Lessons

Lesson Info

Editing Your Composition Part 1

This is where we were at yesterday I knew that today we have to do a lot of stuff talking about I want to show everyone how weaken sort of re edit our song or add new parts or how good we can quickly take on idea which is what we could say we started with here with an intro, a verse and a chorus yesterday and flush out toe a full song so what a better way to show everybody today how to do that thing to sort of set it up in advance so when we all left school yesterday and everyone left the glass and you turned off your computers, my group was hard at work we got back at it sitting in hotel rooms and back at home working out parts and sending some files back and forth and this going, taking this idea of collaboration I wanted all of us to start thinking about making music you know, with friends and or by ourselves but thinking that they're fun time, you know, art music we'll do when we have that time and so we've got a great example of that what happened with our song overnight here? So ...

remind us a little bit of what we had we hired a drummer yesterday we brought him in uh and take a look at that drummer so we're lucky enough to have changed here we're lucky enough to have our friend benny coming and play drums here. Ana type. Funky beats with minimal phil's on a vintage kit came in with our neo soul kit. We customize in different parts using their editor here for the drummer came up some cool. Did some guitar takes over. It had our vocals and that's where we finished off of the intro verse and the chorus, like I said, we left, gave her money a little bit of homework. We had to come up with the bridge. We had to come up with a bass parts couple. Other things so went on her way. We must show again. One thing that we looked at just a little bit yesterday here in the global tracks was this idea of an arrangement. Track said we had markers which we could do a similar thing with putting. And where are we in the song had a little plus, it will allow us to make some markers we could rename them and actually do any of those. Instead, we used the new arrangement marker track and filled out a couple things put in a couple of bars for an intro, a verse and a chorus. And we saw how that populated our drummer track for us. Uh, sort of put its road map down for what we wanted to have in play. And we were able to add it that a little bit more, uh, a little bit further with that did some things that make it easier for me that I want to show you guys kind of hard to see the difference between the intro verse and chorus, so and it was pop up the color palette. Here you see what I did option and see under view, we're going to see the show, our hide colors I'm simply going to click on one of these groups here, that one there it's actually click on my verse zooming now getting out is always big soon get that touring that spot, and I could go through and pick any kind of color I wanted for these click away to the next one, you'll reveal that color was so I threw some college. I don't think these are the ones that I actually used, but just want to map things out a little bit more before I left the session here, and of course, we had our e at the end of class talked a little bit about comping some of those things, so we're in our folder tracks with a little bit of quick swipe comping to pick out some different parts that we wanted from other tracks show you a little bit of that again down here. We end up talking a lot after class about that, too, but how great it is, but not just because we did something had made a mistake or had something wrong is just we could find the best little parts of things and put them together. So, like I said, I sent everyone on their way. We were done with class and we want to do a little bit more work. Well, that's, why I started using another new feature here that I hadn't muse just too much before against brand new, but point out my impressed with it, I'm gonna go to file here, I'll tell you normally, wouldn't I wantto collaborate with somebody or we want to do different phases of a mixed like maybe I'm gonna do some edits to this? Maybe I'm gonna like we tried out some new drummers last night, maybe want to get back to where I am right now, but I want to make some changes, but I'm afraid that they're not going to be things I'm going to stick with in the past. What we always do is go down and do this thing called the save, as when you do save as gonna ask us the same thing as the normal saves where we could make a hole, new package or a whole new folder at all these files but what we normally do if you want to just another version of the song we could come back to but share the same resource is like the audio files, sample files, all that stuff as we get rid of saving all these other things and maybe save it as a package so rather than coppi and every time we do a new version copy over all the audio files, all the balance is all the other folders you see here, we just want a new session document, basically, and that could get a little bit maciel so you'd end up with a folder and previous versions of this and all other d a w I'd end up with a lot of version, especially later today we'll go into mix and you'll see that every time I mix a certain phase of the song like drums, bass guitar, I'll do a save as so I could say ok, this was our song in the mix at this stage no stage one drums, then bass end up with a ton of sessions in this list kind of hard to even remember how to get back to things and again we're toting around all these different documents, so and that's the way it always done it, so no big problem with it learn how to use it, but they've got a new feature that works even better let me show you under file we have down. Here