Film Scoring Masterclass with Logic Pro X

Hi, I'm Mike Roberts, Head of the Electronic Music Department here at Guildhall School, we all decanted the other day. The LSO sent Luke's to the impressive home of the London Symphony Orchestra to deliver two

masterclass

es on music and

film

making that we are particularly excited about. this time to teach these

masterclass

es because they highlight the fact that we now offer

film

music as a main discipline of study, so electronic music, game audio, live electronics, sound arts, music production and film music, can now be studied in the artistically rich environment of a music conservatoire here in the heart of London presenting our masterclass on film composition is one of our long-standing teachers, Johnny Buchanan, last year, John, who explained his production workflow in a masterclass that received over 320,000 views online and I know it.

His experience is worth sharing more widely, so if you enjoy this masterclass, please like, share and subscribe for now. I know you can enjoy it, as Johnny offers a true masterclass in film composition. Could you join me in welcoming the drama teacher? and songwriter Jenna Buchanan, thank you very much Paul, much appreciated, thank you very much, okay, welcome, it's a pleasure to see so many people here. Thank you so much for giving up your Wednesday lunchtime to come and learn a little more about film

scoring

in Logic Pro 10. I appreciate it. Everyone probably prefers to whip up sandwiches, so thanks for being here, as Paul mentioned that this is effectively the second episode of our Logic Pro 10 masterclass series.

A year ago, I was standing on a stage in Milton Court, right next to end of the street, taking them through the

logic

al workflow and Obviously, today the topic we're going to cover is film

scoring

, but the reason I mention that master class, other than you know a little bit about narcissism, maybe it's because that video is like Paul mentioned online and may well prove to be a really useful additional learning resource last year I started out by saying that we were going to go over tips for beginner, intermediate and more advanced

logic

users and that's true again today, but it's fair to say that we have a lot to cover and We're going to continue with a pretty old clip, so definitely come back to that video if you haven't had a chance to watch it yet.

Well, on with the program, so today we have a movie to work on that was specially made. for us this afternoon is called Just in Time and the first thing we're going to do long before we even think about opening the logic is to watch it in QuickTime. I'm going to turn the volume down a little bit because it's pretty loud and I'm just going to press play and we should all be ready to go so this is just in time guess what he said yeah you're never on time? yes, not a single one. I won't go, come on, hey.

I did it, yeah, it's about time, okay, so your classic boy gets a text from a girl, boy does parkour, boy-meets-girl story, okay, so we've all been there, maybe we're not all right, so there we are, we've seen it in QuickTime. Now, the reason for this is that, of course, the temptation every time you're about to start working on a new film score project is to just put the video into logic and immediately start throwing in sounds and start watching. what sticks, but us. We're going to be a little more strategic than that and the reason we've watched the movie out of logic is because I think what we really need to do every time we start a new film music project is identify a theme something that can put it to work and maybe instruct us in terms of the sounds that we could then use in terms of building the project that we're working on and I think it's fair to say that the kind of beginning The theme of this film is time from the moment in which the boy looks at his watch until the end, until the moment when the girl says: "It's okay, you were just in time." We have time like this. concept, it's going to make it and I think really, from a film music standpoint, it's going to be the kind of seed of the creative foundation of what we want to continue and build on now that we've really identified our theme, what we're going to do. is to open up the logic and then what we're going to do is think about starting a project, but actually, just before we go to the farm menu, let's think about that too.

Of course, I start with a completely new logical project and I can start populating it with sound and again, as I say, start to see what sticks and what feels good, but the vast majority of film composers don't work that way, what they will do instead. is opening what's called a template, now let's assume for a moment that I were the kind of film composer who works every day with strings, woodwinds, brass and percussion samples and that I could spend the first two hours of every day of my life preparing the exact same instruments that I set up yesterday morning but that, of course, is a real waste of time, so what templates do is allow you to set up a bunch of sound effects and all kinds of other things to follow to see what you can then use it as a starting point for a completely new project and I've created a template for today's session just to give us some sounds to get us going so I'll move on to the new thing from the template .

I'm going to move on to my templates and here's a template that I made for this movie called just in time, just before I hit choose and open this project, we can see that there are several things that we can configure inside a template at the bottom. of the screen to start, I have identified that at least for the beginning of the film I feel that a tempo of about 116 BPM will be a good thing and yet Pacey not too far off, so that will get us started. I will return to the tempo in due time.

I have also identified that I want to work in G minor. I'm working at 48 kilohertz, which is pretty standard for music and image projects, and I'm also working at a frame rate of 30 frames. per second, which is shown here as 29.97, so after I've drawn your attention to those elements, I'll simply press choose and logic will load the project. Now you can see it right away, although it's taking a little longer than it could be. Open a new project that doesn't last long and now suddenly I have a set of sounds that will allow us to get going and, as I say, identify our theme of time and how we could start working, but of course, I don't have one yet. movie, so let's go to the file and let's go to the movie and find the movie.

The film was on the desk. We've already seen it there, so I'm just going to click there. I'll bring it here and then press open. Now what I do is logic will ask me if in addition to opening the movie I also want to extract the audio track that contains our sound effects. our dialogue I definitely want I'm going to need that to be able to type in it, so I press ok, the movie comes and that audio file comes in a new audio track here at the top, ok, which I really am. What I'm going to do is rename this, obviously it's taking the name of the movie right now, but I want to be called I want this to be called dialogue and sound effect.

I'm just going to type this out and let's learn our first key command of the afternoon, which is shift + option + N and what it does is it changes the track name based on the track name, in other words, where I labeled that now applies that to the region and actually that will be really useful in several contexts this afternoon, ok, in a moment what I'm going to do is watch the movie with you again. I'm going to turn the volume down again here because I obviously don't want that. It's going to overshadow what we're going to do a little bit from a musical standpoint, but I'm very aware of the fact that you guys have only seen this movie once and normally what would happen at the beginning of a project.

Where you would sit down with an editor or director is to have a creative conversation about what he or she might want you to bring to the project. It's called a location session. It's very common for you to sit down and particularly with longer films it's a great opportunity to identify themes that might be repeated later or talk about groups of instruments or maybe someone would have written some temp music and what you'll be looking to do is figure out what works well. with temporary music and what maybe doesn't work as well, then a location session is a very good creative starting point for ideas you could work on with the director.

Now we're going to have a localization session right now, partly so that you understand an opportunity to watch the movie again, but also so that we can identify some really crucial moments, including perhaps the most important lesson of the entire afternoon, which is when to write music and when not to do it, I'm sorry from the beginning of In this movie, these two guys get together and we still don't know if they're capable of achieving these remarkable physical feats, so right now they could be just... any look just hanging on a guy excitedly saying he might have gotten a date.

With this girl it's only when they start moving that we realize the fact that they may not be like the rest of you. Again we're going to have a little localization session and we're going to start identifying some crucial moments within the movie, so I've muted the dialogue, let's look at this until we turn off the click traffic as well, so at the end At the moment we're in a place where they've gathered, these could be any two guys, they're just sitting there, starting to go to work and thinking about what they could do next, and then we have our crucial moment.

They jump down and they start moving and we immediately notice some of their tricks, so it definitely seems like we should have the music going at this point, at this stage we're just starting to understand a little bit of what they're capable of. So this definitely feels like an opening theme and we're running through this section to the point here where they run up the stairs and we get our first slow motion shot which I think is important at that moment, then the pace picks up. again we're in a different environment now we're in this stadium and the guys have broken up, they're working independently and now they're back together at this point it definitely feels like we're trying to push things forward.

A bit now we are in a third landscape where it is surrounded by trees and leaves in a much more natural environment and then we enter the maze. This also feels like sort of the third segment of the film overall and then we have the first. a look at the girl here the pace actually continues despite that skid until that jump and now everything changes all the action has stopped we have this slightly awkward little exchange there's a little bit of romance it's a little shy it's a little cute it's a bit fragile and certainly the whole rhythm of the film has been lost at this stage and I think we will need to reflect that in the music as well, so this idea of ​​a location session, this idea that we could just go through and start to understand structurally what the film does seems like a good place to start now, as I identified from the beginning.

I don't think we need music, we just want those guys to get together and start chatting, so what? What we need to do is find the moment where the music might start and then make a musical decision about how we're going to make that work for us as the kind of songwriting department of the project, so I'm going to zoom in. a little bit and let's look at the beginning one more time and see if we can find a useful place to act as what we call an ending point here we go, guess what she said yeah, don't you ever take the time? no let's go, okay, now this is the moment where the guy jumps and this is where I think we're going to start working and if I use the playhead inside the logic, I can hover over this point and make this jump type and down, which is quite nice, but in particular what I want to do is find the moment where it actually hits the ground and I think that's this little waveform here, let's look at that again, yeah, right now, This is the moment where I really want the music to start and by holding down the control while moving the playhead I can actually identify that moment quite closely, so in terms of identifying this cut it's fine, but since From a musical point of view we are in no man's land.

I'm halfway between bars seven and eight, this isn't the most useful place to say yes, that's where I want the music to start, so what I need to do is move the film around so I can identify this moment as a place. where musically I'm in better shape, in other words, I want to move the movie to a downbeat so I can startwrite from that point, so what I'm going to do is copy the timecode position, the logic of which is identified here in the Transport Bar Command + C to copy and then what I'm going to do is move here to the list of tempo and what I can do now is try that timecode position right here, now what I value is what I do. the film is now moved and is placed at a point at the beginning of measure one which is not ideal, there is a lot of film now so that is actually before the timeline starts with my project.

What I want to do is change it later, so I actually go. to put it at measure eight and what that should mean now is that the moment that the guy jumped coincides with At the beginning of here you can see that within my templates, so you know where we are within the movie, I have identified some moments key here that I have put with markers and this right here should be the beginning of our music so I'm going to put the click back and we should see as we run now that the click matches him jumping down and that should put us in good shape in terms of writing some music, come on, come on, okay, we're good. way now, suddenly we have a useful musical endpoint that will allow us to start the process of writing music, so let's close the tempo list and now we can get to the template and find out how I put some sounds together here and to find some sounds that I create that would be useful, I'll just make the movie a little bit smaller and place it in the bottom right corner and we'll make the screen a little bit smaller.

