Drum Synth overview in Logic Pro for Mac
Drum Synth provides you with easy access to a powerful electronic drum synthesis engine. Depending on the sound type you’ve chosen, up to eight specially selected controls for pitch, filtering, effect, and envelopes allow you to quickly create the electronic drum sound you need. You can, of course, add further processing plug-ins in the instrument channel strip or busses.
Drum Synth is ideal for adding fills, flourishes, or individual hits to an existing Drummer groove, loops, and live or sequenced parts, and for drum replacement and doubling tasks.
You can use multiple Drum Synth instances, either as individual software instrument tracks or inside Drum Machine Designer, which allows you to build complete electronic drum sets, encompassing everything from vintage drum machine through to modern synthetic percussion sounds.
You can also directly load Drum Synth settings into Ultrabeat to access additional synthesis and processing parameters. Typically, you would replace Drum Synth with Ultrabeat on a channel strip, and the Drum Synth sound is automatically loaded.
If you’re new to using plug-ins in Logic Pro, see Add, remove, move, and copy plug-ins in Logic Pro for Mac.
Drum Synth global parameters
Drum Synth has four global parameters in the plug-in window.
Group type pop-up menu: Choose a drum or percussion instrument family: Kicks, Snares and Claps, Percussion, Hats and Cymbals.
Sound type pop-up menu: Choose a drum or percussion sound type from the active instrument group. Back to Default reverts all parameter changes to their initial values.
Instrument icon: Click to play the sound.
Key Tracking button: Enable to play the sound chromatically. Disable to play the sound at the root pitch when any key is struck.
The “Root Key” label is shown beside the keyboard in the Piano Roll Editor.
Mode pop-up menu: Choose a playback mode.
Mono: One voice can be played. If you play another key, the newly played note cuts off the playing note.
Poly: You can play multiple notes simultaneously.
Gate: Like ‘Mono’, but the sound is heard only while you hold the key.
The parameters of individual types of drum sound are covered in other sections.