100 Logic Pro Tips, Tricks, and Shortcuts

100 logic pro tips tricks shortcuts this video is going to be long no doubt about it and that's why i've time stamped all them in the description below and i've categorized them by categories so you can reference them at a later time there's no priority order to this video they're not chronological there's nothing going on where you have to watch it from start to finish you can and feel free to come along the journey but you can also reference this video at a later time and just reference the timestamps below i didn't want to rush through the tips that's why it's long because i wanted to give detail on each tip and show you how to use it in context with your music in in logic so that's why it's long let's get into it now stick along for the ride if you want to carry with me for the whole 100 and let's just start at the beginning uh the first category is editing would be great if you could give this video a thumbs up or a like maybe even a subscribe if you want to it really supports the channel this is the logic song that i'll be kind of referencing these tracks and showing you how to use these tips in context throughout the tutorial it's just a song that i've been producing uh recently so before you know before we get into this you have to have advanced settings on so in order to get to settings i just did command comma there to open that up quickly but you can go to the top here logic pro preferences advanced tools and this button here just make sure that show advanced tools is on it could be on for you already and that's great if it's not your logic probably looks like this and it's like more of a garageband look as soon as you click this checkbox on notice that things in the background will change and then we have all the advanced tools so make sure that's on it's important because we're going to be discussing all the things that you need with that on number one might seem obvious but use the tools available in logic logic is a very thought out program and they give you tools to make you more productive and i've seen a lot of beginners make the mistake of just never using the tools what are the tools what i'm talking about is these three things at the top here you probably only have two i'll explain this third one in a little bit so you probably have this drop down and this drop down here this is what i mean by using these tools these menus are the same and you should get used to using these tools while you are working in logic what i would recommend is you having the pointer in your left click tool and then your command click tool start using the marquee tool or the scissors or the fade this is going to help you with editing here's a quick example of how you might use this in context without using the tools if you wanted to what i've seen beginners do this if you want to go to this electric guitar here and let's say you want to cut at bar five i've seen a lot of beginners do command t which is cut at playhead which is fine because this is a garageband thing but getting used to using the tools is going to save you lots of time instead of doing command t put the scissors tool in your command tool and then whenever you hold command you're going to get this tool so you can have this be scissors you could have this be a fade see i'll hold command now and now i have a fade you could have this be a marquee the marquee is like a scissors cut tool it's great for bulk editing so for example i can just ignore this tool right now for example i'm going to put scissors in my command tool and i can go hold command cut that i can really cut things quickly it's going to help when you're editing and then you can use because we have let go of command we can now use select tool and move things around um this is how i would use this in context to edit things so if you find yourself you haven't started using these tools at all or you haven't been holding command with your thumb and using the command tool start getting used to that that's a tip that most beginners don't don't start with because garageband doesn't have this this kind of thing and when you start with logic you should start getting used to this because it's just going to help you down the road if you start getting used to these shortcuts with the tools number two is now we can talk about this tool is adding a third click tool this is not necessary and this is gonna be a subjective thing if you want a right click tool you can get that by going logic pro preferences general and editing because your right mouse button is assignable to a tool you can also do other things with it for me i like my right click with a tool but not everyone likes right click because with a right click tool on when you right click on something you don't have the right click normal option you would have a mouse so you'd have to press ctrl click with your left click and then that's when you get the right click options it really works for me so it is a subjective thing but i like to have um my right click toolbe scissors and my command click tool either the fade or the marquee depending on and this this does switch depending on where i'm at in the process of making music for example in the editing stage where i might be cutting and fading things a lot i find it very valuable to have a right click to cut so all i have to do is right click on something where my mouse is so i'm at four i can just right click and i cut there it's super easy to cut things and then i can zoom in and fade it with my command tool i don't have to spend the time going