Okay, so the first sound I have here is a sound that I definitely like, but I've also included it in the template because I'm sure you'll like it, if you're a logical user, I don't like it as much. of the metronome sound, don't worry, it's a bit annoying, so what I want to do is be in a position where I can replace it as soon as possible with something musical, there will be a more inspiring sound, so this first. The sound is effectively a sort of propulsive percussive sound that I'm just going to use as a starting point to build some ideas based on our theme of time.

It sounds like this, okay, let's record two bars of that, come on, come on, okay, one note. The movie soundtrack is great, let's just mute the dialogue and go back to this region now, although I've already played it live, I need to make sure that if I'm going to use this as some sort of loop, something that's going to loop needs to be absolutely in time, so the first thing I'm going to do is quantize it, so I'm going to select a quarter note there so the knowledge starts absolutely at the beginning of this region and then I'm going to press E to open the editor and we're going to learn our second key command of the afternoon and a really useful one, we get one that we will come back to a lot, let's assume for a moment that you had only recorded a short note within this region I want to make sure that every time it repeats you get a really smooth loop, the key , come on, what I'm going to show you is capital letters and backslash and that produces what is called a forced legato that makes each note last until the next note takes over or, in the case of a region where we only have one note in a region, it will last until the end and that will be really useful, it will give me a smoother loop every time this region repeats. that's forced legato, we'll come back to it.

I have hit this note quite strongly. In fact, I'm going to slow it down a little bit, which I can also do here inside this editor and we're in good shape, so We've got our first sound, except I think we could do more with it besides being able to fill out a template. with sounds, we can also use other things, including effects, and you can see that the first one is waiting for me here. It's skipped for the moment, but this gives me the opportunity to introduce the Logical Steps Effects plugin, which is a modular plugin in a modular plugin which means a lot of separate bits that you can turn on and use the bits that you want to use so that I can see that around the edges here I have lights on for a bunch of different types of modules and the two that I'm using a little bit of distortion but also this filter and this one in particular is the one that I want to get your attention because the moment I remove this bypass effect, you can begin to see that what we have really done or what I have done here is create a continuous sequence of steps, sixteen steps and what they are doing.

They are being routed through the filter section of the sound, which means each sixteenth note has its own offset tone, it will be brighter when you play it, we should listen to it, you will hear that the loop suddenly has a lot more purpose here is the original, ok, so suddenly it's a little bit more up and running and we're just starting to get back into this time theme that I've identified, ok, let's take a look at the second sound within our project. I'm going to copy the first loop to this second sound and then I'm going to press this one and it's fair to say it even before I press play, please don't leave it.

I don't like this noise, here it comes, okay? a kind of mid-80s Depeche Mode. Well, what I've done here is identify this sound, not because I want to use it in its current form, but because I want to show you one of the most powerful logical plugins, which is alchemy. Now alchemy is an absolutely extraordinary place where I can combine up to four separate layers of sound. Then I can modulate them in many ways. I can add effects. I can add sequences, all kinds of things. In fact, we can hear the sequences being played through this sound it contains. 2000 sounds in their preset banks and you can start to see how I selected this one.

I landed on our qualified drum sounds page, perhaps surprisingly not a very drum sound, this one is in the list of sound tracks and that yielded these six. options and I chose this one now, all the functionality that I just mentioned a moment ago is available in the Advanced tab and if you are an advanced logic user, this is definitely a plugin that you should spend more time on because it is capable of the most notable sounds , although that all feels a little complicated for now, there was also a simple and useful tab and the reason I selected this sound is to show off one of the most useful features of Alchemy, which is this area here, which is called morph pad now, what happens when I move these target points, as you can see on the screen, is that several parameters associated with this sound are changing, so maybe the reverb balance changes and the sound becomes a little bit damper or maybe we'll delete it. a couple of layers of the sound to make the sound thinner overall and the area of ​​the sound that I'm particularly interested in is this one down here where it says heartbeat and now when I press play we're going to hear a radically different sound but it's based on the same noise, okay?

So why did I choose this? Well, first of all, it helps us mark time again, but it also feels useful. It's like the heartbeat type of element, it doesn't just represent physical effort. "The guys are getting down to business, but maybe it'll also let us get into the romance territory later in the movie and see what I've done there. Cleverly, isn't it okay? So there we are. Now we have the our heartbeat working, we also have the beat dialed in. Now remember our first key command change option because I copied that pattern. I'm going to use it again so that the region that we created there represents or is named after the track that it created, okay, one more loop that we're going to add from alchemy to now, of course, I could play at this party and I'm just going to audition it for you on the keyboard, it goes like this, more or less I couldn't resist this sound in a movie super contemporary.

The idea that we're going to have a lot of anachronistic mechanisms from old clocks really appeals to me and of course I could add this as a new file so write it down and just save it but this is a little tip that I'm going to give you. show now, if you're a film composer who maybe sits on the train as much as he does in his own studio, what we'll do is just copy this pattern one at a time. More time again I open the editor and this time what I'm going to do is select these notes and I'm going to use the option and the up arrow and I can move forward to activate the key that I just played now if you use By changing the option up and down , you'll jump in octaves and like I say, if you just use the up and down option, we'll move in semitones, so if you're someone who doesn't have a full range keyboard in front of them and you're working on your laptop, then actually this is a good way to be able to move MIDI around, so now we have three loops, all of which have been triggered from the first one again, we'll just rename that one and up to now.

All this is very easy. I've played one note and we have three loops. I think it's time, from a rhythmic point of view, that we look a little more at how we could further develop the rhythms that I'm going to make. that by creating a whole new region for Nick's sound, now this sound is from the designer of the drum machine, which logically is some kind of iconic electronic drum machine and what I'm going to do is press edit and what I'm going to see now is the names of the sounds on the left side that I want to use within this project - all sounds that are available to me and there are a couple here that I like.

The first one is this sound called click that's down here on the bottom and I don't want a continuous sequence of notes here that I'm going to add using the logic brush tool. Now I've selected it just from a toolbar here and the brush tool is great, it allows me to just draw a line of notes, all of which fit perfectly into the project, very clearly, the only problem is they're all the same color , which means that they all have the same speed. I don't want that, I want more variation in this sound, so what? What I'm going to do is put all these notes together.

Then I'll move on to the MIDI transform functions and then specify the random speed. Now what this box allows me to do is what you would expect from its name. I randomize the speed, the strength of each of these individual notes and I can set a range for the ones here. I actually want this sound to be pretty low in the mix, and from a velocity standpoint, I'm going to rain them down. I'm going to set a range between 15 and maybe around 40 and then as I press select and run I'll see that a change has occurred if I go back out now they have different colors and they've been random and they're all a little bit lower on the mix, so that's cool, that's what I want and then what I'm going to do is add the second sound from this kit, but I also want to use it, what is this sound called impact noise, the game is going to do this. a little bit shorter, which I can also do within this region and this sound that I've selected because every time we jump down or every time we get a strong impact and there are a lot of cut points and hits within this film where that happens.

I wanted to shore that up, so I'll show you what I mean, if I put in just this sound, I'll run it right before my loop, we'll see that this is the moment where the guy jumps, this sound will give We have a good impact that I think which will feel pretty good in the context of the overall rhythm section, okay, and you can hear the clicks keep time in a slightly less traditional clock shape, okay, so I've got my first drum measure here I go to repeat that's command + R to repeat I'm going to select them both on the tool button in the toolbox again I'm going to paste these two regions together and I don't actually want this impact to happen every measure, so after I've done that turned into a two-bar loop, what I'm actually going to do is go back to this second hit and just delete it and when I come back I'll see that I now have a 2-bar beat. based on the one I created for measure 1, okay, let's do the same thing again with one more drum machine, this one is from ultra beat, a different drum machine, I have selected this sound, I really like this kit called , it's full of really little technological noises and here I'm going to build something a little bit more like a kind of conventional beat that will appear again here.

Simply double-click the region to open it. I'm going to grab the kind of beat pattern that I used from alchemy, I'm going to create this little syncopated rhythm that goes like this, we've already seen that command and I'm going to repeat it and that will happen with MIDI and with entire regions, so I'm just going to Repeat the first two beats in the second TB of the measure. We've also seen that the brush tool will use it again now for the closed hi-hat and just place a sort of continuous series of sixteenth notes here and then.

I'm going to slow down. I don't want them to be too loud and I'm also going to put a little bit of backbeat just on beats two and four so we have something more similar. a conventional beat that sounds like this EDM movie okay, what I'm going to do next is repeatall that rhythm to make it two measures long. I'm going to select both. I need to change tools, okay, let's get rid of it. those, I'll just take the glue and stick them together and now we have five parts that make up the rhythm section of the track and we'll listen to them all together, okay, now in our localization session I identified that this moment from the moment the lead jumps to the first series of runs and jumps that they do, then they run up the stairs and then we do the somersault and that feels like the first moment where we want a change, so what I'm really going to do is specify all these loops and I'm going to have to adjust them and continue in two-measure loops until we get to that section which, as you see, I've marked here as a pause, so I'm just going to repeat these phrases up to this point, however, it's going to be a bit boring if we only have a two-bar loop playing throughout.

In fact, I want to present the type of kick drum and backbeat that I prefer. I've put this most recent sound in measure 12, so it appears a little later. After I've pasted these two two-measure regions together, I'm going to open this up, I'm just going to laugh, ooh, the notes I don't want, I'm just going to move the movie for a moment, I'm going to close this button here which will park it here in the top left corner so we can still see it, but it takes up less screens. I'm going to pull out these notes, delete them, and I'm going to To do a little bit of the same thing with this impact sound, the moment it jumps, we get a nice impact and I think there's another one here.

I think there is a hand grab where he climbs up the wall, but there really isn't. There's a strong moment here, so it doesn't seem like we're going to need this second impact sound here. I'm just going to delete it and that will now lead us into a slight development in this opening section, let's just look at that, okay? and we're actually getting to that point where he's doing his job very well, so it seems like it's working out well. However, I definitely don't want these beats to continue in that moment where he does his jump, but I think we're going to use them. again from the moment the beat picks up, so again for now I'm just going to take these two bars, copy them into this section and for now I'm just going to repeat them a few times just to complete as a sort of placeholder the next section of the movie because we're going to move on to the next collection of sounds that I've put in the template now, as we can see every time I record something in logic, remember the first one.

