From the course: Logic Pro X Essential Training

Exploring track types - Logic Pro Tutorial

From the course: Logic Pro X Essential Training

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Exploring track types

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- In this movie, I want to go over all the different track types and what they're useful for. And remember, when you open an empty project you're prompted with the new tracks dialog box, which is what we're seeing here. And you have the opportunity to choose the tracks you're going to use in your project. Let's start with the software instrument track. And notice I have some settings down here. I can actually select the exact instrument I want from all of Logic's instruments, or I can choose the default patch and open the library and pick my instrument from there. I'm going to go ahead and keep that checked and click create. And this brings us into the default software instrument which is classic electric piano. Now, this is our software instrument track and I can change the patch as it's called here. This is a software instrument, the electric piano, and I can change that patch over here in the library on the left. So, I can go here and change it to, for example, a grand piano instead. And notice the track name updates, the icon changes, and a lot of my settings and the actual instrument I'm using changes in the track patch. Now, what is a software instrument track? A software instrument track makes sound from any of the very large array of software instruments that come with Logic. Now, as you can see, these include drums, synths, pianos, strings, organs, orchestras, horns, you name it. Software instrument tracks themselves can only contain MIDI regions on them. Let me show you what a MIDI region looks like. I can choose the pencil tool from our toolbox up here. And if I click once in the track, I get a green blank MIDI region. These MIDI regions contain sets of instructions called MIDI events which tell the software instrument what to play, and when to play them, and various other information. So, that's what's going on on the software instrument track. It loads up a virtual instrument from Logic's library and it uses MIDI events to control the playback of those virtual instruments. Let's create another track type from this list. I'll go back up to track, new tracks to get back into this track dialogue. And let's look at an external MIDI track. Now, notice on an external MIDI track, here for output I have any connected MIDI devices. So, this might look different in your studio or your setup but we're connected to the FireFace audio interface which happens to have two MIDI ports. And each MIDI port can have up to 16 channels. So, I can choose port one, channel one, and when I click create, it creates a external MIDI track connected to port one, as you see. Again, that might look different depending on your setup. But what is an external MIDI track? Well, it's similar to a software instrument track in that it contains MIDI data. In fact, if I click in here I'll create another MIDI, a green MIDI region. Except instead of controlling virtual instruments, this can control external hardware connected to your studio. So, if I had, for example, an external sampler connected to my FireFace via MIDI, it can control the sounds from that external hardware. So, this might not be used for a lot of people who don't have external devices, but if your studio has some MIDI controllable devices, samplers, and that kind of thing, you can control it from Logic using an external MIDI track type. Let's make a new track back to that track style log. But I want to teach you a handy key command here. It's Option + Command + N and that pops you right back in to this new tracks dialogue. And I'm going to go to the center column here and choose an audio track. Now again, some of the options update down here, we now have an input and an output. I'm going to go ahead and click create to make our first audio track. Now, notice the icon for an audio track by default is this wave form. And that's indeed one of the differences between an audio track to the top two MIDI enabled tracks is that an audio track actually contains sampled audio. So, it would house a dot wave file, a dot AIFF file. You can also record two audio tracks from say a microphone or any other instrument connected to your interface. So, instead of housing MIDI these guys are going to have sampled audio in their track. Notice I can still load up patches for an audio track. Only this time, for example, if I load up a voice patch, it's really just going to load up some plugins that control like a compressor or an EQ that'll control what happens to the digital audio that's stored inside this track. And notice one other difference here is you see this I button, which you don't see on the MIDI tracks that opens up the track to listen to any connected microphone you might have connected to your interface. I don't currently have one. Otherwise, I would see some level coming into the track. So, that's what's going on with audio tracks. And let's go back into the track dialogue and let's choose a guitar or bass. So, this is very similar to an audio track. In fact, it's the same technical track type because it contains digital audio. You can record to it. The only difference here as I hit create is that these tracks are pre-configured with some settings that are very appropriate if you're going to plug a guitar in and track a guitar, or record a guitar into your interface. So this one, the default patches houses this type of amplifier, virtual amplifier. It has a bunch of settings here that are appropriate for guitar recording. Right, and I can also go in here and put, for example, a bass amp on there instead if I was plugging a bass in. So, very similar to audio tracks. In fact, it is technically an audio track. Only it just comes preset with some settings that are appropriate for recording bass or guitar. Let me go back into the new tracks dialogue, Option + Command + N, and you kind of see a pattern emerging here, right? So, we've got MIDI-based tracks on the left. We have audio based tracks in the center. Now, what's on the right here? This is a specific kind of track called a drummer track that is not really either of these types, as we'll see. So, I'm going to go ahead and click create and we'll see our first drummer track. The drummer track is a special concept and special track type in Logic 10. It chooses a virtual drummer personality and drum kit for that personality to play. And these different personalities, as you can see, they're given names and they actually have some descriptions. And we can change the personality and that'll actually change the different ways that the drums are played back. Each of these different personalities are preloaded with different types of drum sounds. So, for example, Anders is a hard rock, so we're going to hear something like this. (drumming) And we switch over to Jesse, we'll hear a different sound and a different playing style. (drumming) And these playing styles can be controlled down here with some of these different sliders and different parameters to control the way that a drummer plays back. Now, don't worry, we're going to dive way deeper into drummer tracks later in this course, but for now just know that it's its own special track type which is kind of different than audio tracks, which we have here above, and MIDI bass tracks, software instrument tracks, and external MIDI tracks. So, that's a good overview of the five different track types that are at your disposal in Logic and what they're useful for. As we continue to create music in Logic, we'll be using a variety of these track types as we work in this course.

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