to at the top here and fading things like this hovering over to grab the fade i can just quickly do that because i'm holding command it's worth just trying it out with the the right click tool if you like it i just love the option of having three tools really really quickly available at right at my fingertips number three which is we're gonna stick on toolbar right now is the toolbar workflow so you can have you know one or two tools maybe three in here but the other idea is because you're going to be using multiple different tools use just the shortcuts so what i mean by that is whenever you press t the shortcut menu is going to pop up and this menu here is what this menu is up top it's the same thing all around and it also pops up wherever your mouse is so for example my mouse is over here press t and it's going to pop up if my mouse is over here and press t it's going to pop up there so it pops up wherever your mouse is so you can really get used to this muscle memory of t and then sliding with your mouse down and knowing where things are if you don't want to do the muscle memory way you can just do the shortcut way inside of that so you can press t and then you'll notice that there's a letter corresponding to every little one here so if you know for a fact you want pencil tool all you have to do is press t p in logic so let's click out if i press t p my tool is now pencil if i press t g my tool is now glue t m my tool is now mute you get the idea n t t back is back to pointer tool so you can see them change at the top here tg glue tp pencil ty zoom so let's use an example of how to do this in context let's say we're adding a new software instrument track and we want to put a region up here quickly so we can program some midi in here so typically you might have to go up here go to pencil and click and then you have a midi but faster than faster way would be let's just delete that would be tp quickly click back to tt and i do that a lot when i'm adding regions that's a great contextual work flow example of how you could use that okay number four let's move on from toolbars and get into some other things um quick zooming option on things when you're editing if you want to zoom in on anything you have to just click the region and press z and you're going to get a huge like zoom zoom in on this track on that specific region so you can see loop five if we want to go over this region z or zed we say in canada you can press it and press that again and that zooms you out on any other on any region you choose so that's very handy if you're editing you're like hey i want to check the timing that bass sounded a little off this is how we might use it in context if you're listening here [Music] you're like oh that bass that note sounds a little off i'm going to press zed zoom in oh no it yeah you're right it was me so i might now right click cut that and i can just drag this over a bit if i'm like you know i want that to be a bit more locked in and then i could fade it here we'll also get into more some more options with fading that kind of thing that was just a reference for you with zooming and then we can press that again to zoom out number five is while you're editing you might have slow computer problems this happens to me a lot of the time when i'm running lots of software instruments especially paid instruments and lots of plugins my computer the fans are running it's gonna blow up and uh that off happens to everyone if especially if your computer only has like eight gigs of ram how do you fix that this uh this tip is talking about freezing bouncing and um putting tracks on or off they essentially do more or less the same thing with me personally i always bounce tracks unless i'm not convinced that i'm ready to commit to the sound so let's take an example of how we might use this in context let's say we have a software instrument we're running alchemy and we're running lots of paid plugins so we have like you know a paid compressor we have more you know sound toys distortion we have paid reverbs it's getting pretty heavy right so let's say and we have a t i'm just going to make region t p make a region here go back to t t i'm going to double click in and just put some midi in here i'm going to go through some stuff like this pretty quickly and not explain things but i'll always come back to show you what i did throughout the video we have a lot of these tracks eventually let's say things are going to get pretty intense right and all this shortcut stuff don't worry about it right now i'll show you how to do all these things later so what you would do what i do if i'm working in midi and i'm producing and i like the sound of these alchemy synths but i'm not convinced yet that i want to commit those sounds for example i don't know yet if i want to bounce them to audio so what you can do to save computer speed is freeze these tracks you can see these little snowflakes here if you don't see this on your logic don't worry about it right click go to track header components and these are all the things that you can add on the track here so if you take if i take freeze off it won't be there so you have to go here put freeze on and then we can we can actually click and scroll down and put all these tracks these alchemy since we want to freeze and all we have to do is press space bar and now this is going to freeze those synths so because i did it on 1 2 3 four five six seven tracks this is just gonna take a few minutes so let me run that through and we'll pick it up in a second you can see notice on every