The sound we put on I record live and every time you make a recording in logic, by default any new software instrument will be green, okay this is the slight OCD part of my personality coming through now. I really believe in the idea. which is really helpful for you to have the different groups of sounds you put together color coded separately. If you come to a project, you have a hundred clues and they are all green. Identifying the sound you want is very difficult, so what? What I'm going to do is select all of these. I'm going to press option C to bring up the color panel and I'm going to choose this kind of gold color for my drums and that way when I start looking at synths. what is the next group of sounds that I want to incorporate, they will be a different color than the drums that I am using so far, well, the next sound within my project is called growl big bass and it sounds like this, well, not like that.

Although I think that in order for this sound to justify the name I've given it, we need to record a measure and then start looking at how we can give it some life, let's just put it in Now then, I'm using this sound because I really like this moment, we have this slow motion cut, he jumps the fence and we have a lot of power in the shot and I want to reflect that in the score as well, so again, like before quantizing, I'm going to open the editor and make sure the notes are exactly as long as I need them to use force legato.

So far, we've seen that. Not only can I put instruments in a template, I can also put effects as we've seen and I can also put automation lanes. Now automation is a logical way to allow you to make changes over time to specific parameters, so what does that mean? I'll show you that if I press a, we'll open up the automation tab and what that does is give me an automation lane that I've already added to my template. This is the cutoff frequency for the filter on the synth that I'm using and by drawing a couple of automation points here we're going to start to get that kind of growl.

What I want to bring to this sound as I draw a rise here, what's going to happen is the toll of the sound is just going to solo it so we can hear it clearly it's going to grow, it's going to go from being very dull to a little bit. brighter, let's listen to that, okay, that's starting to happen and it feels good, it feels like We could take it further though, so what we've done there is add an automation lane, but what I want to do Now is to start thinking about the effect in more depth than what we have already seen.

I have a bunch of effects waiting to show up on this sound to help shape it and help it become the sound that I really want it to be, so the first one is called bit crusher, it's kind of like digital distortion, what I'm going to do. What I'm going to do is unmute it so we can hear it, but what I'm also going to do is draw your attention to the fact that there's a little link button here. It's not about you if your logical user all the time ended up with 15 logical plugins. The windows open at the same time and I'm kind of wading through them and wondering which ones to close using the link button the next time I open a plugin it will close and the next window will open which means I get a lot of workflow smoother, so now when I press play, we'll hear this sound again, which is just a solo and this time it's got a little bit of digital distortion, okay, so we're getting to a place where they're going to incorporate. a more analog form of distortion sounds like this.

I don't know where you are, but I have subs behind me here. This is great, okay, fantastic, okay, let's move on. I'll go into the EQ channel maybe. Black Eggman, it seems like the side days are over because now I took some of the bass out of that sound and pushed the top end a little bit so it became a little bubbly, well I don't want the base to become overpowering and that's why I did that and then I'm going to introduce the tape delay. Now what this gives me is echo, but the reason I like tape delay so much is because what I can do is introduce a random pitch variation like before.

Tape machines used to do that, so what I can do now is be in a position where I can add what we call flutter pitch variation to those echoes. Okay it's definitely starting to feel like a big grunt base so it's justifying its name so we have more inserts but what I'm also going to do now is bring in some auxiliaries that I've also prepared for this project if you work on a template and even if you were working with a kind of orchestral formation that I mentioned in the From the beginning you will want reverbs, delays, spatial effects added to your project.

It would definitely be worth including them in your template. I've done it here, we have a reverb on bus number one and what I'm going to do. What we need to do is just press it a little bit harder, so this will give us a sense of space around this sound. Okay, a little more symphonic in character. Now, generally speaking, auxiliaries tend to be spatial effects, reverbs and delays, as I mentioned. but in reality any effect can be in an auxiliary and the one I have prepared for this second effect is a much less conventional auxiliary effect.

This is parallel distortion. This is a distortion channel that I want to make available to other sounds within my mix. Also, that's why I put it on an aux, but this will definitely give us a lot more power, so I think we're there, remember where that sound was five minutes ago, a very low bass sound, so in terms of using Sound shaping effects is a really powerful way to be able to create your own noises and feel like you're in control of the sounds you're working with. Okay, so let's get out of solo mode because I want to use this sound more than once I'm going to turn off the loop for a second and see how this sort of second section of the movie is going to take shape.

I definitely want to use it again here and I want to also copy it one more time, but before I copied it a second time, a box with logic appeared asking me if I want to copy the automation data that I created, which I do, and I also want to copy it another time when I put the third iteration of this region here, so I'm going to print the copy again now that we already have a break here and I think there will also be another one in the movie, yes indeed, I can see in the bookmarks that I created that I have another break coming up, so if I replay the movie, this is the moment where the guy jumps into the tree and then jumps again and I want to pause the music at this moment. period, so I definitely don't need these batteries.

I'm going to get rid of them. Remember we just copied a few regions at the beginning, but what I also want to do is manage these loops so that they stop at this point, so I'm going to select the Scissors tool. I'm going to go through them all first, then I'm going to select the Lizard tool, Scissors, and then I'm going to click right now right here, now when I let go, the logic pops up with this box that says. Well, what do you want to do with the notes at the moment when you are about to cut them?

You could keep them, which means the regions would be shortened, but all those notes would still sound. It's definitely not what I want. I could split them. which means the notes will be retried at the point where I'm cutting them or can shorten them which is exactly what I want to do here when I press ok now we can see that those MIDI regions stopped at that point meaning en It's very easy for me to see one last time these little bits that I don't need anymore and they're gone, so now we're going to make that cut too, which is great, but what I do want is to make sure that these notes last for complete. so edit force legato and then what I'm going to do is open up the automation again and just make an adjustment here so that that growl lasts that whole region a little bit longer so we have our first synth part going.

What I have identified is what I call the action section in this middle part of the movie, let's take a look at the next sound, this one is logical. Oh, since this is a really friendly instrument to get to know if you're new to this. synthesis, so we'll use a sound here and we'll see that the brush tool that we've used in terms of programming beats is also a really useful tool if you want to program, since I'm I'm going to go in here, grab the brush tool and just create a sequence continuous notes here. I don't think they're going to be strong enough.

I'm going to speed it up a little bit and what we're going to do is just just just his parts so we can hear him. I'm going to put a loop around here. Okay, okay, but I actually want it to be an octave lower so I can use the editor here in the top left corner. I'm going to use a transpose offset of 12 to bring it down an octave. What I'm also going to do is fix the dynamics so that they are all exactly the same. It measures a MIDI velocity 64 from 1 to 127 and by selecting fixed in the middle, I'm setting this all to 64 and then I can create the velocity offset that I want right here and what I'm also going to do is use a time offset gate , gate time literally means note length, so by spreading that out or lowering that to 50%, these notes will be punchier and now it's down at the bottom.

If I wanted to make them permanent, these changes that I've made here are a permanent part of this region. I can press Ctrl + N and that's what's called normalizing sequence parameters, which is a fancy way of saying that whatever I put in that box becomes a permanent part of that region, okay, let's get out of solo mode and let's make that part also play up to this point, we know. That's our exit point, so I'm just going to use the scissors to cut at that point and then we can throw that part in there and then it's time for me to record something again, so I'm going to do that. for the next sound that sounds like this, this is also from alchemy.

Okay, let's put this part into what I have in mind. Okay, then let's fix the time too. I'm going to use quantization to put it in time. I'm going to fix my dynamic again. I'm going to put a little velocity offset here. This speed of sound triggers how bright it is, how much it bites, and I want it to bite quite a bit here, so I'm using a pretty big speed. compensate again and again I'm going to fix those parameters so that they become permanent. It's time for youlet's pick a color, I think for our since I'm going to go with something a little more purple.

I warned you that I was going to be hot with the color, there it is again, it won't be the last time I mention it either. I guess it's not right, so since we started coming together and now we're in good shape, as you can probably see. According to my template, I did not have a joyful process with this film because, unlike usual, my director said: I want you to work with sounds that you want to use, with two caveats, there were two groups of instruments that I would like you to consider when it comes to of writing the score and those are brass and strings and this synth part, this bass part with a big growl, it seems like it might be a good time for Institue to introduce one of those groups of specifically brass instruments.

I think the sound could be duplicated very well with some throaty brass. Well, we still have four sounds that we haven't even identified or examined yet, but just by looking at their names you should be able to see that none of them are actually metal, so what I have to do is be in a position where somehow way I can go and find those sounds and bring them in now, of course I could set them up from scratch, but like I said at the beginning, actually that takes time and you kind of want to work at the pace of your creative workflow and suddenly have to stopping and setting up these sounds from scratch isn't really ideal, so what I want to be able to do is look somewhere else, look for those sounds if I know they exist in another project and bring them into this one and we're going to do that in just a second, but what I'm also going to do is draw your attention to anyone who is working on the template.

Be careful, we haven't saved this project so far because we started from a template. The logic is to use this effectively as a new untitled document seems like a good time to save it. I'm going to call him just in time and then we'll be ready. Now we have a new document here and obviously we can retrieve it at any time, so I'm going to go up. to the browser area here in the top right corner and within these browsers I can use all the files to go anywhere on my computer and look for another logical project, one that maybe contains the sounds that I want to use.

I have a little marker here. I'm going to go in here and logical projects and I have a project for cooking brass and strings that uses two trombones and two horns, which are the instruments that I want to add to this project. Now I just want to embed the plugin that hosts these examples, so I select that option. We'll use contact for the examples that I'll run this afternoon and then I'll hit Add and them. They will be added to my project now, you might be thinking it's faster than setting up those sounds from scratch. Well, I hope we answer that question because they are already in the project that they already entered, so if I close.

