I’ve gotta say, Drummer in Logic Pro never ceases to amaze me.
Drummer was first introduced with the original release of Logic Pro X back in 2013. And only now are plugin developers catching up to this amazing innovation…
In 2022…
9 years later.
Drummer is your virtual bandmate. At a moment’s notice Drummer can deliver an entire song’s worth of drum tracks. And they come with all the nuance and care of an actual drummer or beatmaker.
It’s so much better than writing drum beats one MIDI note at a time (like how it used to be!).
Of course Drummer might not match the vision you have for your songs right out of the gate. But that shouldn’t stop you from using Drummer.
In fact, Logic Pro provides many ways for you to customize your Drummer tracks.
So today I thought it would be fun to customize Drummer’s performance for a riff I wrote. Really digging into the weeds to nail that drum track I’m imagining.
We’ll cover:
- Editing Drummer quickly with the Drummer Editor
- Customizing Drummer performances with the Follow function
- Use Groove Tracks to further fine-tune fills and timing
- Split up Drummer regions to improve on Drummer results
- Dig into the actual Drummer MIDI data itself
Walking you through the actual choices I’d make to customize my own Drummer tracks. Check out the video above for the full walkthrough.
Again, fantastic info Chris. Thank you.
Awesome Chris! As usual, learned a few things that others just do not find! One question about Drummer that has me very puzzled: how do you mix Drummer performance? Seems there are two options:
1. Leave “as is” with all the busing, reverb, etc in place
2. Remove all plug-ins and routing and set up new drum bus
The second option is what I have been doing but perhaps that just adds needless time and introduces my inexperienced methods. What do you do?
Really appreciate it!
Dave
One of the best tricks I’ve discovered for working with Drummer is to use more than 1 Drummer track and to really limit which drums/cymbals can play in each one. It’s such an obvious thing to do and yet it’s often overlooked.
Sometimes you just can’t get what you want for the whole kit with just the settings available for one Drummer. For example, use one track to just get the swing of the cymbals the way you want. Then use another track that only has the kick and snare, perhaps set to follow a walking bass line or even set to half time etc.
I’ve even created a custom midi “tap” track and then told my kick-only Drummer track to ‘follow’ that.
Another general strategy I’ve found really helpful as a piano player/singer/songwriter:
1. Record piano (scratch track) without a click
2. Map with Smart Tempo
3. Tell Drummer to ‘follow’ the piano (it’s also following the subtle tempo changes of course).
4. Now re-record the piano while playing to the now-foundational Drummer track . . . similar with bass etc.