track the plugins on the left they're all grayed out you can't click on them and that's because they're frozen so that means that your computer while this this stuff is being played now this is going to sound terrible by the way so bear with us [Music] so while that stuff is being played it doesn't the computer doesn't have to run the synth anymore essentially what has happened is this on the back end is now just audio what logic just thinks it's audio now so it's not having to run any computer so that's a good segue to talk about if you are for sure committed on the sound let's just unfreeze these if you know for a fact you really like this sound and you're gonna you're gonna want it for the rest of the song just bounce it as audio and that's gonna be the best thing for your computer in order to to do that you would go at the top here file bounce track in place to and you can replace the track and you probably don't want to bypass the effect plugins and you can have normalizes off now this is just going to bounce essentially this to audio and your computer will be super happy because it's not going to have to run any um anything anymore and you can see it's actually audio and it's super clean and it kind of actually looks better than midi as well so that's bouncing and that's freezing the other way to do it you can go to track header components here and go to um where is it on or off i don't use on or off let's put it back on so you can see where it is this button here essentially when you have that off it turns it off and that's supposed to help i think with your the computer speed but notice that the plug-ins are still available so your computer still have to run the plug-ins so don't be fooled by if you turn it off that your computer is having a better time it's not for your computer to have the best time tracks need to be in audio if you want to also help your computer a bit you can also freeze the tracks so that's how to speed up with computer problems and use it in context let's delete these tracks and get on to the next tip number six let's talk about chase midi notes this happens when you are editing and you have a really long midi note so let's just draw that in uh tp to put up a region back to tt here and it's going to make a massive midi note oftentimes i have these really long midi notes that just carry throughout the song for example it might be an atmospheric pad so i'll just go atmos pad and what the problem here is if you are mixing let's say the pre section up here and if we just solo the pre and this pad and want to listen to it here and press play we can't hear it right let's we have to press it from the beginning to hear the sound throughout the song if we don't play it from the beginning we can't hear the pad sound so often times if you're mixing the pre-chorus we're not listening to this atmospheric pad sound right now and that's a super bummer we can change that so we can go to settings project settings actually that's a good thing to note out in your logic pro you have preferences and here you have settings but you also down here in file you have project settings which are different and you can go to midi and see chase and then if we click notes that means that when we play this atmospheric pad now if we solve it and play from the pre we'll be able to hear it it doesn't have to start at the beginning so it's super beneficial if you do have these long notes if you don't not a huge concern let's talk about number seven which is nudging things which essentially means moving things left and right and you can move any region left to right by clicking on the region and going option left or right on your on your keyboard but nudging things is based off a nudge value and we can change these nudge values by right clicking on a region going down to move set nudge value to so you can see we have nudge left nudge right which is the command left or command right which we just talked about then you have set nudge value to bar b division 10 ticks and tick so i'll show you if we just go bar and then if i just delete this region just so you can see this in context and if i do option left that will move a bar from 11 to 10 now to bar nine back to 11. so that's how you can move things very quickly but what i like to discuss and what this tip is is nudging by ticks because this is going to really make your if you nudge high hats and you nudge snares and your vocals by ticks it's really going to help sit things in the pocket because if things are just way too mechanical and right on the grid it's going to sound going to sound too too mechanical and you want a bit of fluidity you want a bit of tick change if you will in the song and so how do you how you do that right click again go to move set nudge value to tick and now if i go option left you won't see nothing you saw from this view happen to this region right but let's zoom in and you can see before if i command z it was here and i go option left again now it's before the beat and you can see a little tick i don't know if you can see that it's right here on the cursor there's a tick there take there and tick here so i go option right two times now this guitar is after the beat it's laid back this is a great thing to do with hi-hats you can do it with guitars too with vocals it does come down to taste but i think when you push it a bit by a few ticks and test it out maybe you can go even drastically you know maybe 10 ticks that's why that option to do because ticks are so small that's why they do give you an option to do 10 ticks so test out