What I can do then is take these four parts. I'm just going to bring them to the end of my arrangement below everything else, as a group, so the brass is down here, okay, now we're using Spitfire audio symphonic brass for this collection of sounds there's a bunch of third party orchestral libraries available definitely do your research before purchasing if you want to purchase third party libraries. I like these, so we'll use them this afternoon. Okay, so the sound of the trombone. that I've identified here sounds this big and fruity and I think you can start to see that it might be a good accompaniment to that synth part I created earlier, so what I'm going to do is grab that synth part and just drag it over here and put it on the trombone track.

The logic will also ask me if I want to copy the automation data, of course, not this time, there is no filter for these sounds in the same way, so I'm not going to copy that and now we should find that we have a nice big trombone noise at the beginning or as the basis of this part of the synthesizer. Well, I think that will work fine. I'll just take the film and put it in there for a moment too, so now we have some brass. I think I warned you that they also need a copper color.

Do not say I did not warn you. Okay, change the option and I'll go in. I'm going to rename those trombones, okay, so we have the first of our brass sounds in a minute. We're going to complete this whole brass setup with some of these other sounds as well, but I haven't just bought brass. As I want to underpin some synth parts, I also want to take the brass further and create something a little more dynamic. Going back to our location section, the next section of the film is what I have identified as what I call the superhero section.

Now the reason I call it that is because if we watch this section of the movie again, the guys get back together, they start moving through the trees, they jump in here and suddenly they head into the maze and we have these shots where the boys run. towards us and this reminded me of watching superhero TV shows when I was a kid. Nowadays, superheroes make billions of dollars and we have the entire Marvel Universe, but when I was a kid, superheroes wore their pants. out of their tights and these are the types of superheroes we're talking about here.

I want to find a way to make sure that we have kind of a really big, stomping old school superhero theme underneath this section of the movie, so again what I'm going to do is park the movie for a moment. I'm going to take this little bar region that I created and I'm going to repeat it again from this point to the next moment where the pause occurs, which I think is here for now, we won't worry about it, we'll make those cuts in a little while, so Now I have something that I'm going to record as well, but what I have to do is present to you the theme that I'm going to write, which is a little bit like this so that we get this big arc shape.

You may have already noticed that we have a bit of an issue with this sound, but we're going to address that issue in just a moment. moment let me put the melody first, okay, so it stops at that point, it definitely feels like a good time to break those drums, so we'll also stop at this moment, at this point, okay again, I'm going to shorten them and discard the regions that I don't need, okay, let's just put this brass part back in for a second so we can address the fact that while some of these notes sound good, others really don't again.

To make sure that from a MIDI point of view everything is as it should be, I'm going to fix the dynamics so that we're back at MIDI 64 and I'm going to create an offset so that the notes are pushed a little. a little bit louder and I'm also going to select quantize to compensate for my poor timing on any performance issues I may have had from that perspective, let's listen to this melody again, okay, so the long notes sound good, the short ones really Don't do it, because before they've really had a chance to speak, we move on to the next notes, so there's no power, there's no emphasis on those notes and that really shouldn't be a surprise. ask a brass player to somehow know that I want emphasis on the short notes, but I'm happy that he or she has broken down Paul to actually produce a softer note on the more legato notes and of course a patch, a joint, as we call them, it's You're never going to give me that expression.

What I need is a way to be able to switch from one type of articulation to another so I can go from long, soft notes to short, punchy notes, and Logic has a fantastic feature that allows me to do this. which I'm going to present to you now, which is called articulation mapping, I'll close the region inspector, I'll open the one for this particular track and down here I have the option to create what's called a new articulation set. When I do that, a dialog box appears and the first joint that I'm going to create is called Long Notes.

Okay, we're working on channel one, so I'm going to tell that to logic as well and then I'm going to create another one. articulation for the short notes or what we call staccato again. I mean logic and we're still working on channel one ready for those sounds as well and also what I can do here is add a symbol to these notes, this is the staccato symbol. that players would be used to seeing if they were working with scores and we'll see that that will be useful a little later. I'm going to click on the staccato option here and we'll look at it again later.

What I'm going to do is go into the output tab because I need to tell Logic exactly what I'm trying to do here, so how do I normally change articulations well the way sample libraries work? Do they present you with a reproducible range? for you to program the notes you want to work with, but what they tend to do is also give you a series of what we call key switches, ways of being able to switch from one articulation to another in keys outside of that playable range. and these samples are no different: I have a key switch right at the bottom of my keyboard in the C octave.

In fact, it's the first one right at the bottom that allows me to switch between these articulations and in the articulation mapper I can set them here , so first I need to tell the logic that we are going to use what is called a MIDI note in the message, a key switch, in other words, for both articulations again, I can specify the channel that I want. to work and then what I'm going to do is say, yeah, the long notes are in C - - and the staccato z' is in f - t, which is here, so what I can do is close this box. and then I'll save it as trombones and this will add it to my articulation list and now when I press play on this sound or I should hear those two articulations, okay, but actually I think I may have missed the correct articulation for the staccato that I want, so I'm going to edit that to come back here.

I'm going to specify that I actually want to use F sharp to ice the car, so let's try it. That, on the other hand, is okay, that's giving me a little more power, so that's great. I'm going to keep it exactly where it is and what I can do is map this to other sounds as well, so I'll make sure. that all of these sounds are labeled trombone and what I can do next is copy them to the second instrument where I can also specify that I want to use the trombones here now I'm also going to drag them over to the horns. which I also incorporated, but these use a slightly different joint that I already did, which is the horns right here and we're going to put the same thing on this second group of horns as well and now we should have a nice big brass master section, okay, like this We have started to see how articulation switching can work, but that is not the only way in which it is possible to handle samples within the logic and it is a very important feature that we will see next and that allows me to work with what We call midi control now, what MIDI controllers do is that they allow you very different ways of approaching different groups of samples and in particular today we're going to focus on two separate MIDI controllers, now that I have a couple of faders in front of me, the which I've mapped, the first of which controls what we call MIDI expression, which is basically just the volume of the samples that we're using and that's on MIDI controller 11, which is this fader here, the other one. controls something a little more nuanced.

This is the mod wheel. You'll find a mod wheel on most controller keyboards. I've assigned it to a slider, but what it does here is allow us to move through different speed groups. What does that do? I mean, okay, first of all let's explore the MIDI expression, just see how easily it can work, so here's a note and here's the MIDI expression controlling its volume, okay, so it's pretty simple, I can turn it up and turn it down in terms of its volume, but if using the mod wheel we get a slightly different effect. Let me explain this to you once we've heard it.

Okay, so if you're creating sample libraries, what you want to be able to do is not just have a dynamic layer, a sound layer. Whether you record loudly or silently, what you want to be able to do is fade the crossfade between those layers, so that if you want to produce, say a crescendo, for example, you're in a position to do it by moving from silent sample layers. to the strongest ones, like we just did with that slider, and in particular, what I want to make sure that I can do is reset the handlers on these samples so that every time the logic hits this collection of metal samples, those two sliders are reset.

I'll show you what I mean. I'm going to record a measure here just to get information from the MIDI controller. Here it comes, that was exciting, wasn't it in many ways? I think that was the best part of the masterclass so far, okay? We open the editor, let's take a quick look at what we have actually donethere, obviously there's no note data, but what we're really looking for here are two lanes of automation data that I can see inside the MIDI drawing, since I say there are no notes, so we won't see any velocity, but if I low all the way down we should see a modulation reset, so this is the crossfade speed, go down and back up to maximum because I just want to shoot. the loudest samples and also if I look at the MIDI expression which is also restarting now it doesn't matter that it has all these individual points, the crucial point is that the last one is at maximum and that means that every time the logic goes back to the beginning of the project and plays it, it will come to this point and reset those two controllers and therefore I will have the volume and velocity change that I want on those instruments, so again I will copy this to the others, so we are also resetting those parameters for the brass again.

That's right, it's color time, which makes the brass the color we want and then we have the brass inside our project, okay, so it's working fine, so We have our metals theme, we have our theme superhero thing that's working here, but I think it's time we recheck the movie to find out whether or not our timing is as it should be, as we saw at the beginning. We have good hits on particular cuts within the film and what I want to do is check that we're still doing it at this particular point when we get to this moment here where the superhero theme starts.

I want to make sure. that's actually getting to a point in the movie where I want it to happen again, if I just move the playhead, we move through the various frames of the movie and as he jumps down like he did at the beginning , I want music to start, okay, so we're missing it, okay, so here's the moment of impact and when we get to the point where my theme starts, he's already a little depressed and he's just thinking on getting back up, so I really want to. get to this moment here and set it as the moment where the music speeds up so we're going to need a tempo change.

I need to be in a position where by speeding up the music a little bit, maybe we'll get to this moment sooner, which means we'll get to this moment a little faster. So where do I want my change of pace to start? I have a break, so I guess I could put it here, but I think we're going to be a little more strategic than that and think about backtracking taking a little more time. kind of an overview of the whole movie and coming back here and acknowledging that after our opening section and after this nice somersault, maybe the next section of the movie, this action section of the movie, might be a good time to speed up the pace a little. a little bit and when we see the end of this somersault and when we get up to here, it's actually on beat four of this bar that would suddenly have a shot where we have action as he runs towards us again, so this feels like potentially a good time. or a good place to make a tempo change.

I'm going to do it by going back to the tempo list and this time instead of doing it from a timecode position, I'm going to enter one manually because I put the playhead in the position I want that to happen, the logic knows instantly which this is where I want to add the tempo change and then what I'm going to do is increase it a full beat per minute because that's how generous I feel good right now. Why does my name only do that for one BPM? It's not going to make much difference. Alright? I'm trying to hit a sync point and if you think about it, I'm only a couple of frames away, so it's a really dramatic tempo.

The change will not take us where we need, let's see if a BPM achieves it or not if we come back here. Now I'm in my pessimistic groove and look, yeah, we're a lot closer to the moment here where it lands. I think that's going to be better, so now we have a change of pace in the project that will hopefully allow us to get to that moment with a little more clarity than we've been doing well, so when we hear that and let's see. now we have the music playing at that moment, okay, again, I'm going to save the movie for a second and use strings from Logic Studio just to explain a little bit what I want to do next.

