Advanced arpeggiator programming - Logic Pro Tutorial

- [Instructor] Now I want to look at some of the more advanced features of the Arpeggiator. So first of all, we have the Play Button which makes the Arpeggiator go. So if I turn this off, I can just (synthesizer music) play my synthesizer, like I would regularly, it's just going to respond to the midi notes that I'm playing, passing them directly through. Okay, we also have Latch Mode here, which is cool, because essentially what that does is when I play something, (bright synthesizer music) what that does is it actually holds those notes in place. I'm not actually holding those notes down with the keyboard right now. And so right now it's in Transpose Mode which means if I hit another key it's going to move the whole arpeggio into that key. (bright synthesizer music) Pretty wild, huh? We can also change to Gated Transpose, Reset is going to reset the whole arpeggio every time. (bright synthesizer music) So it's just moving with whatever I play. Gated Transpose is like a temporary transpose. What's cool here is we also have Add. So let's say I have a sequence here. Let me clear this thing. I'm going to hit the Clear button and I'm going to start the arpeggio over, but I'm going to add one note at a time. As I play a note it's just going to tack it on to my arpeggio. Let's listen. (bright synthesizer music) Let's say I don't like that last note, I want to get rid of it, I can just hit Delete Last and it'll delete the last added note. (bright synthesizer music) Add Temporarily is going to do the same thing but it's only going to respond while I'm holding down that additional note. (bright synthesizer music) Okay, then we also have Through. (bright synthesizer music) Through is going to allow me to play my midi notes along with the latched arpeggio. So they're kind of operating side by side. (bright synthesizer music) Ta-da, I love this thing. It's so much fun to goof around with the different latch settings here. I'm going to leave that off for now. Nine times out of 10, I'm not really using the latch because I have my midi sequence going, but it can be a really helpful thing for working live. Now, before we jump over to some of our other options here, I just want to point out that there are presets for the patterns so you can save them. You can call them up. You can check those out. Let's go over to Options. Now, most of these other parameters have to do with general midi type things. So we have our Note Length, which can shorten or lengthen each note. (bright synthesizer music) That can be a really fun thing to automate, and then we can randomize that. (bright synthesizer music) Okay, we can adjust the velocity. We can have it play 100% of the velocity that came in from the grid. Remember, we're adjusting our velocity here, or we can dial it back if we want. And we can also randomize that. We can add swing, which can be really handy to get that feel going. (bright synthesizer music) So we also have our cycle length here which is basically going to choose how many of the notes it goes through. (bright synthesizer music) And so a lot of these things are going to defer to the grid but they can be really fun to automate. Let's go over to our Controller area where we can basically assign different things from our midi controller to different parameters on the Arpeggiator. So let's say I want to use my Mod Wheel to control note length. (bright synthesizer music) That's fun. You can go to town with that. Let's look at Keyboard. We can also split our keyboard if we want. So say for example, I want my upper notes to be playing the arpeggio, but the lower notes I want just to be passed through. Or I can also use the Remote setting, okay, so Remote, we can see it if we click here. And basically remote is going to allow us to control different parameters of the Arpeggiator using our midi keyboard. I can also just have a lot of area that doesn't have anything, which means (dull synthesizer tones) that's just normal playing ground. (bright synthesizer music) So this is really handy, especially if you're a player. There are all of these different things that you can customize. We have a key and a scale quantizer, okay, so we can choose what key we want to play in, and which scale it's going to quantize our pitches to. We have other midi effects for adjusting that, and we're going to talk about that in a moment, but it is built into the Arpeggiator, and then Input Snap, nine times out of 10 Link to Rate is going to be the way you want to go. Because what this essentially does is it quantizes the beginning of the arpeggio to the grid. So if you turn it off and you just hit None, then it's still going to play in time internally, but the start of it is wholly dependent and separate from the actual clock. So if you leave it on Link to Rate, and then you quantize things in your grid, you should be just fine. Let's go over to Pattern, and I'm going to turn on Latch. I'm just going to hit a couple of keys. And what I can do over here is actually pull my midi information out of the Arpeggiator, which is super powerful. (bright synthesizer music) So here I can pull the incoming notes or I can pull the notes that are going out. So here's my midi region, which is like super, super handy. I absolutely love this feature. It's great. And here are my incoming notes. This was the chord that I was playing. So one thing that's really great about this is you can say, oh, well I really like this arpeggio but maybe I want to customize it at some point. And I want to say, well, it's going to do this, you know, about a million times but then it's going to do something else. So you can actually make a physical sequence out of what's happening in the Arpeggiator at a given time, which is really, really powerful really handy and allows things to be very highly customizable to fit your composition.