moving your hi-hats and snares 10 ticks here or there or ticks here and there to see if it flows better and if it grows better in your beat and that's what that tip is about tip number eight is command r which duplicates regions really quickly using this all the time in context when i'm producing songs so you can do this one region at a time or multiple regions so if i have this loop here that i really like and i want to extend it i could loop it and have this like go like this but a quicker way in my opinion is do command r and you can press it multiple times and that region will be duplicated the same thing goes in midi for example if we just have a region here and i go to the midi editor and i start drawing some midi notes in this is a huge length from the pad we did i can go command r and that's also going to do the same thing for midi notes and then you can highlight all of them go command r and then that's going to extend really fast also works the same with multiple regions so if i extend our session view here and i know for a fact like hey i i really like you know the chorus so i want all this stuff and i don't like that part so i want all this stuff here i can go command r and now it's duplicate that whole section right um in time on the grid starting right here number nine is insert silence let's say you finished producing your song but you forgot to make an intro and you don't have any more room at the beginning of your session because you started everything too close to number one you could highlight everything move it over sure you could do that another way to do that is just go at the top here cycle it go to this drop down which is your toolbar like more tools i guess you could say and then just say insert silence and we do not want to move the temp changes so now we have another bar you could do that again to get another four bars or sorry two bars and you can do that anywhere in the song but now we have more space here without having to like move over everything and making sure everything is lined up it's pushed everything in regards to the grid so you know everything is still in time number 10 is locking regions so how do you do that how do you lock a region let's go to our base here and we right click and go down to smpte lock and we'd lock the region so now there's a little lock here and we can't move that anywhere so this is in context this can be helpful if you have tons of regions and you're kind of scrolling back and forth here or there this has happened to me before or i just accidentally moved something like that or even nudge it a little bit here and i don't know because i've been scrolling and zooming so if you are concerned about something moving that's why that option is there so you can lock regions you can also lock tracks but we'll get into that in a later tip shortcut let's move on to tip number 11 which is selecting all tracks and i'm not talking about command a what i'm talking about is under edit here you can go select select track sorry and here's where you can have an option to select tracks that are categorized i guess what they are so you can select all audio tracks and that's all the audio tracks you have in your session you can select tracks by color and this is how i use this in context so i really try to follow some type of color scheme with my instrumentation so if i want to like if i know my guitars are blue for example then i can just go here select tracks and go same colored because sometimes when you have tons of hundreds of tracks you might have guitars at the bottom you might have guitars at the top you might have organized your guitar is not in the same section because you might have organized it differently in parts so that's how i might want to use that in context i would select all my tracks for example all my guitar tracks same colored i could bus every guitar track out to a reverb i could put them put them in a new aux track i could delete all those tracks you can also go up here and you can you can select all the muted tracks you can select all the instrument tracks all the summing stacks it's just a bit quicker than having to go and search through the tracks and maybe like click command and click the tracks like this if you color code them correctly then you can do edit select all number 12 is the drag drop down options in logic here they are at the top we have drag no overlap overlap sorry overlap no overlap crossfade shuffle right shuffle left so what are these and how do you use them um and how i use this in context is with crossfade i typically would just have crossfade on here and what this means is drag whenever you drag a region into another region this is what's going to happen so you can cross fade for example actually now this is locked we'll have to unlock this unlock so let's go back up to our base here and we we noticed before in the earlier example that we might want to shift this over a bit right so let's just zoom in here and what we can do is as soon as we drag this region into this region it's going to generate a crossfade for us if we just undo that and we change this to overlap now when i go into this region it's just going to overlap that region you can see when i click this region to the left it's still there it's just underneath it for example now it's yeah now it's underneath it if i go back again changes to no overlap now it's just going to actually eat away at that region and so it's kind of cut that for you so there's different options where you might want to do that as well but for me and shuffle right and left is