is a scene called alternatives like go in. Now you're going to see a list of them. We have some option of new and edit whenever I want to do something new with this session. So again, my next step in the progression, I would just go in here and go file and alternatives knew and let me do a new name, too. Right now we're calling the song I just when we started, I had no idea what it was we call the c l song one um, of course it's called our love is the song I love this song la la la right, sure, yeah. Excellent. So we'll be changing this later, but I was going the see elf creative life song one first and it was just my number one, a version of it. So the first sort of attempt at it, our first stuff that we put in here as I went on, I want to change it, so when I took it back to the hotel room, I got rid of may be the one and put t k in there. I'll cancel, we'll see when I go here that was in fact, seal song won t k one was where I went to so they'll let me sort of pop open a new sessions just like going in tow open I haven't done anything here yet today so I would say don't save and here we see that I was doing a little bit of work excuse me one second little bit of work here uh comp ete up the guitar track I've kind of soloed here but again it was safe to do anything I wanted that was at a point where I could rip apart these guitar tracks the vocal tracks pick out different parts I thought were great and not have to worry about it you know if if I ruined everything if I deleted the wrong thing no problem we'll have to do is go back on her file alternatives and go back to that seal song one I'm right back where I started before so that's why I did it went around did some things with it now let me check in on where I was here with the drummer sure enough fired benny I found you know everything was working great, we tracked to it and everything was fine but style wasn't quite working for me a little bit you know how little bit of an attitude maybe some reason I just didn't like what benny was thrown down so I went with our new drummer here on dh she was darcy it is little more as it said, tasteful and restrained dedicated to serving the sun you see she's in the songwriter category here are genre go ahead and take a look here again we have the rachael turnem songwriter in r and b and just some great drummers in here and darcy fit I thought perfect wasn't you know exactly what I was looking for but definitely closer also changed out the drum kit from our neo soul went for a customized believe they call it the bluebird changed out a few things with it made a few adjustments to some of the drums definitely changed out the symbols on it I got things we wanted another one let me shrink this down so we can see we definitely were big on the percussion in this one so we did a little bit of a raising gain or volume overall just from the instrument of the collapse still looking to put that cow bell in there but I turned it up to a case we can but so darcy was working out find started making some adjustments with the park here um just get a little bit of a different field not a big change so far though but right away I knows matt you just hit a little bit better so is good change on drummer sorry see betty go but we had a new one so that was my next step that I had here at the same time michael ross we have in the class here I gave him the job rob wasn't around so mike he became the bass player on the keyboard so I sent him to the hotel room gave him xander's ipad with the app and he started playing the bass on dh through it and so what happened is I was gonna have him on my computer I was still busy doing some work trying out the drummer getting stuff set up so he's got his own mac book pro simply took the usb hard drive copied over my files and in fact the way I did it to make sure that I had everything we can always you know the way that I used to do it go to the hard drive find my file were in music logic there's that seal song one what do you suppose I could grab this, pull it over to a hard drive it'll be over my favorites list under the devices and put that hard drive on his computer but just to be safe I use another feature they have built into the app which is file save a copy s we save a copy what is going to do is make sure that we're not replacing the one that we have we're not change anything about it but we're taking all the files and as long as we select things like the audio files access instruments you know you're making a cop because it's not gonna let you change if it was a package or a folder, it was a folder we're copying it so it's just going to take everything that was there move it over to where we want to go. So if it's on a different hard drive, you know different place on your computer it's a great way to know that you haven't touched anything you're just basically cloning it it's its own thing that as I said, I'd give it to mike. He put on the hard drive, take the hard drive to his laptop, drag it on over to his local computer and that's his his to work with them so sent him working. I was then working in the hotel in a different stations, same computer here working on my own thing so collaborate and being able to do twice the work at once. It's great. So can he had his own session? He went under file, he saved it with I think he had your name in it or something that will see actually I dragged it back over. So c l c l song one bass tracks is what? Like he said, right? And now we'll get to that like mikey, pull it a little a fast one on me we'll get into that reveal here in a minute, but mike he went on his own, I kept working in fact I kept working in a soon as I got the drummer changed I want to make sure that I knew okay well that was a point where maybe I'd want to get back to us well