From a musical point of view, I have a melody that goes up and we have heard it now, so what am I going to do to harmonize this melody? Until now I told you that we are in G minor and in fact I have only been in G, that only chord with an RP so far, the only foundation from a bass point of view is a series of G. At this point, I want something very more melodic and harmonious and something that feels a little more expensive, so what I want. What I have to do as the melody goes up is I want the Harmony to go down so that we're effectively moving in counter motion and we get something quite cinematic and quite big, let's demonstrate what I mean, okay, so this will be the general shape of our melody now I'm going to dwell on this for a moment because there's a really important chord here that musically seems like we should pay a little attention to.

I'm in G minor, the second chord. is F major, next is E flat major now inside the G minor chord, the next chord that would make the most musical sense would be to use C minor, but that's pretty classical and also feels pretty sad. I think if we use C minor this is guaranteed to be the worst quote ever. I'll show you what I mean. That's not going to turn out well. Alright? So instead, what we're going to do is change that chord from C to C major. and suddenly we have a totally different feeling, we're going to get something that's a little more optimistic, something we can believe in a little more effectively, it's two crucial chords of G minor and C major.

Well, now I'm drawing your attention to that. because what we're going to do now is harmonize this trombone line and the way we're going to do that is by taking a measure of our bass line that runs here. I'm going to open up the editor so we can Look we're starting at G, okay, so what I'm going to do is repeat it a few times until the end of this sentence and again I'm going to pinch it all the way here and I'm just going to throw out the parts. which we don't need, then I'll paste them in and what I'm doing right is changing these notes to reflect the chord progression that I just explained to you.

When I open the editor, I can see the chords here. I'm going to do the second measure in F just taking the notes in this second measure and lowering them and then I'll take the next measure to E flat as I describe it again. I'm just using the same key commands that we identified before the next measure is C, we'll go back up to G there and then, just to make the point, we'll go back to C major again. on this chord and then back to G for the end, so there's a synth part that's hopefully now giving us what we need in terms of harmony support for the melody, let's listen to it, okay, we can't really listen to it because it's being drowned out by the brass, so let's give it a little more support by copying it into a couple of other sounds that might give us a little more power.

Next is the next sound that I have inside my template, which is a sub. bass and again, of course, I could play this, but again, this is another little laptop trick that I'm going to show you guys in case you're working primarily on laptops, what I want to do is create a smooth bass line to starting from this sequence that I created full of continuous notes and the way I'm going to do it is to link all the notes in each measure except the first one. I'll do it by just holding down shift while I draw this loop around all of these notes and pretty soon we're done when I press delete with just one note at the beginning of each measure and if we then use force legato we have a nice, smooth bass line that has emerged. out of sequence to one, so it was easy, let's also create one more bass line, something nice and strong that will be used in this sound here, which is also from Alchemy again, let's make sure its name reflects the track I want.

What I do this time is I grab the scissors from the toolbar and I'm going to do what's called a multiple division. Normally when I click on a region, you can see that the scissors are here waiting, but if I hold down the option button at the same time they take this little plus button that I hope you can see on the screen and if I then click on the kind of target from a time point of view that I want to make my first cut, which is on the third sixteenth. note or the first octave or an eighth note if you're a real musician I just say it out loud okay what we're going to do is cut here and then when I release it what happens is again logic asks me how do I want to split this and this time what I want to do is split it and what that means is that every time the logic creates a new region on an eighth note, what I'm going to do is just be in a position where when I paste them back in and when we open them up what we should find is that we now have a continuous series of eighth notes because all of those divisions when I put them back together, of course, they are separated by the distance that we specified in our multiple division now this bass line I think is going to being an octave too low I'm actually just going to turn it up an octave, let's listen to it this is a pretty strong industrial based sound, yeah right okay, that really drives home the point.

Let's listen to all these bases with the brass melody that we've also written, okay, and again I'm going to make that a permanent part of that region now that we're getting somewhere, except I want to start managing a couple of These moments in Those of us who have silence between our sections before we enter the superhero section will remember that our boy comes towards the tree, here he jumps to the tree and then he jumps down, and what I'm going to do here is introduce you. It's a great technique that is quite common in trailer music, which is the idea of ​​what we call a sub drop, this would definitely wake up anyone in the back.

I think if you're sneezing, give someone a little nudge. because this should work fine, so what I have here is a copy of my sub bass sound and I put it on its own instruments and the reason I did that is because in this version of the sound I have set an extended tone range, In other words, I've set up a pitch bend range that actually spans two separate octaves. What I'm going to do is create a region in this space right here. It's definitely a very good technique if you're writing music for trailers, so what I'm going to do is jump to this area, this region, we just created this new region and I'm just going to draw a note on C, sorry, on g4, which is Here I will make sure that it lasts for the entire generation, the entire duration of that particular region and now it lasts for a full measure.

I just extended the left border and we'll see why that is. In just a moment, what I want to do is go back to MIDI automation and this time I'll take Pitch Bend and this time I can create a ramp by creating a single point right at the beginning and then what I want to do. What I'm going to do is create another point at the end where the pitch bend range drops to the bottom. Now you'll see if I zoom in on this to allow the note to settle before the pitch bend decay starts and it bottoms out just before it ends and that means we'll hear the beginning of the pitch of the notes before the pitch starts go down and you'll hit the target pitch that we're heading to just before that bar line, okay? on its own here comes in handy, so let's hear that in context, this should take us through these moments where our guide jumps up the tree and comes down the other side, okay, that's a really useful technique, like I say, It's also worth taking a look at the beginning, as we've already seen that the reason I drew those midi changes on our brass parts and created those reset data bars at the beginning is because I wanted to make sure that every time we go back to the beginning and press play, they are taken to the maximum before we hear a note.

Now, the most recent thing that happened in my tone. Bend drop here is we got all the way, now it's two octaves below where I want it. the logic of being the next rise comes back and plays, so the reason I've extended this region is because what I'm actually going to do is create a couple of points here, literally resetting them to zero before it starts, so spread them out. On the left edge, draw a little bit of reset data there so we have a nice, fluid moment where that happens, let's exit the editor, okay, now we're in good shape too and it's definitely time for us to start thinking. about the next group of instruments within our project now you will remember a moment ago I mentioned that my director likes brass sounds andhe also likes string sounds and I think it would be a good time to start thinking about strings for this individual project.

Okay, so what I'm actually going to do is go back to the project where the brass and strings that come here are stored and this time in addition to loading the instruments that house the string samples, I'm going to load their contents as well and I'm going to hit add and what that means is that not only are we going to get the sounds that I identified that I wanted to use, but we're also going to get the string parts that I have. gathered for this project also now again, don't throw tomatoes at me, okay, let's just identify why I prepared them in advance, we have a little over 90 minutes together here today and say it took longer than that.

Writing the string parts would be something of an exaggeration of how much time it takes to perfect the samples and sample groups. Now the caveat here is that everything that has been used to write these string sounds that we have seen in brass I have used. MIDI modulation to refine and see work through groups of velocity samples. I have used MIDI expression to control its volume. I've used the speed very carefully to control the actual volume of those No and, as we'll see, just opening one of these. There's a lot going on in the parts, I'm just going to move all these string parts down so they're out of the way and underneath the brass, and if I open the editor just for the first eight bars of the first violin, I hope you'll forgive me, The first thing I have to say is that we have more articulations, the set of articulations for the strings goes to many more, we have long and short trills, pizza car, toy, we pluck notes, we have tremolo and I also have muted Dino notes on the console, you can see some of the staccato here, this is a trill and these are long notes, but when we start looking at the MIDI data that was added to these projects, the crescendo appears.

I'm going to hear in a moment that this matches the kill shots, but it's particularly the expression data in this part that controls the volume contour of this part that you start to see how complicated this is, in short, what I'm What I'm trying to say is that there's no way we could all have created these string parts even if that's all we did in 90 minutes and I think it's also worth saying that an afternoon like this and a masterclass like this doesn't I want you to leave with the impression that it is possible to do it in the Norma amount in a short space of time, you should take your time about all the creative decisions you make, so we are looking at the strings after the effect, so let's listen to them.

I'll definitely play them for you, it seems. It's fair and we'll listen to the way the strings were put together and see how they sound using these samples. Let's listen. Do you still forgive me? I'm not sure. Alright. It's fair. I will be a soldier. Anyway, okay, now we get to this crucial moment in the movie that we haven't seen in some time, which is where everything changes, we've had a rhythm throughout and you can hear that the strings are really helping to back it up. that now, suddenly, like me. said when we did our localization session at the beginning in all the changes, we go into a completely different section of the film where suddenly we have no power and no action and something a little softer and a little more fragile and this definitely feels like a place where we need to slow down.

I'm going to create another tempo change here like before I click and at this particular time the movie we're going to go down to 102 beats per minute here which we've also got a very different character in this movie and I wanted to make sure that in this scene In particular the character of the string parts that I programmed here will also change, so what I'm doing here is using the Dino console in muted mode. the strings and the articulation are muted and what the muted strings give you is a fragility, a kind of softness that seems like it would be a good match for this particular scene, but before we watch it, what I'm going to do is activate the dialogue so that In fact, we can see this with the movie now.

In a way, I'm lucky the way this movie was created. I don't have to worry too much about dialogue, it's an important consideration when writing music for a picture. careful words come first, people don't like going to the cinema and not being able to hear what people are saying to each other and your job as a composer is to make sure you stay away from dialogue, that doesn't mean you can't write music for people talking each other, but that doesn't mean that you don't put a great melody in those moments because, generally speaking, the editor just turns around, so we can't have music. at this point because it gets in the way, so I have the only other part of the movie that contains dialogue running right now and the reason we're going to watch this together is so you can see how I started to approach this.

Idea: I wanted harmonically our two G minor and C major chords to come back at this point to give us a nice upbeat ending to this section, but obviously what I wanted to do was the little melody that I wrote that I want to have. They only emerge after these guys have talked to each other, so let's look at this final section, hey, I did it, yeah, it's about time, imagine if that was a call from a seed miner at the end, disaster, okay, date Halloween, okay, there we are, we have our strings there at the end and you can hear those muted strings, they're just giving us this softness and this warmth that I think is helping them at this point.

