and snare patterns that you can
match with five different hi-hat options and match with three different percussion elements another
way to make a beat is something similar to what i did with using the apple loops library is to use
samples working like splice i use splice not that much but i do have it and so i'm going to
show you an example let's start with using a sample of a kick that we really like because
that's kind of the bread and butter of your beet and so we're going to use this big kick here
it's a really big kick so we're going to just drag that into
our session and keep in mind we have a tempo of 110. typically when you're making a beat you you
might have a four on the floor kick or like the kicks on the one and three or the two and four
and now but really there's there's no rules what sounds good is the best approach to
go with let's do a four on the floor kick so that's one two three four kicks in one
bar and we'll do that for each bar so that's going to sound a bit aggressive right now but
so as you can see the kick is exactly with the metronome
and so we're going to want to add a clap to that or some type of snare i have a clap here in splice
so i'm going to add that in and i'm going to have the clap
on the 2 and 4. copy and paste these elements to the rest of your track so let's do it here
and so that's what this is going to sound like
and we can always be changing and just like maybe we don't want the kick here we can just
delete these kicks maybe we want that kick though i just deleted maybe we want that a
bit you know before here um to add a double click kick here you know that sounds cool
so we're starting to make a bit of a house song i'm going to spend like
five minutes just on my own here to make this a big clean this up a bit
so i did have the kick um right before on the four on the floor and that sometimes can sound
a bit too like house music too clubby so i did this kick pattern here and then added
a second kick happening on the bar so that this is what the kicks sound like
and then i also up the tempo to 112. if i double click here i have in the analog circuits drum kit
i have these kick oh sorry snares that have tom rolls and i have these shakers
happening in fourths so that with that it sounds like this
and i needed something that gave it more um rhythm so i added these hi-hats which was a sample from
the loop browser and i also added a drummer kit uh from um a software drummer yellow track
so normally like i would never actually use all these elements that i had explained in this video
but i wanted to do it for the purposes of this video so with everything we can sound like this
so very simple beat and you kind of want it to sound simple like that because as soon as
here i i have a synth here then i'm going to add some sound and you'll see it's all
really all starts to come together when i add some some instruments
feel free to listen to some of my own music um it doesn't really sound like this example i
gave you right here it is on youtube and spotify and everything there
and if you want that more extensive course on logic products i'll leave a link in the
description and hope to see you in the next video