Producer Thoughts: Logic Pro’s Ultrabeat & Ting

I was working on a Doxkyn track this morning. I had a nice synthwave drum beat set up including a percussion loop but I needed an extra percussive layer to help build the rhythmic texture of the song.

Ting By Klevgrand

I’d recently grabbed the quirky but exquisite sounding Ting by Klevgrand. Ting is a percussion instrument of everyday items beautifully sampled and packaged with some other processing that just makes it sound delicious.

Looking for that percussive texture but wanting something a little quirky I loaded up Ting. I tried a few things but I really knew I wanted a prebuilt MIDI loop to throw at Ting to see what percussive surprises I could find. 

I started looking through the Logic’s MIDI loops but quickly moved away from those. What I really knew I wanted to do was fire up Logic’s Ultrabeat and drag and drop some 2 bar MIDI loops. 

Logic Pro’s Ultrabeat

Ultrabeat is a great drum sequencer and one that I want to dive back into more. The UI is a little clunky but it’s a powerful tool.

So I quickly found a suitable groove and dropped the MIDI onto my Ting instrument. I scrolled through some presets whilst listening to the main groove. Tweaked the velocity of some parts to help create a bit more dynamic symmetry and we had something cooking.

The build in reverbs on Ting are gorgeous but we’re suiting the vibe of the track. My reach for reverb/delay is Baby Audio’s Spaced Out. It rarely disappoints. I dialled in a bit of a non-linear reverb vibe and some dotted eighth delay, mixed to taste.

We were almost there but things were a little clean so I popped in Audio Things Valves to texture it up with some saturation. End result, delicious percussive texture that helped to lift the track. 

The Takeaway: You obviously don’t need these plugins to do what I did (although Ting on sale is very reasonably priced). I think the thing for me in this process is getting some “collaboration” from another source happening. Using percussive audio loops is fun but limited. Using percussive MIDI loops gives you a level of creative injection with customisation.