10 Overlooked Features in Logic Pro To Be Thankful For

hey friend chris van der viver here from whylogicprorules.com the website that helps you get the most you can out of apple's logic pro today i want to share with you 10 or so hidden or overlooked logic pro features that i for one am extremely thankful that they exist in logic pro these functions or features just can make your life so much easier when you're composing or producing or mixing and sometimes these are functions or features that we didn't even know existed where we thought hey why doesn't logic do this or why does logic do that thing it's so annoying that it does it but you can actually change the behavior you just have to dive into some settings to do that also in the spirit of the holiday season here in the us just yesterday it was a major holiday thanksgiving i want to express my thanks and gratitude to you for checking out wylogic pro rules whether this is the very first video you've ever seen or one of many or if you've subscribed to the youtube channel or the website i'm just so thankful that you've given y logic pro rules a chance every single week i spend a lot of time and energy trying to craft videos that will help you and your music so you are just getting the best out of this amazing program thanks so much for checking out the channel let's dig in this list is in no particular order number one is that you can actually change logic's behavior when it comes to playing back midi notes now what does this mean exactly i'm going to hone in on this bass track here we're going to open the piano roll editor now anyone who's been using logic for any length of time knows that when you're playing back midi information the playhead has to play through the beginning of a midi note for it to be activated for that instrument so what i mean is is if the playhead starts in the middle of this first note it's not going to actually play that note it will play all the other notes afterwards because the playhead is playing through the beginning or introduction of that midi information so that lets logic know to trigger that note let me just demonstrate right now so that's kind of annoying right you don't want to go to the beginning of a midi note just to hear it played because you have a lawn drawn out performance that's hanging around for a while you have a drone note that started at bar 1 but you're at bar 53 and in fact there's a project setting that you can set so logic just plays the note regardless of where the play head is if we go up to file go down to project settings and go down to midi under this chase tab we have this option for notes now check it out if we now set the playhead in the middle of this note and just like that now your notes will play regardless of where the playhead is which will just make your life so much easier when you're producing and composing the only trick to this is is that project settings are saved on a project by project basis so i recommend that you save a template with this project setting enabled and then every time you open a new project just open that template and forevermore you won't have to deal with the default behavior of playing midi information number two on our list is the sempti lock function symptoc is especially helpful for those of us who work with composing to film or video but something a lot can be helpful to anybody what it does is is that it locks all regions in place so you can't move them from left to right but you can move them up and down so let's do that right now i'm going to select all my regions right click and go down to empty lock and lock this empty position so now if i try to drag this region to the left it's not going to go anywhere if i try to drag it to the right doesn't go anywhere if i drag it up or down it will actually go up and down but one step better is that you can actually adjust the tempo of your project even after you've composed and created all sorts of tracks and information you can change the tempo without messing up the entire performance's tempo let me demonstrate so i'm gonna just take a quick listen to this part of the riff that i have here cool so we're at a bpm of 140 but maybe i want the tempo to be half time or double time just because it will be a little easier to record to well let's try to adjust the tempo to 70 bpm okay everything's been squashed now let's take a listen [Music] it's the same exact tempo let me demonstrate with the part we listened to [Music] the only thing that changed was the delays because they're tempo synced and they were tempo synced to 140 bpm so we may have to adjust those but everything else is as it should be let me just bump it back to 140 and let's now remove symptom and then do the same thing so take a listen switch it to 70 bpm okay take a listen [Music] so that's massively annoying right so with empty lock you can lock everything into place adjust your tempo and then you can unlock this empty position and then go on editing and moving stuff around but everything will stay at the tempo that you had originally set for your project number three in our list is the bypass all plugins key command or channel strip setting so if we open the mixer here i'm going to just navigate to my sub mix here and then go up to the channel strip settings and right down here about a third down the menu we have bypass all effect plugins now prior to 10.6 this is kind of a once and done type of thing i've set this to a key command of shift command 1 and you can set that just option k to open the key command menu or go down to key commands edit and then i've looked up right here bypass all for bypass all effect plugins and set the key label to shift command one just press the tab here shift command one boom and now we have it learned for that function prior to 10.6 hold shift command one we can turn everything off on this channel strip which is pretty cool but since the 10.6 update this function will actually toggle off and on so we can bypass and then reintroduce the plugins shift command 1 again turn them back on one step better if we select this channel strip that has some plug-ins that are bypassed and some plug-ins that are enabled if we use this function turn them off and we can re-instantiate the plug-ins that we had on without turning everything else on this is so helpful when you're trying to test drive plugins or settings or processing to see if you're making a positive impact or maybe it's going a little bit too far number four in our list is the ability to separate midi tracks by note pitch this is so helpful especially with drums let me just introduce an instance of drummer and we'll solo this track and i'm going to right click go down to convert and i'm going to convert this to a midi region so now we have a midi region of this drum performance let's take a listen now maybe we need to export these drum tracks individually to sent to a mix engineer or for us to process how do we do that if we don't have the ability to use a producer kit maybe we're using a third-party plug-in like easy drummer well in this case if we just right-click the region go down to midi separate by no pitch now watch this so now each of the different drum elements have been parsed out to their own track lane if we look in the mixer we don't see any more track lanes but they're here in the arrange page and if we solo the individual regions we're going to use control s to solo the region itself where soloing gets kind of funky when you just try to use the button in this sort of arrangement take a listen so we have the kick the snare bits of the hi-hat now we can export these different elements individually for further processing or to send off to a separate party and this isn't just for drums you can expand the view of just the midi performance of any software instrument track this brings up my next favorite function and that is the