🥁Drum programming with Ultrabeat

Drum programming is an important part of a lot of electronic music, whether you are looking to get a certain sound, create drum patterns that a human drummer can not play, or when you are unable to record live drums. Although there are a number of ways to program drums in Logic, the Ultrabeat instrument is a flexible tool that allows you to load 25 samples, modify them individually, and create different patterns of MIDI notes that can be quickly dragged to the timeline and sequenced. To open Ultrabeat, create a new Software Instrument. Then open the Inspector by pressing ‘ I ‘, click the “Instrument” box, and select “Ultrabeat (Drum Synth)”. A window will pop up with with a keyboard roll of samples 1-25 on the left. To load a sample, click on of these and then click the box that says “No Sample Loaded” near the bottom left and click “Load Sample” (see A below):

A.

B.

From here, you can load a sample from one of the pre-set Logic kits, or you can navigate to your own audio files in Finder. Once you’ve loaded a sample, there are a number of parameters that may be useful: the pitch setting, directly to the right of the sample loading box allows you to pitch the sample up or down, which can be useful if say, the hi-hat isn’t high enough to cut through the mix, or you want to duplicate a snare or kick and have one be pitched down for accents. To the right of the pitch setting is the envelope generator, which you can use to change the duration and shape of a sound. Say the sound is too loud at the beginning, you can drag the “Attack” button & corresponding curve to make the sound ramp up to its full volume. Similarly, maybe the sound is ringing for too long, and you want to cut it short; in this instance, you can drag the release button & curve to change how the sound fades out (see B above). Here, I have created a more gradual Attack curve, and a much quicker Release curve, meaning the sound will gradually build in once it is triggered (either with a MIDI keyboard or with a drawn-in MIDI note) and then quickly fade out once the key is released.

pThere are a number of other, more advanced features, including two built-in equalizer bands (see EQ Basics section), multiple filtering options (see Filter Basics sections), and a few others that I don’t really use but can be worth exploring!