actually just going to shuffle these regions so quickly if i shuffle this move this over those regions are now going to be completely shuffled i don't never i never use that so i'm just using crossfades because like i was said before if i'm listening to this bass in context [Music] and i noticed you know what i want to just move this one over i'll cut it with my right click drag it in and now it's cross fade and i can edit this cross fade by just clicking command because i have my command fade tool here if i didn't have the fade tool i'd have to like for example this was a pencil i'd have to go at the top and you can edit the fade here it's fine you can do that but for me i just like having it quickly here that's just my personal workflow number 13 is using flex pitch for gain automation this is really valuable for vocals or any type of audio that you've played and you haven't properly or not properly but you haven't played consistently and some notes are quieter or louder so you want to adjust the gain i'm not talking about flex front flex pitch from the perspective of tuning things just gaining things so let's just cycle at the top and look at this bass as an example in context i might um actually let's do the guitar it's more i think realistic so if i press e to open up my editor window and i go to track i'll get the guitar notes here right and i can press this dna symbol and turn on flex and now i can go to this drop down flex pitch and you have to press the dna symbol again to get these little midi notes up here i don't know why you have to press it again that's just how it is i think so we can see here this is what flex pitch looks like you might be familiar with this and these are all midi notes on the left dot of each blue midi note is a gain option and you can increase the gain or decrease the gain of an audio signal so if this is your vocal or let's say this is your guitar which it is and you want to make this little note louder you would increase the gain here you could also decrease the gain and you can go through your signal like that in context while you're doing this it might be faster to do this in a region editor and we'll get to that in a little bit but if you are deciding to say hey i'm going to take a second and listen to this entire guitar track and just see if anything's pointing out then i might say do it inside flex pitch or you can quickly do it right within flex pitch and you can actually gain specific audio from the signal for example you can cut this and you can just gain up this section right you can really narrow in on what you want to gain i can cut that even more and now i'm just gaining this so it can be very kind of more surgical in flex pitch with gain but i would say if it's just a quick thing where you're listening in context and you're like oh something's jumping out too much then i would go and do it in the region editor and we'll get to how to do that in a little bit number 14 slip editing right while you're editing drums bass anything inside regions where you want to test out where the placement of the region so let's get into what i mean by that let's take a look at this base again if i highlight this region and i go control option left arrow watch what happens oh i'm set to my nudge value so let me um i didn't mention that right so you the slip editing has to be set to your nudge value it's kind of like nudging but you're not moving the region so slip editing just means you can move the notes within the region without moving the region so let's look at that if i right click and just set my nudge value and move to let's just say a beat right now then i go out and i go control option left you can see the region is moving within the region the notes are moving within the region and so i don't actually have to move the region itself i could just move the notes within the region and this can be really valuable while you're editing to test things without moving the region if you know your nudge value is set correctly you can just click on the region just go control option left if you want to try that at a different timing for base i wouldn't do this normally but i would do this for drums oops or for example my drums bus here i can go and set my nudge value i might not want to do a bar because the example i'm going to show you is just nudging over a tick so um 10 ticks so i'm going to do is control option right and that's just nudged everything over right within the region so i don't my region's still lined up nicely but i've nudged all the midi notes over respectively within the region tip number 15 is using flex time and we went over flex pitch just a minute ago this is actually the shortcut of flex time we're not getting into the editor flex time but the session view flex time so in context what i mean by that is you can get to flex time whenever by just pressing command f and it's going to open up in your session view here under every audio track not the midi tracks for example in context i just let's say i just add my guitar plugged into the the interface and i want to time it quickly so command f i'm going to do and i have flex time on i'm just going to change that to automatic and then it's just going to ask me okay and then i can quantize it in the region here by 16th note for example and right away it's quantized i know it's in time it's good enough for me to produce around there could be some bad notes and some artifacts in there but i don't care while i'm producing i just want something i can work with and that's how i would use that tip in context