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Making Drums Beats with Ultrabeat

Lesson 2 from: Songwriting in Logic Pro X for Electronic Music Production

Tomas George

Making Drums Beats with Ultrabeat

Lesson 2 from: Songwriting in Logic Pro X for Electronic Music Production

Tomas George

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Lesson Info

2. Making Drums Beats with Ultrabeat

<b>In this lesson, you will learn about Making Drum Beats with Ultrabeat.</b>

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Writing Drums and Bass Part Introduction

01:11
2

Making Drums Beats with Ultrabeat

14:27
3

Beats with Ultrabeat and Drummer

08:48
4

Writing Bass Parts - Part 1

15:03
5

Writing Bass Parts - Part 2

04:53
6

Writing Drums and Bass Parts Assignment

00:44
7

Writing Chords Introduction

00:56
8

Writing Chords

19:38

Lesson Info

Making Drums Beats with Ultrabeat

OK. Now we're going to have a look at making a beat with ultra beat. Ultra beat is a drum sampler, drum synthesizer and step sequencer. And it's one of my favorite ways to actually create a beat in logic pro 10. So let's create a new software instrument and go down to instrument. And here let's choose ultra beat for now, we're going to choose stereo. We'll have a look at multi output later on, then let's hit crate. Now let's double click on ultra beat over here on the left, the channel strip, an ultra beat will appear, we have two views for Ultra B. We have this kind of synth view, the different oscillators and filters envelopes down here and then we have the full view which is more of a step sequencer you can see already there's notes that have been inputted. And if we go down to our left this actually a piano. So if you click on some of these, you can hear the samples. So if kick rimshots snare claps, snare two, et cetera. So you can click on some of these and just hear what the s so...