so I started making some other alternative takes or sessions to this one as well another thing I want to get into your at this point was arranging we're falling in love with this song but intro verse and chorus does not really make a song we need to go a little bit longer to get some radio airplay out of it so we knew that we wanted to extend some stuff so from our intro verse and chorus talked with spencer about it and he he told me in on how it went hey wrote the song he really intended it to have a few more parts sort of a traditional structure of intro verse chorus on dh then another verse another chorus a bridge and then an outro chorus so he had it mapped out really really well problems we left class we weren't together I'm sure I could have sent them home to record the guitar parts in the vocals over again but they didn't have the same set up the guitar you know the guitar set up was here might have been some differences might have been able to get exactly the same because of our patches in our different tracks with the guitar amps and everything but I want to make it a little bit easier on us, so I want to take the material that we had already in our simple part of the song and flush that out, get tau are full arrangement. So that's, when I started going in here and doing the idea of making a new arrangement to it, let me jump here actually let me show you from the session and then I'll go back to the one that's done so you can see how I did it along the way. So what I did is getting put in some different colors with these options see, just we'll be able to see the different things here, and I'm sorry little bit that zill highlight that I could give those colors, so when I had something like the intro here when it up, having to do is go in and make sure that I knew just the spots that I wanted to move or to copy over so it's something like the verse here, I want to make sure that I had sections that were cut down to it, so I'm doing my comping doing that thing that we talked about with flatten and merge with the tracks go bring up another one there flatten those, then I started cutting him up a little bit more and basically cutting my region so that their raid on the section so okay I too close out inspector a little bit more room to work just using the guides of my arrangement markers and using my marquee tool zones here going in selecting okay, well this was where the verse was like look at my length there figure out where exactly I need to be a little bit more of a zoom and would highlight something like this section here going up through the verse once I've highlighted with that marquee toe simply click on it now I've got a section that's the same size as my verse I did the same across all of the tracks and they're wherever I was able to cut them right down to the size of our sections so going up through there I think I missed a little bit you guys will see the point a little bit more and shift and there you see I can do it across multiple tracks at once throwing them right in there but basically I went through the whole song I'm not going to make you sit through it all here but I cut down wherever I could are different regions and folders down to exactly the size of the sections like the verse the chorus that would that would give me an opportunity to do then go back in to my arrangement and we saw this guy was working with just a drummer track but now we've got all these other tracks let me you couldn't hide it any of these things you want the global tracks I'm gonna hide hide tempo for a second beside that signature we're not gonna be using that give us a little more room to look what is able to do see that I said that we want to do a verse again after this first chorus so even though I've got some hangover notes a little bit of sustain and stuff I'm able to do is just go up here just like we did with the apple loops and then with some of the other loops are regions in this main areas we said we could use option on dragging to do like a copy and paste sort of a force copy move it over this is so cool rather than having to grab all these individual ones or even select all of them I just go from the arrangement markers held down option drag it over we see that all it's showing me is that it's going to move this marker but as soon as I let go there we go slid everything over moved stuff over I want to show you how this slid these things over basically it just seemed it right into that spot so if I wanted to throw for some reason like another intro in here watch what this will do it's so neat wanna grab that get to select it now soon back out and see now, if this was an intro, I want to have happen again or maybe it's just a different part what I'm able to do is go in here, grab it and slide that thing over watch I'll slide it right in between those two look how it moves that rate in slides everything down so we can sort of shuffle the things around you decided we needed to get a little more space in here at another part slide this one in between there so easy to do using these arrangement markers on their global tracks to slide this stuff around absolutely loved it that's not what I end up doing with it, but I just want to show you a couple of ways that it worked to throw these things through there. So let me now go back into my alternatives and say what happened when I started arranging this track? I don't need to say what I did there sure enough that's what we ended up with so now I've taken all those same pieces were before let me show you where we're at we were just at intro verse and chorus I was able to go in and can cut all these different things down now I'm showing the verse coming afterward a new chorus after that and he said we were going to do a bridge we haven't recorded