BLOG DIARY

FOR RATHER
BE
BY: LUCY IZZET

RATHER BE
I was given the sheet music to the song Rather Be
by Jess Glynne and was given the task of
recreating the song on logic pro x and this blog
post will include all the internal controls I used
when midi sequencing.

STEP RECORDING

This is step recording, you locate this by pressing windows and choosing show step
input keyboard, step recording allows you to create your melodies and record MIDI.
You do this by choosing the length of the note for example if your note was a quaver
you would click the quaver note on the step input keyboard and play your note, you do
this with all your notes and it keeps your music in time whereas if you played it in you
may not get the right length of notes this simplifies playing the melody. I used this to
create the piano melody the background chords and the vocal melody which was
played on an 80s starlight synth.

LAYERING

Once I had my melody I wanted to layer it, to do this you have to copy and paste the
regions into the area you want it to be in, I wanted to play the melody across three
different synthesizers, to do this you just highlight the region you want to copy, right
click, press copy. You then create a new software instrument and choose what you
want the melody to play on, I chose the Micro Pulse, the Eighties Poly Synth and
the Moving Fuzz. You then move the white time line to where you want to paste the
region, right click and past it. I did this to create more depth to the sound and make
the melody have a fuller sound instead of it just being played on one synth.

GLUE AND SCISSOR TOOL

GLUE TOOL:
I used the glue tool when making my
recreation of rather be, the glue tool
allows you to link regions together, the
way to do this is clicking the glue tool in
the tool menu, highlighting the two regions
you want to stick together, your pointer
will be the glue sign next to the glue tool
in the tool menu and you just click and
they link together.
SCISSOR TOOL:
I also used the scissor tool, its the
opposite of the glue tool, the scissor tool
allows you to chop up regions, I used this
to divide my piano melody during the gap
section where the reversed cymbal plays.
Its the same process of the glue tool yet
you just click where you want to cut the
region instead of gluing it together.

ERASER, PENCIL & POINTER TOOL

ERASER TOOL:
Eraser tool allows you to delete wrong notes you
may have entered, I used this a lot in step
recording when I either chose the wrong length
or note and the eraser tool allowed me to quickly
delete the note and do it again. To use the
eraser tool you click on the tools menu and
select the eraser tool.
PENCIL TOOL:
The pencil tool allows you to write in the melody
in the piano bar, I used this after I had used the
step recording feature, If I had forgotten a note
or I needed to edit the length the pencil tool will
allow me to make quick changes. To use the
pencil tool you open up a piano bar open the
tools and press pencil bar.
POINTER TOOL:
The pointer tool is the tool you use most when
editing in logic, it lets you move regions,
highlight regions, copy and pate them etc.

All the tools in the tool bars are ways of editing MIDI

REVERSING THE CYMBAL

I wanted to reverse my cymbal sound to fill the gap between the intro and verse. The
way I did this is I enabled my advanced tool settings and bounced the normal cymbal
sound and saved it to my desktop. I dragged the bounced file into an audio file
instead of software which is different to the rest of the regions, double click the region
and it opens the piano bar. The piano bar shows you what is in the region. You have
the option to choose track or file which gives you loads of different options to edit the
sound. I chose file.

REVERSING THE CYMBAL

CONTINUED
After I chose file I clicked on
functions and then lots of different
options came up which allows me to
edit the instrument as you can see in
my screenshot and to get my
reverse sound I wanted I clicked on
reverse. This automatically reverses
the sound and then I had my reverse
cymbal. This really fitted well into my
creation of Rather be it filled the
gap and made you think something
was coming it builds the song up so
the verse can start.

MUTING AND SOLOING TRACKS

When making Rather be I often muted the track I had made, muting the track allowed
me to see if the part I muted made a massive difference to the song, if it improved or
made the song worse. Once you have pressed the M that channel goes grey which
means when you play the song that section will not be heard. I did this by clicking on
the M on the channels. The M stands for muting, the S stands for soloing and the R
stands for record.

I also soloed tracks, instead of pressing the M in the channel I pressed the S this
is the opposite to muting, soloing means when you play the whole file only the track
you have soloed will play. This allowed me to really listen to each and every one of
the bits I was adding to see if any changes needed to be made. If I tried to just listen
to one area but not soloing it it would be very difficult to identify if there was a
problem because so much would be going on.

LOOPING
There are two different ways of looping.

One way of looping is looping individual regions, looping means to repeat the region
so if you loop it it will copy your region and put it on a repeated cycle for as long as
you want. This is a quick way to have the bar repeated instead of having to play in the
bar over and over again. This loop is on my drum beat, its playing on every crotchet in
the bar so I only had to play the drum bit in four times and fill up one bar instead of
having to fill up every bar.
The other way of looping is looping
part the whole song this is to help
you edit its not in the actual track it
just helps you listen to the part you
have looped it just plays it
repeatedly but it will not effect the
track whereas the first way I showed
is in the actual track and will stay
like that.

AUTOMATION

In this screen shot I have used automation, automation allows you to decide the
volume/pan of the region, I've used automation for the outro to fade out at the end
and also the intro to fade out to let the verse play.

VELOCITY AND QUANTIZING

In this screenshot I have used velocity, velocity allows you to decide

how loud or how quiet a note is, this is shown by the colour of the note.
The red and orange notes show that the note is loud, the green and
light yellow are lighter sounding notes.

This is quantizing, quantizing allows you to put any note that

is out of time and put it in time, I used this when playing in,
not drawing in.

ULTRABEAT
This is ultrabeat. Ultra-beat
is a drum editor
that allows you
to create a drum
track, I created
my ultra beat
drum track for
the chorus to
build the song
up. Ultra-beat
allows you to
draw in different
sounds and
experiment with
different drum
samples.
There are also pre sets, which means drum beats that are already made into
logic, you can use this in your piece however I created my own.

MARKERS AND COLOUR COORDINATING

In this screenshot I
have added markers,
markers allow you to
be able to see when
and where each
section of a song starts
and ends. In my piece I
have markers for an
intro, verse, chorus
and outro. This helps
to be able to see the
structure of the piece.
To make it even easy
to understand the
structure
I have also colour coordinated the piece, so the intro is bright purple and all the
regions within the intro are bright purple, same as the verse chorus and outro but with
different colours this makes it very easy to edit the piece because you know what
section of the song each region is in, if it is all one colour it may become confusing.