How to record vocals in logic pro x for beginners. So if you are like, blank slate, you don't know
how to record vocals with Logic, then this video is probably right for you. I promise to
you, by the end of the video you'll know how to get set up with your microphone and start
singing over your track or over other tracks. The video is quite straightforward,
Section 1, we’ll talk about what equipment you need to get started. Section 2 is how
to record vocals in logic, what equipment do you need, you're gonna need, logic on your computer,
and you're going to need an audio interface and a microphone. So let's start with audio interface.
You can get any audio interface, it doesn't matter, what an audio interface does, is it exchanges the
signal, the audio signal, from the microphone into a digital signal so Logic can understand.
Some audio interface examples would be like mine, which is the Apogee One, you can also
look into the Scarlett or Apollo. I would spend around one hundred dollars if you're just beginning.
With an audio interface the second thing you'll need is a microphone. I would recommend getting a
condenser microphone because this is going to give you the quality for vocals that you need.
You can go out and buy a USB microphone, you can actually skip the audio interface section, if you
have a usb microphone because it can go directly into your computer. The disadvantage
of those things is, you're not going to get the highest quality audio. Once you have these things,
let's get set up now in Logic and start recording our vocals. This is a song i'm working on in Logic
and we'll use this as a reference as we go through. So to start recording vocals in logic you will
need to start an audio track. To do that, you go up to the top here where it says “Track”
and then click on, new audio track. This is going to create an audio track under wherever track you
had highlighted. So i had the keys highlighted and it created a new audio track for me here.
I'm going to scroll this up the top just so you can see it a bit better.
I'm going to unclick these buttons right now and explain what that means in a little bit.
With this empty audio track here i can now start recording my vocals. But before i just go
and press record, i'm going to need to make sure a couple things are set up. For example, i'm going to
need to make sure that my microphone is plugged into my audio interface and that the interface
is plugged into my computer. Once the interface is plugged into my computer Logic should recognize
right away that you have something plugged in, and it might ask you, “do you want this to
be your audio output?” or “do you want this to be your audio input?” You can go ahead and press yes.
If those notifications don't come up, don't worry, what we're going to do is go to Logic,
at the top, and go to Preferences > Audio. You can also get to these preferences by clicking command
comma. This is a shortcut. Here we're going to focus on the output and input device. We want our output
device to be our headphones, wherever our headphones are plugged in.
Whether that's the computer, your monitors, or your interface. They can be plugged into all
those three things so if your headphones are plugged into your computer make your output device
is your built-in output. In our case, we want them to be plugged into our computer because while we're singing
we want to be hearing the track we're singing over only in our headphones and not out of any
speakers. If not, that would bleed into our microphone. And we want the
input device to be our audio interface. So whatever interface you have, the name of that
interface, will be here. For example, mine is the Apogee One. So my input would be this and that means that my
microphone is plugged in there. Now I should be set up to go. Last quick thing to do before we
start singing is to make sure that our inputs are set up correctly on the channel. And what i
mean by the channel is I mean this track here. So, we have audio one and we can call this our vocal.
And then we can actually right click here, and put a nice little
icon if we'd like to. So, we want to make sure this vocal track and the inspector window here
has the right input to our interface. Sometimes it can happen that your interface has
more than one input, maybe 2, maybe up to 6 or even 8 inputs. If you have an input
one here but you plugged your microphone into the input 2 on your audio interface
Logic is not going to line those two up and then your vocal recording won't work, since you won't get any
signal. So, we just want to make sure whatever input we plugged into our audio interface, that number
needs to show up in this inspector window. For example, I put my microphone in the first input
in my interface, that usually goes from the left to right side of the interface. So, the plugs on
the left side of the interface usually start at on. So, mine is one and then it's one here.
If i did it in the second input, I can still do that if i want to, but, i just need to make sure
that it says input two here, instead of one. So, just make sure those inputs line up. Now, we're actually
ready to record our vocals. Get into a comfortable singing position, stand up to the mic. If you have an
acoustically dry room probably better to record vocals in a dry room. This room is very echoey and
not always gives you the greatest vocal recording. It doesn't really matter though because we can do a
lot of things in post-production with effects so we will press the R on this track which means that
the track is armed and ready to record. Then, we can go and press record. All we have to do is
press R on a keyboard or press this red circle here and now on this track we are recording our
vocals and you can see here, while i'm speaking, you will notice that this sound is coming through
on the microphone. So, let's talk now about a few things we can do on our audio interface
and a few things that we can do in our settings inside Logic Pro to make sure we're getting the
proper vocal recording. Let's talk about the first thing to make a proper vocal recording in Logic.