Now let's just park the film again for a second if you ask any film composer. those with the most extensive sample libraries known to man, what they would like or enjoy most about the process of writing music in images, will tell you whenever it comes to working with live musicians, what we can do with samples in These days it is remarkable. I'm not going to deny that for a second and sometimes budgets prevent us from being able to work with live musicians, but when they are available it's always better to work with real music and really, if you think of it as a self-fulfilling prophecy, what samples?

What we are trying to do is get as close to the real thing as possible. Wouldn't it be better to have the real thing? Well, we're lucky to do so. What we are going to do now is welcome the guild hall session. Orchestra that will come to play this piece for us, give them a round of applause please, that's right and a little more here we go, okay, actually that's enough, let's not intimidate you, we are very good, now while you take your seats. and I'm just logging on, I need to talk to you about a couple of things because you might be wondering how they actually have notes in front of them, considering their music stands are there and they're very nice.

Luckily, what we have within the logic is not only obviously an extraordinary set of editors, but what we also have the opportunity to do is create really extended scores and if I take, for example, something like this, this trumpet part, just take these regions here and paste them, what I get to see when I open the editor is that I don't have to just look at them inside this kind of piano roll screen, let's just bring this down, I can see them as a score as well, so here there is the trumpet part, for example. II.

I can see that I am in the key of G minor and if I would like to make changes to the sheet music, then of course I can do that too. Suppose, for example, I wanted to put this melody in the treble clef. I could go to my slots option here and just drag it here and instantly the melody that we just heard, the superhero theme, suddenly transfers over and becomes our melody at this point. Okay, so what did we do? was creating a score for each part and then what we did was compress them onto the iPads that these guys are using as music stands today and they're viewing them on iBooks, so that explains how we ended up. to be able to see the scores and on the screen they look like this, so there's the first violin part on an iPad, okay, that has to do with how we place the notes in front of the players, now what we have to think about is how We're going to carry out the recording process and before we continue, I'm going to turn the level down to the PA before we get any howling feedback, obviously at this point I need a lot of audio tracks because what I have to do is move around and think about the fact that we're recording here on this iMac Pro that's in front of me.

Now we are very lucky that what we have been able to do today is partner with DPA Microphones who produce wonderful orchestral tools or microphones for recording orchestras. Now all our musicians have their own individual microphones. Some of them are clip-ons for violins and violas, and then we have microphones on stands for some of the other instruments. also a pair of stereo microphones on top of James. I'm just going to draw your attention to James. You're not going to like this, but I'll say it anyway. James is a current electronic music student in our film scoring program, so a little applause for our Director please, the curtains, you don't just get applause James, you also scream, there was some screaming, I heard some screaming, it's okay so we have that stereo pan, we have another stereo pair on each side of the stage hanging from the ceiling that you may not be able to see in this light, but you can certainly see it at the end of the session as well, so we have two pairs of stereo microphones that they capture a feel of the stage and then we have a bunch of closed mics that are sent to three apogee symphony interfaces, all of which can contain or give me eight analog inputs and we have 24 channels of sound, all coming to the computer at the same time, what?

What could go wrong? I'm glad you see the funny side, so what we're going to do is bring in those tracks and what we're going to see is they're down here ready to go, here's my stereo pair. For the front of the stage, here are the ones on the side and then we have our closed mics and in due course we will make a recording, but what I want to do is just check that we have some level. and in fact, just before we completely turn off the PA system, I think what I'm going to do is give them a note to tune up, let's go back into our studio string instrument.

I'm going to take something that's a little bit more sustained and give them an A, so what I want to do is check that I have the level coming into the computer. Now what I've done is put our instrumentalists into groups within the logic if Click on the first audio track. You can see in the bottom left corner that there is a group called chains and what that means is that when I press the record button for this particular track, anything that is in the chains group will highlight you. All of a sudden I can see I have a bunch of red recording lights and if we go into the logic mixer we should be able to see those two if I scroll to the right side, here's the first set of those really cool instruments.

You should be able to monitor those levels as they appear and that should give us a good starting point, so what we're going to do next is just give these guides a chance to play them, so what are you going to do? To listen guys, you're going to listen to music from measure eight and you're on ten and four now we're just going to listen to the whole ensemble playing together, we're not making a recording yet so you can still cough. but don't listen to them, okay, here comes everyone ready, yeah, okay, they haven't recorded yet, so let's not be too generous yet, okay, sorry, what we're going to do is go back to the same place where are you.

Again, going here, click from bar eight, this time we're going to do a recording, but the brass, if you could just sit still for now, we're going to record these guys in two separate blocks, so this time it's just going to be the strings. time eight music again everyone happy everyone got the level everyone happy with where they are good fantastic James everything good brilliant okay so this is going to be eight music again and let's make a recording this time okay, never be in too much of a hurry To press stop, I want to make sure the atmosphere and room are captured as part of that recording, so I let it continue.

I also stopped her at this point, we need to record the section itself, but the instrumentalists. Here you need to mute if you don't have string players yet, do it for me before moving on to this final section, so this time I'm afraid you can have a much shorter count on just two beats in bar 37, which is where your first violin pickup will be please violinists and then we will play our big slushee chin. Are everyone happy? Great, okay, let's make a recording of just two beats in this time so you can hear the music of measure 36, thanks everyone, perfect, okay, great, so what?

What I'm going to do is turn off the record lights for the string players and we'll switch to brass, so we'll leave those parts exactly as they are. I have another group here. and you can seewhen I click on this first track here, this one is labeled brass now of course I'm still going to use the pair of stereo microphones on the front and on the sides so again what I have to do is just press and we record light and this time we have a smaller group of tracks, now the brass doesn't play as many notes as the strings, so we are in a position to start recording a little later, so what are we going to do?

Do this guys, you will hear music from measure 18 and we will play at 20, okay, fantastic, here we go, this is the brass recording that you can play until the end of the superhero theme, please, here we go, fantastic, Alright. So we're in this very strange place where, even though I have this amount of talent and these musicians on stage, they've actually done what I need, so even though they've now been here for five minutes, we We will give a round of applause and say thank you very much for being part of this. Thank you so much.

Well, while you're pulling the plug on some things, what we're going to do is just look at this kind of stack of audio files that we created and you guessed it, the first thing I'm going to do is make sure that, from a code standpoint, colors, where we need to be, these are our strings and these will be our brass part. so I can see at a glance what the next thing I'll also do is dive in here. I'm just going to make sure that at the beginning of all of these individual recordings remember that they are grouped, what I want to do is just add some audio fade to this group so that at the beginning we have a chance to do a fade so that where I pressed record no appear as a We start with a really strong kind of ping, we're just going to make sure we have kind of a half second fade in the front and then maybe something more like a second at the end, a thousand milliseconds.

I'm going to do the same. What we did with the other string parts that we've recorded was we backed off a little bit on the left side because remember we had a really rough start in that measure there, so I'm just going to add a little bit of a fade in at that point and then we have another second at the end of the exit. I'm going to do the same thing with the metals as well just to make sure again that we don't get any clicks in the driveway. or outside, he wants to hear what I sound like.

I definitely do well, so you're asleep formal. Okay, so I'm going to come back here and we can see within our mixer area that we've had those groups that they've worked with. very good for us, but what I want to do now is decouple those groups. This is the change, Angie is going to turn them off and the reason I want to do that is because I want to listen to these microphones individually, these are the string microphones at the front of the stage, so this is the main pair that was on top of the head of James, the director, let's listen to the superhero section for the strings at this point, oh yeah, public address system, we're good there.

What we're then going to do is put in the other pair of stereos that are on the sides of the stadium, we're going to start building a sort of much larger impression of the orchestra that was in front of us, okay, now what I said. What I'm going to do is take one last look at all the close mics for the violins. What's really interesting is that generally speaking, until people have done recording sessions for orchestras, you would think that those close microphones would be the main ones. part of the sound that we're going to want to use today because that's where all the details are and all the precision is, actually, that's not usually how we listen to the orchestra, that's most of the time we go to concerts, so go to the recording sessions, we are sitting where you are right now, in other words, away from the orchestra, so that you can hear the interaction of all those musicians as a group, as a whole series of musicians, a joint group, and you.

You're also listening to the way the sound interacts with the building you're listening to those sounds in, and in fact, closed mics sometimes sound a little unfamiliar to people who haven't heard groups of closed mic recordings on strings before. . shows what I mean here, the strings have a lot of power here, but also a lot of abrasiveness, so you can hear that they are actually really I don't want to use the word Scratchy, but they are certainly tough. and really hard and really interesting when when you make a recording and you're lucky enough to work with an orchestra, it's really worth walking around the group while they're rehearsing and getting a sense of what the orchestra sounds like when you're closer, you can make decisions about where place the microphones, so what I'm actually going to do is select all of these close microphones here, I'm going to go into the mixer after I select them, they should do that.

They will be available to me and, as a group, I will remove the closed microphones. Most of the sound I want to use will come from the stereo pairs, but these will definitely give me some really useful additional details. also and then I'm going to do something similar with the brass, I'm going to keep these two stereo pairs as they are. The rest here and then what we're going to do is lower the level a little bit on these close microphones. and just keep the main stereo group here completely, so that what I suddenly got by putting those tracks together and seeing them last that way is controlled from the mixer's point of view over multiple tracks at the same time, is now You may be thinking well, that means I can now mute the samples that were being used at the beginning.

Well, not really, the samples that I chose, the symphonic samples that I chose, are actually recordings from a much larger ensemble, so The Strings in particular, which are from the symphonic series again from Spitfyre Audio, are actually 16 musicians in the violin sections and a much larger ensemble group than we've had on stage today and what composers will generally do if they're working. For a really big sound, they'll opt for what's called a hybrid approach, a balance between the real thing and the samples used to trigger them. I definitely need them to be quieter, but I don't want to get rid of them. of them in total, so what I'm going to do is select my four sampled metal section, which is these four tracks again because I sued them last, they should all be highlighted together, effectively, I'm going to take five. roughly DB of these so that the Poussin balls go down and we're going to do the same with the strings as well to have a balance now between the original strings that we just recorded and those samples as well.

