From the course: Producing Electronic Music in Logic Pro

Working with Apple's Loop browser and factory content - Logic Pro Tutorial

From the course: Producing Electronic Music in Logic Pro

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Working with Apple's Loop browser and factory content

- [Voiceover] Earlier in the course, I showed you how to access Apple's Loop Browser, or Logic's Loop Browser, and we can do this, again, by the Loop button on the upper right corner. And essentially, what the Loop library is, is a library of factory content in a variety of styles and genres, that comes with Logic. And there's also a few different types of Loops and ways to browse through Apple Loops. So, we can see that when we have the Loop Browser open, we could search for exactly what we're looking for. we could search for Loops within a specific key, also a specific time signature. We could search by type, so all drums, then drums within certain genres, or reset to go back. And if we look down at the bottom, we can see we have the name of our different Loops, the number of beats, the tempo of the loop, and the key of the loop. With Logic, though, the Loop will actually conform right to the project's tempo. So, you only really need to focus on tempo as a reference point for the original way the Loop was created, but in all cases, the Loop will conform to the master project tempo and can create some pretty interesting effects, especially if you're putting a Loop that's at a tempo of 80 bmp into a project that is at 127. Let's take a look at dragging some Apple Loops into our arrangement. I'm gonna go to beats, and I'm gonna go to, let's try Dark, and check out, let's see, Abstract Atmosphere. (percussion beat) So, it's, kind of, like, a sweeping, kind of, beat with a lot of noise. Let's look for something else. (percussion beat) I like this one for, like, kind of, a hop layer to, maybe, something before our kick comes in. You'll notice that this Ambient Beat 01 is green, where the other Apple Loops are blue. There's a difference in the type of Loop. Essentially, the green Apple Loops contain MIDI information, and the blue Apple Loops contain audio information only. If I drag a green Apple Loop right into our arrangement, you can see that we have an option to Import the tempo information, so 100 or say No. I'm gonna say No, to stick with our current project tempo of 127. But let's pull up our Inspector, and you'll also notice that not only did it load up this MIDI information, but it also loaded up a drum kit and some effects in our signal path. So, let's hear this now. (percussion beat) Cool. One of the really cool things about MIDI Apple Loops is, it's really easy to customize them. We can change the Drum Kit. This is a really simple instrument. It's, kind of, like a derivative of a garage band instrument. But we can also go in and, of course, change the MIDI information. So, it's a great way to have a starting point that you can go in and easily customize. I'm gonna go back in. (percussion beat) I think what I really need now is a kick drum. So, for the kick drum, I'm actually gonna reset, and I'm gonna go to All Drums, and let's do this one by search. Let's just search Kick. Let's Eternity Kick Beat, let's check that out. (percussion beat) That's actually perfect for now. So, remember, the biggest difference is, the blue Apple Loops are audio Apple Loops, and if I drag this one in, you can see that it's conforming to the project's tempo, but it's only adding an audio track in our project. Now, we can go in and edit this audio, but editing the audio is very different than editing MIDI. We can change certain parts, we can slice certain parts up, but we don't have as much control over the way things sound. This is also a four-bar Loop. I'm gonna go ahead and make a copy. In the past, I've shown you how to option drag, This time, I'm gonna hit command + r, to just make another copy, and let's play this back. (percussion beat) Cool. So, I'm not gonna cover every single feature in Apple Loops, but I just wanted to go over the basics, so you can easily get started and experiment with some Apple Loops and bring them into your own project.

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