You'll notice here that the signal of my voice, if I zoom in, it isn't very big, compared to this
main guitar track down here. I can barely see my vocal signal. Ideally your really want a
more powerful vocal signal coming in, however, not so powerful that it's going to clip. But, it's in
this right sweet spot. So, i'll show you how to do that now in order to get that sweet spot. We're
going to need to control the gain on our audio interface so as we're setting up our vocal track
we will need to test how loud the gain is on our interface to make sure we're getting the right
audio signal. So, there will be a circle knob on your audio interface this is the gain knob.
You can think of the gain knob as it controls the amount of signal the microphone is taking in
so the higher the gain the more power the microphone is grabbing that signal. For example, if
i want to be really close and sing loud in the microphone i'm going to want to lower the gain
if i want to be way back there I’m going to need to crank the gain
So, i can make sure i capture that signal over there. So how do you test what gain is right?
We can do this while we're recording to get used to the gain knob
or we can actually do this just by looking at our inspector window. The easiest way to
check how much gain you need is just to press record like i'm recording my vocal right now.
So we can actually see how much gain is coming in visually and right now I just upped the gain
a little bit so it's coming in. We wouldn't want it much higher than that as we can see
on the bottom left here we're peaking around negative seven right now. Don’t worry too
much about the stereo out. That’s where all my other instruments are. So watch what happens
now when I increase the gain, you'll notice that my audio signal here really starts to increase
so much so that it's going to get yellow. You can see it's at negative 1.7 right now
and i'm going to go a little bit higher just so it starts to peak
and you can see there it peaked. So, i'm going to bring that down because you never want audio
to peak and i'm going to bring it so far down that you can barely hear it anymore and then
we'll never really be able to see it. So, i'm going to bring that all the way down and then you can
really not even hear me anymore. That would be my best way if you're a beginner to check how
much gain you need on your audio interface for your vocal track. The other way to do it is without
recording. Just making sure your track is armed here, by pressing “arm record” and then looking at
what signal is coming on your inspector window. So, we never want to get red. You never
really want to get yellow, you want that green which is about between a -6db
and a -8db which should be fine to record a vocal. After, we're going to want to bump this up
anyway in post-production. The last thing to check inside Logic Pro to make sure that your audio
system settings are correct, we're going to want to look at the I/O buffer size. So, we're going
to want to open up command comma again with the audio preferences and look at the I/O buffer size.
Mine is set at 1024 right now, because lately i've been mixing this track, I don't need a lot
of buffer size to record. Buffer size is helpful, the lower you go the faster, less latency, your
going to get in your audio signal. So, if you'd like to hear your voice in your
headphones while you're singing, there's there's this thing called latency. Which means,
the time it takes for my voice to go through the microphone all the way through the wires,
the computer, and back into my headphones. There's latency, there's a lag. So, the smaller you go
on the I/O buffer size, the less lag will be. For example, I'm at 1024 right now, and you
can see it says 49.6 milliseconds round trip. If I lower that to 32 it's going to be 8.2 milliseconds.
So, you're going to want to play with your I/O buffer size while you're recording your vocals
to make sure there is no latency. Latency can be really distracting if you're recording vocals.
The only thing to keep in mind about I/O buffer size is it's very strenuous on your computer. The lower
you go the more your computer has to work, so, if you're not recording vocals bump that up since
we're doing any recording bump that up to save CPU power. I did mention, if you want to hear your
vocals in your headphones while you're recording, Yes you can do that. No problem. In
Logic, while we're in settings, we're going to go to “General” and we're going to click on
system monitoring. That's going to allow you to hear your voice as you're singing. So, once
we click that on and then close our window, the only last thing we have to do to make sure
we hear our vocals, is to click this I here. That's the input monitoring button. So, when
we want to hear ourselves in our vocals we click that on. Orange when we want to hear ourselves,
And off when we don’t. Okay, so a 10 second wrap up to how to record vocals in logic. Start an audio track,
plug your microphone into your interface, your interface into your computer, set the right inputs
and outputs, your I/O buffer size, get the gain level on your interface at the right level
then click “arm record”. Then if you want to hear yourself click I, then click record. There are many more
things you can do with your vocals just after you record so let me know if you want more videos
Like this. For example, what you might do for processing your vocals or editing your
comps. Let me know in a comment, Ii answer all those and I’d be happy to help out a bit more and
feel free to listen to some of my own music as well. Hope to see you in the next video