with the shortcut for flex time so let's do command f to get rid of that and we'll talk about tip number 16 i believe are we on 16 yes we're on 16. tip number 16 is removing silence from audio and you can quickly do that with any audio for example let's just take a look at this bass if i go on any region and i do control x this is going to open up this window and logic is telling me hey i think i'm going to put squares around anywhere where i think there's audio and then i'm going to delete everything else and you can adjust where you want the squares to be like if we increase or lower the threshold it's going to make the squares bigger if we um to increase the threshold it's going to delete everything so find the sweet spot of where you want to delete silence press ok and now you can see that the regions are now split up and the silence is removed you will have to have a listen back in context [Music] sometimes it really works sometimes it doesn't but it can be helpful if you just want to remove that dead space if you need to for vocals in context i wouldn't ever really do because i like to do it manually just because the lead vocal is such a prevalent thing and so i would go do it manually and then do my own cross fades but for bass guitars things that you don't need that dead space in it's fine to do that it's also not completely necessary to do it on everything if there's no noise right for example this was a midi bass that i just bounced to audio so there's no noise in between [Music] right so you don't need to do it on these kind of things you just need to do it on things that have noise number 17 in editing is the snap feature a really valuable feature that is will help you improve your editing it's at the top here beside drag we have snap we have an on off button too can turn it off and turn it on i always have it on and it's usually on smart for me but it changes when i'm doing some type of editing so what is snap basically snap means is in regards to your regions so it will logic will help you snap to certain areas on the grid for example if we have this set to bar and i try moving this base to bar or this to where the cursor is logic's not going to let me do that because i've set it to bar it's going to push me to 22. so let's try see i'm scrolling over and i want it to land on the cursor but i can't so if that's happening to you and you're like what the heck is going on it's likely because your snap is set to bar so move it to smart or if you know for a fact you're working in divisions then this can be really helpful because you know for a fact every time you scroll right you're going to go to the next division or for example um beats and every time you scroll you're going to go to the beats so for no if i did know i want to the cursor i can just go 2 over and now i know for a fact i'm on that um that beat i don't have to worry and zoom in and be like am i on time for example if i'm working with my drums in the drum buss here i know for a fact that i want my snare drums to be on beats so if i'm working with the snare region like for a while i can go to beats and i know every time i scroll left it's going to go on the beat because i know i want my snares on beat if i'm on smart that's okay it's not snapping me to the beat right so you know it's just it can be faster if you know for a fact you're working in beats just go like this and it's going to help you snap into place and it's just going to be a bit faster number 18 is triggered midi editing so what this means is and in context if we add two more of these alchemy synths here and i'm going to delete this region and i'm working with software instruments right okay so um if i put these in a summing stack and the shortcut for that is shift option d now each of these synths synth one sin two asant okay that's the sun and that's the sun sint and sun sun are now in this bus so if i make a region inside here on the summing stack that means and whatever i play in here it's going i'm sorry about the sirens it's pretty busy in berlin today and i just i'm not worried about the sound here but let's just program i don't even know what i'm programming in it doesn't really matter watch when audio is going to come out with all these three instruments because it can be triggered by the aux track [Music] i only have to do one program one track midi and then all these other tracks inside here are going to be triggered so why you might want to use this in context well if you know certain instruments share the exact same midi then you can save time by programming only one midi because you know that you know sun 2 and sun 3 are going to be sharing the same midi because sometimes it's nice to layer different types of synth sounds that share the same midi okay let's um remove this bus command backspace and get on to number 19 which is now inside the piano roll editor so we will primarily work with midi so i'm going to add a new software instrument track and work with this midi region now if i oppress e and open up this region let's get into some tips and shortcuts in the inside here let me quickly just play something on the piano so we can work with something here something's just super simple just to get the concept concepts down not worried too much about the actual sound right so the first thing is velocity and the velocity tool now you can notice we talked about tools at the beginning and there's three tools at least i have three up here there are also tools here that are different they're independent of these tools they can be different so for me i have