Now that should give us a huge amount of power, let's listen to this kind of superhero section now with all those parts playing together, okay, it's a shame we lost the top note in the brass, but we'll forgive you, okay? We shouldn't worry there, the next thing we want to do is have this mixture under control. Now you can see I have bits all over the place and actually considering we started from scratch we're doing pretty well. So now we have a track count of 70 and that's it with that in mind, what I really want to do is just simplify this arrangement a little bit to have more control over it, what I'm going to do is First of all, take my recordings of live metals, but I'll put them here with the samples so they are together.

You can see I can move them over here very easily, but really what I want to do right now is get my mix more under control and to do that what I'm going to do is use a process called track stacking. I wanted to create stacks or instrument groups or a fader at least for each of the instrument groups I'm using. Now before I can do that, I just need to make one small change: this depth charge patch that comes from the drum machine designer is effectively in a stack by itself. The drum machine designer is already so powerful that he gives me an individual channel for each unique sound within a drum machine setup.

I'm barely scratching the surface of what it's capable of doing, but because it's a stack, I can't put a stack on another stack, so what I'm going to do is just extend this final blow to I don't cut its length and then What I'm going to do is select these regions. I'm going to Ctrl-click this and do what's called a bounce in place and hit OK. The logic is going to run. through and convert this MIDI region into an audio file, it will put it on its own track, it will join the original and what that now means is that I can put all these drums together in a stack.

I have selected them all here. Then I'm going to press create clue stack and I'm going to use what is now called sum stack. At the beginning of today's session I mentioned last year's master class and this is definitely an area that if you are not used to how batteries work, I invite you to watch the video, in short, what is a adding stack. Well, we can see it down here. It is easier to see than to explain. I almost now have a stereo. fader and all of these sounds go into what we call here this sum or sum stack, so in other words, I'm going to end up with one fader that controls all the drums and I'm actually going to label it. to know that that's what it is, I'm going to do the same with those here, so let's put this in a pile in its own right;

This one is going to be great because if I can write, then we're going to have another one here for the brass. You can start to see what is happening, and that is that my arrangement is more and more under control with each new stack that I add, this will be the metals and Every time I close them, suddenly everything seems much more manageable and once I have done that for the strings as well, suddenly we have our entire mix running effectively on four faders. Well, that seems a lot more manageable. Now I can. Breathe a big sigh of relief.

I don't need this particular track because we don't need it anymore, so now we have our mix running on four faders. One of the best things about working with track stacking is that what this allows me to do is start thinking about applying effects, those auxiliaries we talked about earlier, maybe two whole groups of sounds together, for example, if I suddenly decided I wanted to run the brass through the reverb I set up and used. previous sounds that I can and now, because all those sounds have been folded into this place, they will all pick up that reverb.

I'll also send them through a little delay and do the same. The same thing goes for the strings here too, we now know, because we heard them a while ago, that some of the strings, some of that quality in that string sound is a little bit small, a little bit hard, so what I What I What you could also do would be put an EQ on this whole stack and maybe remove a little bit of harshness, which I think will probably be around the two kilohertz mark, maybe a little bit above that, just to remove a little bit of harshness. .

I even put a little more air into the sound here using this EQ and what I could also do is just roll out the low end in case we have some kind of noise on stage again while we're setting up our recording. session to do this so quickly there could be a little bit of a fight a little bit of noise. I'm going to prepare for that by just putting a little bit of what we call a high pass filter on the low end just for super bass. frequencies down here, so because I put that EQ on, that pitch change on that channel will affect all the sounds that are in the mix at this point, so there are a few things we need to do.

I just have my The synths come in the second part of the track and I want them to happen a little earlier. I'm going to bring them in with the drums to happen from the beginning, so the first thing I'm going to do is to take this first sound, our little analog retrosynthesis to establish that we're running in G minor. I'm also going to take this and this artistic part of alchemy. I'm going to cut that I only need two measures. I played G D and G, so that's like spelling out most of the G minor chord.

I'm going to shorten it for now because I don't need the notes that I played later and what I'm going to do is to extend this region up to this point and again I'm going to use force legato, let's go back to the piano roll, this by force legato on all those sounds and again they'll fill that whole region, so suddenly we're just populating the front with a couple of synth sounds, you'll remember. I gave this sound a big speed boost after we recorded it here. I want it to be a little bit more delayed, so I'm actually going to lower the speeds from the beginning here about 30 units so that it's suddenly a little bit less loud at the beginning, let's listen and see how it sounds good, so not only do we have the battery running on top.

We also have other sounds, so we've seen that in a template we can obviously incorporate our software instruments. We also had a bunch of audio tracks waiting when we wanted to make a recording. We have seen that we can assign. inserts and auxiliaries too, but whatWhat we can also do is prepare sounds, maybe from the logic loop browser, a series of audio files so we can select a couple of them to add to a project as well and we'll do that. Then if I go back to the media browser area here at the top, we go back to the all files area.

I want to go into specific files for this particular project. Now I have a lot of audio files because we just made a bunch of recordings, if I control and click on this arrow, they will all fold together so I have a much more manageable set of sounds to work with and the two sounds I'm interested in and this one is a sort of suspended symbol and orchestral symbol that we'll get to in a moment and then I have another little loop here which I have something specific in mind that we'll use in a moment. to turn the volume down on that one because it's absolutely ear melting and I'm going to face it too, okay, let's go back to this cymbal and focus on this sound first, now we're looking at this waveform.

I'd be forgiven for thinking the part I'm interested in is this area here, but in reality sometimes small is beautiful. We're going to use this little bit here at the end, this little bit of sound. Now, actually, because I want it to be a little bit louder than it is now, I'm going to do what's called a region gain so that everything goes up about 5 DB and I can control the gain inside the inspector here in files. audio and We will also make it a little shorter to work in the area we want to use. Now you can see even in the waveform visualization of this sound that it sort of builds and peaks up to a particular point.

And again, this is a useful little exercise. What I'm going to do is take my scissors and cut this region exactly at the point where it builds on top of this waveform which is right here and then I'm going to scrap this section so effectively that what we have now is a crash of cymbals that sounds like this. Okay, so I just dragged this from the Media Explorer, it's actually not in the location that I want it to be. where I wanted to go is here. I'm going to move the playhead to this point where the superhero theme begins.

This is a great key command that I'm going to press: and what happens is that whatever region is highlighted snaps to the playhead so that it's right there in the position where I want it to go, what I can do then is use exactly the same technique. I'm just going to copy this again anywhere. I'm not thinking about where I'll put it then. I'm going to place the playhead exactly where I want it to go over and over again - move it really fast and this is a really good technique not only for composers but also if you're a sound designer and you're working on the photo, you want to play sound effects on specific locations, use that key command after you've done that, then I'm going to move away from the left edge so my saucer snaps back to the left edge as well and I think again we could put some fades in these half a second inside maybe a second to outline the shape of that sound as it plays and then what I'm also going to do What you need to do is just add a little bit of reverb to it so that it's in the space of the rest of these sounds, so here's our symbol roll that will be used as a kind of transition sound between various sections of the film. good, but we have a big gap in the movie at this point, we have a nice string crescendo that builds up through the somersault, but like I said before, bad, so we have a lot of action, a lot of power, which is then what What happens in this shot from the moment the beat starts moving here are our super slow motion shots and suddenly, as we already know, because we have a tempo change there, what we have is that the action and the rhythm they accelerate again. and to do that I'm going to do something a little silly.

I'm going to be honest and use this loop. Don't say you weren't warned. I'm sorry. Well, there we are. I don't like this whole loop, I like the power and the rhythm that comes at the end of the last two beats, so what I'm going to do first of all is move it to this point here and then what I do. I'm going to make it aligned with these two bars and then I'm going to trim the last two beats to focus on a much smaller area. I think the last two times, where are we? We're here, okay?

So I'm going to throw away this part of the loop. I'm going to copy these last two times over and over again. Now we don't want two beats here that would be in the middle of this measure. We know that the pace is accelerating. on beat four, so I'm going to make it a little bit smaller, okay, no, this is going to sound really good, it's going to sound very loopy, let's listen to that, okay, I also put it in the wrong place, so just move it to back a bar, there we are, let's try that again, okay, that takes us nicely to this moment where he jumps the fence, however, I don't like the fact that it sounds as loopy as what I want to do. to put a kind of audio effect dedicated to this sound and the one I'm going to use is the logical automatic filter, this will again give me tone control.

I'm going to lower the envelope. I don't want any envelope. To shape this sound, I want to use what is called a bandpass filter. This is a narrow band of frequencies right in the middle of the sound, we're going to lose the bass at the bottom and the treble at the top and we're going to focus on this area in the middle and I'm also going to turn up the resonance so that bite a little bit harder and then I think we'll be in good shape, so what I want to do is automate that filter. I'm going to go into automation again.

I don't have a lane ready for this sound, so I'm going to go into the auto filter and go find the parameter that I want to use, which is here and here, then I can create a classification. of the starting point for the shape of the movements of this filter that I want to make. I'm going to have it go up to this point here and then go down through the next bar and we should be able to hear that again. I'm going to slather that with a little bit of reverb and again a little bit of delay and you'll also remember that from the beginning I talked about this unusual auxiliary that I had created, which was a parallel distortion treatment.

I'm going to add that to this. sound to justify setting that treatment to an aux again, let's play that sound on its own now, okay, now we've got a little bit of a tonal shift and it sounds a lot less loopy and we've got this nice little transition that runs through this section, let's see That's with the movie. Okay, they're both percussion elements too, so I want to make sure I add them to my drum stack so they're controlled by those drum regions. I'm going to make sure again that they're the right color and then I'm going to make sure that I just drag them up and place them inside this battery and then they can become part of that overall group, okay?

It was just another sound, but I wanted to include it here and this project returns to the superhero section. Let's come here for a second. What I really want to do, in addition to all the power that's coming from the brass on the strings, is I want to add some drums, all the drum and percussion elements we've had in the piece so far have been these kind of techy sounds. a little more electronics and now what I really want is a big drum set to come through and drive this section forward. a little bit more and we'll do it using logical drum instruments, then we'll press More and select drummer and then I'll have the opportunity to choose what kind of drum genre I'm going to use and rock will get a When I started, I think I'm going to press create and it What I do we can see the interface of this particular instrument, which is a little unusual.

