From the course: Logic Pro X Essential Training

Layering with Track Stacks - Logic Pro Tutorial

From the course: Logic Pro X Essential Training

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Layering with Track Stacks

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- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to dive further into the concept of patches. We'll explore a new concept called track stacks within patches, and we'll learn how to customize them. Let's add another patch to this project. I'll go ahead and click the new tracks dialog and I'm going to choose software instrument. I'll open the library and we're going to create a synth pad component to this song. I'm going to go over to the synthesizer section of my library, and I'm going to choose pad and up at the top here, I'm going to choose analog spheres. Now this is loading up a patch called analog spheres. But if you look at that track you'll notice it has something different going on. Notice this disclosure triangle, which we don't see in the two tracks above. And what's going on here? Let's open it to find out. It turns out that this is a track stack. The track stack is part of this patch and a track stack is when you can combine one or more layers into an outer shell. So in this analog sphere track stack we have two components that are embedded in the outer capsule of analogs spheres. We have one track called... Or I should say one subtrack called analogs spheres that has an ES two synthesizer on it. And we have another sub track called base layer which also has an ES two synthesizer. But it has a different EQ going on. And the ES two synth has some different settings built into it. When we play them together we hear a complex rich tone (synthesizer music) that's combining both those synths to create a really rich pad, right? If I hit a chord, (synthesizer music) it's pretty cool. The other advantage here is we can actually change the volumes. I can have less of the high end of the analog sphere and more of the base layer. (synthesizer music) Getting a little more Basey, right? Or I can go the other direction (synthesizer music) more high end, less base end. So this is what is called a track stack. And it's actually technically a summing stack type of track stack. Now the cool advantage of this is that when you record midi, if I was to record some midi in here, it'll have one set of instructions. One midi region will control both of these instruments at the same time. So you can create one performance to control many synthesizers that are creating a more rich sound. Now, what happens if we wanted to enhance this further we want to add another layer. You can add as many layers as you want inside a track stack. Here's how to do that. We just want to make a new instrument. So we'll start the same thing. Software instrument, open the library and we're going to add a road sound. So this is going to give us, we'll choose bright suitcase. And notice when I created that this track is out on its own. It's not part of the track stack yet. You can kind of see visually that it's not embedded or even when I close the enclosure triangle it's not part of this track stack yet. Let's just hear what it sounds like on its own. (tones) Might be a nice component to add into this analog spheres track stack, right? It'll give us a little bit of a nice bell sound of an attack. So here's how you would add the bright suitcase into the track stack. You want to click and drag on the track header and just plop it in here. And any of these available slots inside the track stacks I'll just put it right in the middle and you notice how it's now been encapsulated into the track stack. And when I close this, it becomes part of it. So now the bright suitcase is one of the three components that make up this summing stack style track stack. So I can alter the volume. I'll bring the bell sound back a little bit and let's play them all together. (bell and synth sounds) Let's hear how this sounds when I play it against our rhythm track here. (upbeat groovy synth music) So I'm just jamming along on my external midi keyboard. That's really cool. I like how this adds a little bit of a sharp attack to the whole instrument. So we've created our own custom track stack. Now, there might be a time when you want to break out a track stack into its individual components. Maybe I want a different midi performance on the bright suitcase than I do on the other two or something like that. So here's how you can break out a track stack or what we call flatten a track stack. You just have to right click on the top part or the main outer shell of the track stack. And we're going to say, flatten stack shift+command+U. And they're all back to their original components. And these are now individual tracks and I can treat them that way. So if I actually just record enable the base layer I hear just that on its own. (base layer music) It's become its own track once again. I can do the same with bright suitcase. (high tones) So that's how you flatten them or break them out. And then to combine, if you're working and you're jamming on some different instruments and you realize, Oh I realized that these would all come together to make an awesome single instrument to create a track stack from scratch. All you need to do is select the tracks you want to be part of the track stack. So I can hold shift select the tracks that I want to be part of the track stack. They don't even have to be next to each other. And then you want to right click on the track that you want to keep the name of. So if we want analog spheres to be the outer shell name we'll right, click on that track. And we'll say, create track stacks. And when you do this, you'll get a dialogue box that asks you what type of track stack. Now we've been seeing summing stacks. That's what we were working on. And this is probably the best option for this type of track stack, because it lets you save it as a patch. And it's good for multiple layers of synthesizers. The other type of track stack is called a folder stack. And this would be more useful for something like if you had a bunch of background vocals or a bunch of guitars that you want to sort of treat together that's a cool option for that. But the only difference is you can't save that as a patch. So when you're working with layers of synths as we are here summing stack type track stack is our best option. So I click create and we're effectively back to where we started. We have the analogs spheres, outer shell within it. We have these three layers and we can jam our song. (groovy synth music) Now don't forget. If you create a track stack like this, that you like, you can save it as your own user patch. So track stacks are one more way you can create complex layered instruments in logic and customize them to your own liking.

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