From the course: Logic Pro X: Virtual Instruments

EXS: Instruments from raw audio - Logic Pro Tutorial

From the course: Logic Pro X: Virtual Instruments

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EXS: Instruments from raw audio

- [Instructor] Okay so now that we've got a basic understanding of the front panel of the sampler, I want to talk about the other display area within this sampler, and that is the edit screen. So if I click on the Edit button and I've gone back to the factory default patch here, we can actually see the back end of the sampler essentially. And we've got to few different screens in here. We've got Zones, and Zones is the word that many samplers use including this one for samples. And then we've also got Groups which are different groups of samples that we can process together. We've also got a handful of different controls over here under the Instrument menu. We can convert things to ReCycler, we can export the sample files if we want to save it. We can do different various edit controls and things like that. We can do certain things to specific Zones. We can load Zones through this dialogue as well, although I'll show you a different way to do it. And then we have our Groups area. We can create groups so that we process things together and then we can take a look at some of our different screens here. Let's just start out by importing some raw audio into here because that's always something that's fun with samplers, and it's also something that you may not have thought of to do given the fact that there are so many presets. But there are a lot of really simple, cool, fun things that you can do using raw audio of your own. And I'm just going to go ahead and open up my media area over here, and I have a sample selected. It's a snare drum. So let's pretend I want to create a situation where I can play a pitched snare. And that would be something that you would use a sampler for, so let's close this up on the side here and, (snare drum sample playing) now, you'll see that we have a lot of different categories over here. By the way, I just dragged that in from my media area over there. I could also do it from the Finder if I wanted. Just keep in mind that when you save your project, you have EXS files being saved along with your project. You may wind up having a lot of extra copies of certain files lying around, especially if you use particular samples quite often. So just be mindful of that. If this session needs to travel and be opened up on a different computer, then you may want to save that so that it goes along with it, but it's up to you. Now, over here we have the name of the Zone, that's Zone #1. This is Snare 1.aif as you can hear. (snare drum sample playing) It is a snare drum. We have the key that it's on. Now, the pitch here, now the purpose of this parameter is that we're telling the sampler, " Hey, this is the pitch that we want the " original pitch of the sample to play back on." So keep in mind as we go up and down the keyboard, (snare drum sample playings) we're actually actively changing the pitch up and down the keyboard. Now, if I play a D, (snare drum sample playing) the sampler doesn't go, " Oh, let's give him a D. " D's are cool. " We love a D minor chord or whatever." It's not thinking that way. It's literally just thinking in terms of the distance from the key that you selected here to whichever pitch you're playing. So if it is a C, then having it say C3 is good thing. But if it's a G, then you want it to say G, and you want to find the register where it's comfortable to play in that (snare drum sample playing) key range. So if I hit C3, (snare drum sample playing) we hear the original pitch of that sample, but if I pull it down to C2, (snare drum sample playing) you can hear that it's actually a good amount higher, and that's because it's compensating. So it thinks that the original pitch was C2. (snare drum sample playing) You can hear that that's now giving us that original pitch, and if I play an octave up, (snare drum sample playing) then it's going to play an octave up. Let's put this back to C3. That works just fine for this. We can have Course and Fine tuning. This is, again, relative. This is not part of the key tracking thing. This I just a matter of blanket tuning up and down. We can change the volume. So we have this mixer section where we can pan things around, we can change the volume of things, and we'll talk about the outputs in a moment. And then we have the key range. So if we want to change where exactly this zone falls on the keyboard, maybe we don't want it to play all the way up and down the keyboard. Maybe we just want it to play on C3 and C#3. Okay you can see that that zone has now been truncated to those two pitches. (snare drum sample playing) But if I hit another key, then we're not going to wind up hearing anything. So let's put this back sort of to where it was, and I can just do this by stretching out the sides here if I want to. Just keep in mind that if you start moving things around, it may mess with the key over here. So just keep your eye on that. Now, we have the key range, we have the pitch. So, if we don't want it to change the pitch as we go up and down the keyboard, we uncheck this box. (snare drum sample playing) And we wind up with all of these different keys that are playing the same pitch. Now, why do we want to do that, you may ask. Well, it can be handy, say for example, you're setting up a drum kit, and you want to be able to hit a hi hat on a couple of keys, (hi hat) because it makes it easier to play if you're doing some finger drumming stuff or something like that, but you don't want it to change the pitch? Well, you can just turn that off. And there you have it. We can also set this thing up as a 1Shot. Right now, this snare drum is beholden to the settings that we have on our other screen. But we can use the envelope to shape it and things like that. You can hear that if I just tap the key. (snare drum sample playing) We're not hearing the whole sample, but if I hit 1Shot it means that any time I hit the key it's going to play through the entire sample. (snare drum sample playing) Alright, we can also reverse the sample if we want. (snare drum sample playing) Okay, that can be pretty cool too. So, there's some great parameters in here. If we close up the Instrument Editor, it's going to ask us to save this instrument. We can go ahead and do that if we want. We're going to need to do that in order to continue. So I'll just say, PitchedSnareInst. And now we've saved it. And there we go, and now that's what this is called. So if I go up and down the keyboard, (snare drum sample playing) I can still use all of my different parameters here. I can use random pitch if I'd like to. (snare drum sample playing) And we can also transpose if we want. (snare drum sample playing) Okay, we can use our glide, although I don't know how much that's going to help us here. (snare drum sample playing) Wow, that's kind of cool. Maybe I'm going to invent a new genre today. And then we have all of our different, like, say for example, we're using the glide, but we also want to get some LFO action going on our pitch as we mentioned before, I can go ahead and say, " Alright, well you know what we're going to do, " the source, source is at the bottom there, don't forget that. Sometimes I get that wrong. Source is the LFO1. Let's go to Pitch. Make it nice and quick. (snare drum sample playing) Maybe we tune this thing back down to zero. (snare drum sample playing) Wow, that's kind of interesting. If we turn off 1Shot we can shape it more with the envelope. That kind of thing is very helpful. So just remember that when you're setting up instruments using the editor, there are a lot of different parameters that we can work with to make these things work well together. For example, maybe I have some other samples in here, I want to turn the volume down on this sample. I want to turn the volume up on another one. That's exactly what this mixer area is here for, for example. Okay, so, have fun with it. And also just remember to keep in mind where your samples are in your computer, because it's very important to remember that with the sampler you must have the samples in order for the instrument to play back, and it's a very common thing for one of these instruments to be missing a sample or two and kind of slow everything down. So if you keep that in mind while you're making the instruments, it'll be much easier for you in the long run.

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