und like. And if we go up here. It says factory default. We can choose some different drum kits, some different drums. So let's go on drum kit, let's choose Electro Bump and then we can just hit, play down here and this will play one of the presets. You can go through all the different ones, just hit the arrows to go through the presets. I recommend starting off with the presets and just having a listen to these. We also have drag and drop samples. So if we go into drum kits, drag and drop samples where you can actually drag in your own drum samples and add them to the different instruments. But with this, we're just going to have a look at some of the presets. So let's go back to drum kits. Let's choose deep house kit and then let's go down to full view here and now we're gonna click some of these to get rid of them. You click to create and you also click on them to get rid of them. And now we're going to create something completely blank. You can leave these kicks generally in electronic music, you have the kick on every beat and then you have the snares and two and four. But this is just a real generalization. You can basically do whatever you want. But if you do want it to be electronic, if you do want to be dance music, generally speaking, you will have a kick on every beat just so you get that pulse going. So people have something to dance to, if however you want to make electronic music, not for people to dance to. You don't necessarily need the kick on every beat. Ok. So let's just add in some snares. Let's just hit play. This will be really simple, but we're gonna build from this and now we can leave it playing and add in other parts. Let's find closed high hats. You can also drag, it's great or get rid of multiple ones. We have other ones as well like piano chord. I'm gonna leave this for now. We're just gonna create some drums can so that each one of these, you can always delete certain ones if it's too messy, if there's too much going on. OK. So this is kind of a quick beat that I've made with this step sequencer. You can always go back into the synth view and edit some of these different parts. When writing drums, you really want to create a lot of space. You don't want too much going on. You don't really want the cluster of sound. So going back to the full view on the kick drum, I really don't want too many drums playing. I do wanna allow space for each of the instruments to be heard. We also go in and change some of these. So we have stuff like the oscillators, the pitch, we have the filters, low pass, high pass band pass band reject. We have the envelope so we can increase the attack time or the release. So we can make each drum take a while to come in or last a bit longer. One of my favorite things to actually do in ultra beat is the step. So if you hit on step here, let's choose this wood block and then whatever's blue is where that drums being hit and we can go through and change anything that's yellow. And this will kind of create an automation. So let's click this one here 14 and let's change the pitch up. Now, let's hear this quite hard to hear. There you go. Let's try some other ones. Let's try this conga I'm gonna do the sound, the pitch, put the pitch down, we can do the same with the snap, go through and change some of these different settings. So we could even go through. OK? And we could change say the envelope for the first one. It's really about just trial and error and going through and just messing around. Really, you can go off step and go back to voice. This will however not play the information we just entered in the step editor. So just remember that let's go back to voice. I'm gonna change some of the high hats. Now let's just drag this envelope, add a filter, some resonance as well, quite like the high pass. It just allows the highs and cut some of the lows. Go back to the bright hat. A lot of this is just trial and error messing around. It's not gonna sound perfect. Straight away, creating beats writing a song. A lot of it's just trial and error. We need to know. Of course, the fundamentals, a lot of it does just come down to messing around and finding stuff that works. Ok? We can drag over to another preset. Let's hear this and you'll realize we've actually lost all the information so we can go back, you'll notice it's gone as well. The important thing to do is to actually drag this over to your project. Let's actually create a new leap. It's really simple as a step editor. If you do delete your work, you can quickly just write something else in just trying to make space ready so each instrument can get heard. I think that has a good grave. Let's go back to the step and I'm gonna change this conga around a little bit. So we go back to the full view, conga. I'm just gonna change the pitch of a couple of these just to kind of make it a little bit more exciting. So there's a bit more going on, let's say this back by hitting the play button here when we started to add chords and a melody, we can actually change some of these. So it fits in the key of the track. We can also go to the snare, we can pitch this to the key of the track at the moment, we haven't really put the notes in. So I would actually go back to Ultra beat later on when I've written some chords and a melody and I'll tune the drums to the key of the track. Let's hear this. Now, let me change this, this ninth one here. OK. And now what we're going to do is we're actually going to drag this over to our project. So we have this button down here by the pattern. We can actually drag it to our project. And this will create some midi information. So we can actually go in double click on this midi information and edit some of this midi information if we want as well. So this is a quick overview of the ultra beat. There is a lot more features, but for creating a beat, I'd recommend just starting off with the step sequencer and then hitting the full view and then going back to here and then actually changing some of these parameters, changing some of the oscillator, changing the filter and the envelope just to make it sound a bit more interesting. So this is basically a quick overview of the Ultra beat synth and how you can actually use this to create beats. Let's go back to our project here and let's drag this to the top, then turn on the loop and we have a loop. Now drag it back right to number one hit, enter and space bar. One thing to do is make sure the ultra beat's not playing as well. So make sure that's stopped by hitting this button here. Sometimes it will actually play in the logic session and it will play in the to be at the same time, which is quite confusing. One more thing we can actually do is change the outputs. So if we go to Ultra bit here, go down, remember it said stereo and multi out. So multi out means we can actually add separate effects to each drums or each group of drums. So let's go on multi effects and let's open up ultra beats. And here you notice it says sub one, if we click on these, we can actually add different groups. So let's have the kick as three and four. Let's have some of these, this wood block on five and six and the conga on say five and six. And then we can go into the mixer and you'll notice down here on Ultra beats, there's a little plus button. If we hit this a few times, this will open separate auxiliaries but not auxiliaries for logic. This opens auxiliaries for Ultra beats. So we can click on these and rename them. Remember that was K and this was the conga and a few other things you can go through and add separate effects to each of these. So let's just loop this and if we solo this night, it will just play the kick, we can eq this IQ the conga and wooden block we could add, say Reverb as well. So let's go down to Reverb and Space Designer. OK. Let's play this in the mix. And that's how we can quickly make a beat in ultra beat. It's really fast, really simple. And the main reason I like this is because of the step sequencer. You can just quickly see the different drum parts and it's so simple to make a great beat in logic pro 10 like this. So thank you for watching this lecture and I'll see you in the next one.

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