Creating drum fills with Arpeggiator

1 Prepare your track

We start off with a drum track generated by Logic’s Drummer feature. We’re going to place a fill leading from bar 2 into bar 3, just before the crash cymbal on the downbeat.

2 Choose your weapon

Create a new MIDI track and load up any drum plugin – either Drum Kit Designer, Drum Machine Designer, Ultrabeat, Sampler or any third-party drum plugin will work.

3 Patch in

Find a preset drum patch (or drag your own set of sounds into Sampler) to use in your fills. We’ve gone for Drum Kit Designer’s Retro Rock kit, which contains some great toms.

4 Be regionable

Create a new empty MIDI region by right-clicking on the MIDI track and selecting ‘Create MIDI Region’. Draw the new region out to the length of the fill area.

5 Open piano roll

Double-click the new region and use the pencil tool to draw notes for the sounds you want to include in a block, starting and ending where you want the fill to start and end.

6 Arping on

Next, in the MIDI track’s Channel Strip, click on the MIDI FX slot and insert the Arpeggiator MIDI plugin by selecting it from the list of possible options.

7 Randomise

In the Arpeggiator control panel, select Random mode by clicking this button. This will create a random sequence generated from the notes in the MIDI part.

8 Set arpeggio rate

Set the Rate control to choose the fill speed. We’ve gone for 16th-notes here, but you can choose any setting you like – 1/8th-note triplets often work well too.

9 Hit play

When you press Play, the block of notes is interpreted as a chord, which the Arpeggiator arpeggiates to generate random drum fills. Cycle round to hear lots of variations.