anything for it yet so I just left the gap for it, and so we wouldn't have these sixteen bars, or we're going to be able to fill those in a little bit later, same amount of instruments that we had in the original one new drummer, but I've now zoom out, flush this out to basically are outlined in the full song taken it from, you know, being about a minute to I think we're over three minutes now with the whole thing also did a little bit more editing with the drums. Ah, little bit of flushing out with those vocals still not fully and still not mixed it all, but we really started to put together something. All right? So this is about where I got with organizing and get the whole song laid out, having all the different sections everything's labeled everything's cut now into these perfect little parts of first course first course I could go and change this stuff again. Add new parts. Let me show you what the bridge is. Well, what I did to get that old cap in there before I moved over this drummer another way we could do it is to use this hidden toolbar, so go underneath. Here we'll see there's, a little tool bart's also control option command and t opening close that for us but these are a bunch of different tools we can use that really handy to get into a bunch of stuff that utilizes either the play head where if I move the play had someplace I could do something like split by play head which was go ahead and do that I cannot do it we'll see that just put a big seam across everything that's happening in there and anywhere that were working here this khun do different stuff split by locators things that I could go in find locators across different things and selected regions with any of those selek two regions on those locators it's going to split it for me something I'm sorry with uh select a couple here with that split by play head if I want just some of them to split just select those all those those split in half not the ones that I didn't select so just being able to grab a couple tracks and have them break it certain points great easy to split by play had split by locators also more stuff in here as far as like if I selected this mostly is going to deal with selecting all the stuff so I can grab in an area and just grab and drag sorry from this area down here I could click and drag through and see what's making the selection across all this stuff could go in new things like repeat selection get another one set there. I could cut a section out this one's going to be based on that marker up there can insert a section and that's what I did here used the markers to say, I don't rate this point, we're gonna want a new section in there will tell us his cool things like, do you want to add a four four signature chain to preserve some time signatures? So you add it it's actually going to change some stuff with our signature lines? I had little sections in there make sure we're putting the right amount of space and and then another one where we can add things like silence, and it will tell us if we need to add or we could say no, don't add any time or space to exactly what I told him to do, so tons of cool little settings that weaken tools that we can use here to help us with our arrangement, moving stuff around, copying things, repeating things really cool way to sort of do a re edit of your song or reorganized the thing another great one in here is that we have this nudge. Option which I want to point out since we have it open something I use all the time if you have something and it's not just quite not quite in the exact place where you want to be sometimes rather than grabbing the mouse and having to slide around doing the zooming that I'm showing you I want to do a thing called a nudge something we could have a key command for us well but I'm gonna show you for here it tells me that a nudge value now jean just means moving a little bit left a little bit right? But in here we get the option of what we want to do, so if I know I want to move something by a bar, I don't want to have to look and make sure I'm dragging it exactly on that bar you ceo much time struggled a little bit with the small screen resolution here sometimes going like this and looking can be a little bit difficult but with nudge will see that as I click that way my region sliding one bar at a time. But if it's something else where I want to say you know let's, just see what this sounds like it's just a little off you know before behind the beat then go then down to a beat so corner notes and moving him now we'll see it move that way or down to the division which in this case I can see the division this is important for the nudge I'm going to custom see over here for for and this sixteen that showing the division think I showed us the first day that's showing us these lines on the ruler I see sixteenth notes but if I move that division to something like let's go not too small but a forty eighth note now when I hit that plus see small little movements with it versus if I changed this division here two hundred ninety second note we'll barely see it moving along just inching barely so the idea of trying to get stuff to just barely slide a little bit ahead or behind the beat could be really cool if we could even go down to the tick level and this is when were we won't even see it moving those little teeny fractions of a bars ago so this is really great for getting something that maybe is just a little bit earlier a little bit late we can throw it in we can't change that timescale from our bars and beats two something like frames which could be great if you're like doing sound effects for movie you want to bring in later today I'm gonna show us how we can bring in a quicktime movie on dad sound effects to it our music to it so frames is a great