bounce tracks in place function which is super helpful if you need to bounce multiple tracks in place so you have new audio regions you don't want to sit there and bounce each one individually you just want them to all be knocked out one after the other to do that we select all the tracks we want to bounce go up to file go down to bounce tracks in place now this dialog will ask us all the usual things do you want to bypass the effect plugins do you want to include automation do you want any sort of normalization i'm going to hit ok and now logic is going to go through and bounce each track in place one after the other i'm going to speed up the video just so we can get through it and just like that if we zoom in here we can see all the different audio we can see we've got probably a tom down here a couple toms and even though each one is called socal we can change the names of those but we have the different drum elements and audio files for us now to export or process or whatever the case may be so let's select everything here we're just going to power it down and i'm just going to hide all these tracks for now next in our list is the ability to quickly time stretch any type of region whether it be audio or midi regions so super simple i'm just going to duplicate this track here and i'm just going to eliminate everything after this one hit bring this down now if we hover our mouse over the left or right boundaries and hold option you got to get about halfway down you see what is a bracket with what looks like two waveforms on each side this is awesome all we have to do is while holding option click and drag the boundary to time stretch this drum hit so let's take a listen to what this sounds like where it started out at and we can do the same thing on the left side holding option drag it out now there is sometimes a limit to how far you can drag out see how far we can take this oh it's not giving me a hard time but in case it does give you a hard time turn on flex mode with this button right here and then i would select monophonic for this kick hit and now you don't even have to hold option just hover about halfway on both sides here and then you can just click and drag to your heart's content so we're gonna bring this way out and just like that it doesn't even need to load let's take a listen and if we change this to maybe like tempophone effects this could be pretty interesting awesome and we can even do this with midi regions as well but let's just take the right edge here hold option drag it out and look at that now we're adjusting the timing of this midi region so if we wanted to play slower or faster once again just like that now you can adjust the timing super easy just a single click and drag number seven in our list is the different display preferences when it comes to track colors marker colors and region colors so let's go up to logic pro preferences display and under tracks here we have a number of different options that are so helpful for track color i love this it auto assigns colors so every time you create a new track in logic it will just give it a new color we'll just drag in some apple loops just to demonstrate so let's even select a whole bunch create new tracks and just like that if we zoom in each one of these regions are being given a different color based on the different color options in the palette here so you can specify you want to use all 96 colors in the color palette or just 24. static is a default behavior where it doesn't give a new color to each new track and the great thing about preferences is that this is a once and done once you set it it will forever more no matter what logic project you open will apply these preferences marker colors are also auto assignable since i believe like the 10.5 update i could be wrong but it's pretty recent so now if you create new markers i'm going to use option apostrophe to create a marker the first one won't have a color but check it out each one after will have a new color and you can also use the marker lane here and just create new markers it's awesome and one step further with the 10.6 update there's now an option for region colors to follow the track color so previously your region colors could be independent from the track itself so if i set the track color to red the region does not follow but now if we set this region color to as track color look at that if we drag this region up it switches color drag this up switches it's just so fantastic and much preferred when you're navigating and organizing your sessions number eight in our list is the ability to convert flex pitch data to midi so if we turn on flex pitch for this kick sound which is more like an 808 we can see that it's pitched and if we open the track editor here you can open it with the scissor button here and then we want to make sure to enable flex view and if we go to edit right here we have create midi track from flex pitch data so check it out we now have a new software instrument track with alchemy with this pitch data in the piano roll awesome this can be really great if you record yourself singing or playing an instrument and you want to change that instrument or singing into a software instrument track you can just quickly turn on flex pitch and then convert it to midi data so helpful number nine in our list i've gone on and on about in other videos is that you can hold ctrl option to quickly get the zoom tool i have a whole video just going on and on about how much i love the zoom tool in logic i'll link it in this video but you can get as close or as far as you need to just control option to bring it up and lastly is the ability to capture record now i have a video dedicated to that as well but it's changed a bit since the 10.5 update a little earlier this year so we're just going to get rid of this midi region now i am no keyboard player i'm going to bring up the musical typing but i'm just going to play a random array of notes you know what let's make it a little bit better let's bring in the arpeggiator see if it makes things a little more interesting we'll set the variation octave okay so now we have the capture record button here i don't even have to hit play maybe i'm just practicing or rehearsing some ideas and i come across something that is just wow i need to save that but i wasn't recording we'll check it out okay shift r and just like that the region is now applied to our project i use key command shift r because i find it it's a little faster to get to but you can also just hit this button so let's do it again down here [Music] beautiful so now that performance is applied to the project now there's a similar function for audio tracks maybe someone was singing or playing and they just get something beautiful they just nail it but you weren't recording well you can capture that as well again there's a video for that so i'll link it in this video for you to check out of course there are many other functions beyond these 10 that just make life so much better in logic especially with some of the new drag and drop functionality in logic but i do hope this was helpful for you if it was as always i highly recommend subscribing to the youtube channel why logic pro rules are subscribing on the website itself whitelogicprorules.com every week i'm posting new videos new emails and posts to help you get the most you can out of apple's logic pro thanks so much

Channel: Why Logic Pro Rules

Views: 52,043

Rating: 4.9878001 out of 5

Keywords: logic pro x, logic pro, audio, audio production, apple, mixing, audio mixing, recording, audio recording, 10 Overlooked Features in Logic Pro To Be Thankful For, MIDI, Drummer, Bounce tracks, bounce stems, plugins, audio plugins, capture record, zoom tool, SMPTE, SMPTE-lock, why logic pro rules

Id: euYPs0atjvM

Length: 16min 7sec (967 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 27 2020