Earlier on, I thought I was quite enthusiastic about what I’m gonna talk and share with you today because they’re really useful, they’re cool things. I’m gonna talk to you about track stacks folders. I’m gonna talk to you about, tempo maps and also about comping multiple microphones because they are, all three things are sort of flag in the sand boom moments that I’m sure you will use and use and use time and time again and are super, super cool. Right. So lemme do a screen share.
So, let’s talk about track stacks first.
Alright, now I knocked up this little, this little thing earlier and talking about logic being accessible for creatives. I just want to show you something, not this down the bottom. In fact, let’s just, you know, forget about that for the moment. Oh, here’s a useful thing in case you don’t know, sure. I’ve told you about this before. Let’s reiterate it, shall we press h boom and it, it pulls up these little hs, which stand for hide up here.
And if I click on there and click on there, which are my two live piano tracks, we’re gonna come back to them later. and then I press H again, or I can press this little h up here. The piano disappears so you can hide lots of tracks that you’re not using or you’re not focusing on at the time, in your session. Oh, I’ll just press H again ’cause it’s something I forgot to do, which is to just, mute the piano.
Because as far as I’m aware, this version, I haven’t done it for a while, but there was a slightly annoying thing where if you hid an instrument, you’d think it wouldn’t play. I dunno whether they’ve changed that now, but certainly in previous versions of logic, it still would play. So you’d be having this thing going, what the, what am I listening to? Where’s it coming from? Oh, it’s a hidden piano. they might have fixed that now. anyway, so let’s just get rid of that in a moment ’cause we’re gonna come to that later on.
But I just want to point out that everything you see here, this whole thing took me, what, 10 minutes to put together. Less than that maybe. Everything is from the loop menu here. All of these regions, as we call them, are all from the loop menu. So I’ll just press play on it for, for for a second and, just have a quick listen. Just something a bit random really, but I was sort of feeling that mood.
but it’s literally all made up of loops. And also, here’s an interesting thing. they’re all, they’re all have lowered the volume of them all. they’re basically all at the same volume that they were dragged in from the loop menu. Okay?
So you’re getting the idea, Okay?
So that’s that.
so regardless of whether that’s your vibe or not, it’s not actually particularly my vibe, I have to say. but then, I don’t know, I don’t have a vibe. I like listen to everything at some point, by the way, lovely documentary I watched last night on BBC, I play it online, if you can get that on N Nirvana coming to the uk, it was cute. It was just real fellas, honestly, at the beginning of everything. and what beautiful, amazing songs.
That was the thing that struck me. This is a songwriting course, right? Go and watch that and just appreciate the musicality and the lyrics. it was, it was back in the day for me when obviously we listened to it and I loved it, but not, you know, not that wasn’t really grande wasn’t my thing. I was more like funk and soul, but I still thought it was great, you know, thought they were great. And listening to it, coming back now and listening to it again in that circumstance, oh, just one of a kind, really, really special.
So that’s Nirvana coming to the uk. anyway, but this is also my vibe. I still love dance music. So all dragged in from the loop menu. Okay? So now then, and anybody who’s a top liner could quite easily come up with something like that. Notice how I gave it a bit of structure that reference tracks would be really useful for that sort of created a kind of a verse drop and a more of a chorus thing, you know, couldn’t help myself really, otherwise it would’ve seemed really bland, right?
Let’s talk about track stacks. Track stacks is the ability to sort of organize, if you like, your session and your instruments. so, first of all, I’m gonna start off by organizing this a little bit just to show the example of what it is. So what kind of things are going on here?
I’ve got leads, since I’ve got groove, I’ve got kick drums, I’ve got baselines, I’ve got effects, I’ve got, you know, various things, right? Let’s just isolate and listen to each, each, instrument. So I get an idea of what it is. So first of all, I might like to group all the synths together. And that allows me, you know, as I’m working to either take all instruments down in volume, group them all together and just do things with them, or mute them for a minute while I’m working on something else.
Or quickly be creative by saying what is, what’s it like if I just mute all the synths? So at the moment, if I wanted to mute them all, I’d all be like, I’d be like, oh, which is a synth, which is not, oh, mute that one. Oh, mute that one, or mute that one. You know, it’s not very vibey, it’s not very quick, is it? So we’ve got a synth here. let’s listen, Obviously a synth, I’ve just processed this a little bit just to show you what I’m doing.
I’m pressing s as I type the region that will solo that region. I’ve also got a shortcut set up, which is for me, which is shift and tab, which will mean that, I can immediately just press that and it will play from the beginning of the region. I’ve got selected look solo. Oops, sorry.
Yeah, da. See what I mean? So that’s why I’m shift and tap. You can sort of make it any shortcut you like really. but I’m soloing the region and I’m easy really easily finding out what that is. You know, as your sessions grow, you’re like, what’s that? What’s that doing there? And you can easily just go, Ah, You see? So we’ve got a synth here. Oh, that’s obviously a base, which I’ve sort of muted by the looks of it and what that little region is doing there.
Take that away. Oh, What is it doing? Not nothing. Okay, Forget about that for the moment. Let’s just delete it. If you’re not doing anything apex synth, that’s not doing anything either. Bye-Bye. here’s a, what’s this? That’s a groove, right? Let’s talk about coloring as well. We’ll press alt C and I’m gonna color all the groove elements the same thing, shall we?
Let’s just say blue. What’s this? Let’s stop playing. Get rid of it. Okay, that’s blue as well. Let’s go blue for that. What’s this one? get rid of that. They’re muted. That’s also blue. There’s a bit of over, you know, there’s a bit of natural overlap in some of these parts. It’s not hugely think thought about. by the way, to highlight all the regions, if you click on here, it’ll highlight them all.
This is obviously gonna be a groove as well. This is obviously gonna be a base. Let’s listen. Yeah, let’s make the base, I don’t know, pink. Oh, Here we go. Pink. What’s this noise that I sort of, I did a bit of chopping here actually just to make something. Okay, that is, that was gonna be blue, wasn’t it?
Here we’ve got effects and I’m gonna put the, I’ve got a crash here as well. I’ll make them yellow. Build up base. So that’s not doing anything. So that can go away As well. So can that. So very, so there’s a bit of coloring going on and we can sort of, it’s gonna take away the mute bits that I muted. so we can just see a little bit of something going on. Oh, these are gonna be all the same. Chose the wrong blue. I chose that green instead.
and this was a synth as well, wasn’t it? So if I move that up there, I’ve got them all together like that. Now that if I click on action synth and I click down here binary layers, I’ve got now highlighted all of these synth textures. If I hover over here and I press control, I’ve brings up a menu and we’ve got here create track stack, which is basically what it says.
Now, a folder stack and a summing stack. I’ll illustrate what they are. If I go folder, stack and create all my synths have gone into this neat little one L lane, one line. If I click this little arrow here, that’s where they all appear. now I can do things with that but, but it just basically puts them onto one master fader.