thing for getting like you know sound effects and explosion tow line of exactly when the action happens on the screen and we can also go down two milliseconds or the very small thing the sample which goes back to the sample rate. So if we talked about moving in a daniel's guitar from yesterday by one sample we did our session it forty eight k, which means it would move one forty eight thousandth of a second forwards or backwards so really small amount when we get down to samples but that's our nudge value tons of great options here bouncing the region so if we like what we've done with a bunch of ad it's our effects, we can actually balance it, get a holy one fact I could do that right there with this one we'll let me pick what to do is it new track selected tracks that what to do with the source? So this is great balance regions in place we're going to take a look at it later it's another one we could do with like software instruments. So once we're done editing the midi, we wanna have an actual audio wave form there maybe we can cut up and do other things with this is the way we do it with that balance in place and some options there we're going to do that bit canceled for now anything that you don't see here might be off to the side, so I've got a couple things like the joint with him puts two things back together multiple things move, play head, but as always, customizing is a big deal, so control clicking in an open area make sure you're not right on the button customized the toolbar and here's all the other things we have, so we'll add a few more things later, like the balance options, we'll have to go through a menu exporting different things out like anything we want to get out of the session importing audio from some place else, which is something we maybe could have used with mikey's base to get that back into recession bunch of cool things there again, this is the tool bar this is where we customize it was by control, clicking anywhere in that tool bar toolbars, hinn raider, neath that lcd anywhere the main control bharat the top underneath that it was hidden away it's the toolbar one last time, it's control option command and tea to get that open and close. All right, now I've just done some bad stuff here, not listening and doing some added ings. Let me show you what we can do if that happens to you we of course have undue so I could sit here and go undo nudge that last region undo this next one that would take a while. I could also go back and look at the undo history, which is such a cool thing. We had some people I think ask yesterday about, you know, can I go back and fix some things I did wrong a few steps ago. Well, here, I've already got my list. We looked at the preference for setting the number, but it's going up to eighty forest faras the things I could go back, teo and I can jump anywhere else in this list, pick something, say, undo that, or then redo it again in a lineup. Everything afterwards, we see is going to be gone, but it's, a great way to get back through all this stuff I just did. I could look by the time and say, ok, what time did I start messing with this thing? All right, we're still in the nine thirty's here I go all the way back to yesterday, make sure that I had everything undid that I did. That was wrong. Close it, chez something else that I'm going to do, though I know that everything I did was wrong since I opened this out, right? Wasn't listening to it move some stuff around, so the coolest thing I could do is revert to so I can revert to the saved or two different backups that happened today at the different times so I could jump back here we're looking at like five minute increments going back and forth, but I can just go to the one that we had from last night basically so going to saved it let's revert and there I am no harm done right back to where we were before so that's a great option we want to try some things you're not sure how it's gonna work out I can't read in there and try it all right let me talk again about what was happening on another computer with michael ross, please questions better just really quick so if you if you revert to like so you're undoing a whole bunch of things, can you redo the whole once you've reverted that's why it's asking you that said, ok, you're getting out of this now so absolutely if I look under edit right now no can do can't redo undo history empty so write reverting to his final I if you think you've made a mistake, make sure you've made a mistake before he revert back to the same yeah it's definitely that's why they give us the undue function so we can maybe just go back and get the things that we wanted to get rid of we could have always just saved a different alternative you know, version of the session and then still gone back to the one that it was before the one that we had open earlier. So you know something? If you know you're gonna be doing some dirty work and they're going to get in there and tear some stuff apart, not sure how it's gonna turn out. You could go underneath there and rather than keeping working on the same session, go the alternatives put another number, you see how the way this is typical of the way that all normally work with something by the time we're done with the song today about we're gonna have a huge list here, but I start with the simple name, then if I'm working on it, put your t k for travis, cast part one and two and tell a bit about what's happening. So in this one, it did the arrangement. I looked at some things with, like flex or with adding some base than putting the bridge stuff in here so you can see how's my progression is going probably have another vocal one on get into the mix and all my different phases of the mix love being able to get back to where it was before.