First of all, you get this overview waveform display here that demonstrates or shows where the beats are located within this drum. Some of it is going to fall, we'll come back to that in a moment. What also appears at the bottom of the screen is this interface that allows me to configure whether or not I want to use a simple or complicated rhythm and if No, I want to play soft or hard, I want some kind of simple rhythm that, however, is nice and loud, and what I'm going to do next is move this region to the point where I want the drums to start.

This is where the superhero section begins. Now what I want to do is make it a little bit smaller. I'm going to work in two-measure loops and the reason is that I want to keep the central pattern the same, but every time after. the two-measure region takes over. I'm pushing the fillings up. Now what they do is they make the ends of the regions different by producing a drum fill each time and I'll see every time I press it on the waveform screen at the end it changes, but before. It's not like that because the core pattern is the same and basically, right at the end, we have a 3/4 bar that we're going to carry over to this break and I want it to fill almost completely, okay?

So what I'm going to do is turn the volume down slightly because I think this might be a little overwhelming otherwise and let's listen to what the drums sound like now with the strings and brass in the main section of the film at this point, okay, drums instant. That's fantastic, it's working very well, so we're in good shape as far as that goes and again, what I'm going to do is just make sure that that new part is part of my battery so that it's controlled by the same fader and again what we can do is just make sure that our drums retain their color, okay, so we also have our drums arranged there and now we are in good shape, now the power of having our mix on four faders should become really evident when we start making final changes to the mix of this project.

What we will do now is watch it from start to finish. I'm going to put the movie here so you can see it compared to the image, but what I'm going to do. What I need to do is simply open up the automation lines for these stacks so I can do volume compensations on these instruments. It may be that the synths are too loud at first or not loud enough, but I want to increase their level overall. It could be that I want to make room for the brass melody or make other changes as well, so I just selected volume as a parameter for all of these separate stacks and as we listen, I could make some changes just based on what I want.

What we can hear is that we listen from here, it works well effectively in real time as we watch for ninety seconds, we can make these changes very quickly. I've actually made more room for the brass ability by lowering the strings at that point, but there's one thing that I was tempted to do but didn't do while we were watching and that I want to explain to you very quickly is that we have many types of decay and echo on the drums exactly at the moment they sound. will come to an end just before we get to the final section, if I repeat this for a second, we'll hear a lot of those little clockworks going.

I really don't want that to happen, what I'm going to do. What we do is draw a volume change here so that the drum bus lowers the volume before entering that section. We should hear them fade more naturally now. Okay, okay, so we get out of the way before we get to this fragile ending. At this final point here, well, so what we have now is our mix organized by instrument group and what I'm now in a position to do is start to think about a kind of final mix, but the final mix in the music of the movie is not like that.

It's the same as working on the final mix when you're working on marijuana records or if you're making dance music, so instead of some kind of stereo file, one that I can put online or distribute in some way what I actually What I need to do when I think about scoring a film is think about working with these stems that I created in the tracking stage. I'm very lucky because I'm working with what we call a locked image. This movie is finished. so it's not going to change, but most of the time, if you're hired as a songwriter, you're part of the creative process and you're not just hired at the end, but you might as well be there throughout the entire writing process. process, they are sending you a new image, we are currently or with each new update, you need to think about trimming particular moments or extending others as the scenes develop and change, so your music will need to do so too and what that will mean to Often an editor will ask you for the themes of your piece rather than a stereo mix that covers the entire duration of the piece and what we are going to do is precisely that we are going to give the editor or the director of this particular piece to project. a set of stems that I can work with to have independent level control and other control over these different groups, so first of all, what I'm going to do is go back to the reference file that came with the movie and I'm going to place Lieut markers around them because remember they represent the beginning and the end of the movie and I want to make sure thatwhen he records these tracks and makes them available to him they are absolutely synchronized from the beginning of his image, he can place them in frame 1 at the beginning of his project and they will line up and then he will have control over them.

What I'll do then is go into the mixer and we'll start to see. how can we set up the logic to record these tracks internally and create the tracks we want. I'm going to remove the image so I can see exactly what I'm doing and you can too Every time creating a new track stack logic it creates a stereo output so we can listen to it, but what I'm going to do is overwrite them by selecting a channel bus for each of these instrument groups. Here is not a bathroom I have done. created, what I've called drum return, now what that basically means is that the drum stack sound will now be sent to this bus where I'll be able to record it and if I then specify the next three tracks as good, and hold down option while I select the bus output, then I can assign these three to their channels and this one will go to boss 29, since the brass goes to 30 and the strings go to 31, so What I'm going to do is go to the Los Angeles Zoo with all the individual effects tracks - that's the parallel distortion and the reverb and the delay and these reverbs and delays here as well and manually what I'm going to do is route those to another bus which I'm going to call effects return, which is here, for so those sounds are now sent to their own dedicated outputs.

What I'll do next is close the window here and create five new tracks inside. Logically, these will be audio tracks because they will record each of those buses internally to new tracks and what I'm going to do is simply specify that I want the first one to be on bus number 28 and then if I press up here, it means that the next track I add will be at 29 and the next one at 30, so it stands to reason that if I do five of those, what will happen is that these five new audio tracks will be configured with bus 28 as input, then 29, then 30, then 31 and then 32, which means that effectively this is what we could call my drum return channel and it will receive the input coming from this stack of tracks and it will record it on The next one will be the return one, the next one will be for the brass, the next one will be for the strings and then I'll give my conductor the option of having a dedicated effects channel. that will take all the reverbs, all the delays, the parallel distortion, and a reverb that came with the drummer region that we added right at the ends and print them out to a separate file.

The reason I'm doing that is him, him. He might suddenly decide that he wants more reverb and by having a separate root he will be able to increase the level of that track. If he decides he doesn't like the reverb, he can turn it down. He has even more flexibility than me. What I'm going to do is find these channels, we don't need to listen to them as they come down, but obviously what I want to do is make sure that I'm recording all five now that we have them. We specify that we want the recording to start here, we put a range loop around this, so what that basically means is that now when I press record, we'll hopefully see all of these individual groups being recorded on their own audio tracks producing tracks for us in the process here we go now remember that that It's not going to start right away because the music doesn't start until bar ten, okay, so what we should do now if I turn off these record lights and we unmute these tracks is we should have each of those individual sounds printed on its own stem, so in other words, if I do a drum solo, this should be just drums, this should be just brass, and this should be just strings at this point too.

I've felt it ever since. Down here we have our effects returned this is going to sound a little strange this is just the vibe of those effects groups now just to make this point this hasn't actually required me to go through my Apogee interfaces in the same way it did when we did our string recordings, you can do this on a laptop, take the outputs of your stems, route them internally and record them back to audio tracks and you'll get the stems you need. What I can then do, of course, is to go back, I put my loop back in and what I'm going to do is specify that I won't see these tracks exported so I'm ready to export them to my director file and then I can take these five tracks. as audio files and a dialog box appears saying ok, good, where do you want to put them?

I'll put them on the desk so I know exactly where they are. I'm going to create a folder here called just-in-time exports and then I can choose some options. I'm going to export what's called the cycle range, from start to finish, so we're only exporting the area where you'll expect to hear the sound. I can choose the format. with the files, you'll want 24 bit WAV files and you can see that the file names are taken from the track names that I created, so this one will be called drums and it will be one for since and brassed etc. and so on as well and when I press export it will take a long time, the logic will fly through those files and that's it, they are on the desktop ready for me to hand to my manager as a series of individual stems and there we are good, so We've gone from a completely empty document to a film school where we've shot tracks from start to finish, we've covered an absolutely enormous amount of content in a short period of time and I think it might be a good idea if we summarize before we finish.

I promise I'll keep it brief, so before we even start composing we think about movie themes. If you're looking for inspiration to get started, be sure to identify a theme. in the movie you will work on at least one and make it your starting point for your creativity, then choose whether or not you want to start a new project and we have seen the power of templates working with a group of sounds. which allow you to get going a little faster and then think about tempo and time signature. I had a tempo going, but we adapted that momentum twice to get things a little faster and then backed off.

Towards the end, we really haven't had time today to talk about time signatures. Another really useful musical device for managing sections between different areas, particularly our breaks. I have some small changes in the time signature. Keep an eye out for them and use them. use them whenever you can to manage transitions between scenes and we've also seen how powerful it is to select a timecode point and please place that musically relevant point within your movie. I identified my input and moved it to measure eight so that musically I was in good shape, we spent much of the day working with the power of MIDI speed, of course we analyzed ligase force, one of the most useful key commands of the afternoon without Undoubtedly, but we also moved on to joint mapping and using it. so we can move between articulations between samples in different libraries and then what we also did was bring in sounds from another project, we looked in another project and brought those sounds in, we used the brass and then the strings as well and we've seen how MIDI controllers work using MIDI modulation to move between velocity groups and MIDI expression to control the overall volume and of course the ace in the hole of the whole afternoon was that we had the opportunity to do a live recording which was exciting for me.

It is very pleasant to work with players of this caliber. We spent some time briefly looking at logic scoring tools and started saying how we could bring them to iPads for them to use and then what we did was work with groups within the logic to make the whole recording process really easy by pressing a record light, they all turned on for all those groups together and all those sounds can be recorded at once and then what we did using track stacks was put the whole mix on four faders so that immediately each group of instruments has its own control from which I can send it to aux and add additional effects and then right at the end what we did was we recorded those stems into their own individual groups so they're ready to hand to the director and I exported them and they're sitting on a desk waiting for him, Well, the last thing I have to do is thank all of you. for giving up your afternoon once again, they have a bit of sparkle again, put it in your eyes if you liked it and if you want to join in the conversation then there are a couple of hashtags you can use on social media. means if you want, but the most important thing to say is what I always say at the end of the master class is that it is your own musical judgment, go and look for sounds that you like, import films that you want to work on, even if this it's not the kind of soundtrack you would have written, take away from this the techniques that you might want to use, think about, for example, changing articulation, think about what we've done with MIDI controllers, all of these techniques will be relevant to you , regardless of the musical genres you prefer, so thank you very much for coming to see you next time.