the right click tool here as well and i always have it as velocity so that means i can just right click on any midi note and drag down and change velocity drag up and it's getting hotter this can is super valuable because i'm always changing velocities in context because i'm programming a lot of midi in and when you program midi in for example with the pencil tool if i just hold command and i'm drawing midi notes they're all green when you program them in so that's not cool right when you're making music you don't want everything to sound the same so when that happens when you program them in just right click and scroll down change the colors a bit and now you're getting more of a humanized sound so that's that tip try it with the right click tool if you're comfortable you can also have it here in the command tool and you can go hold command and just do it that way if you're more comfortable with it the other way besides that is you can just click it the note and go over here and do the slider but uh we're here for tips and shortcuts so i do recommend the right click so tip number 20 is quantization and you've likely heard of quantization before and i'm going to explain how to do it quickly so let's say i played this on the piano which i did but i've already quantized it typically when you play things on the piano or on the keyboard you're not going to play them in time and that's completely normal so this one would be here like this and this one would be here like this so a quick way to do quantization it's always set to the value over here by the way so if we know that we want these notes to land on bar 11 12 13 14 like on the bar we have to quantize by a whole note so it's command a and we can just press q on our keyboard and that's going to correspond to this note so i just press q and everything's moved over now the uh if you have 1 16th note if we just move back and this was to 1 16 and you did command a q you see how it mostly worked except this one didn't go over that's because everything is jumped to the nearest 1 16th note of how you played it so if you played this not close to bar 11 it won't be able to jump to bar 11 unless you choose a whole note and then we can go and command a and q again and that will jump over don't worry too much if you don't um know these yet as soon as you start working on quantization and doing it you're going to figure these things out really quickly now that's quantization with chords let's say let's just make another copy of a region the copy of this region i'll explain how to do these shortcuts later don't worry and i'm just going to delete this and let's say we actually have a melody so something like this and command r we can do command r because we've learned that shortcut already and our melody is like this okay now some notes are longer some notes are shorter and we played it also on our midi keyboards now we can do command a to 1 16th notes and press q and that's going to lock in everything to the 1 16th note i usually do 1 16 when i'm playing melodies and that's because you're you're gonna likely play within a 16th note while you're playing it on your keyboard if you play mostly in time now just to explain the whole notes thing again if i did whole notes with this quantization everything is going to jump to the whole note so that's 23 and 24 and 25. so don't worry if that happens you automatically did that you can just change it back to 1 16. all this is doing this thing here is moving it to the closest bar thing so let me zoom in here so 23 is a whole note 24 is a whole note these in the middle these are quarter notes see one two three four a quarter four things one two three four a quarter if we zoom in more you can see in between here there's going to be another eighth note just zoom in they should be able to see the grid i don't know why we can't see the grid well that's too bad anyways um the 8th notes and 16th notes are in there let's listen what a masterpiece and if that's how you want to it to sound then you've quantized it correctly it's all about the feeling at the end of the day tip number 21 is making all the midi notes the same length really quickly so sometimes if you are playing the midi notes on your keyboard it might look something like this they're all a difference in in length right totally normal however if you are using a synth and you want the notes to be all the same then in order to do that quickly instead of going one by one and making them all like let's say you want them all like a bar along right um you can highlight them and extend them out and you know bring them back in but a quick way to do that command a then go shift option then hold on any one doesn't matter which one and extend it to the bar let go and now they're all the same length they're one bar so i often in doing this in context with the synth so it's just some you know if this was if we change the sampler to a synth and so all this and now they all run into each other perfectly [Music] so this is tip number 22 and it has to do with the paintbrush tool making primarily hi hats in context is what i use it for but you can do it with other things if you have different ideas so i'll change this to my paint brush tool and you know what i'll actually do it with a hi-hat so i'll change this software instrument in my library to a drum kit and any drum kit it doesn't matter right now i'll press y to have that expand out i'm going to zoom in on this region here if i go here sometimes if you notice no names here you can zoom out in sorry zoom in and then the names will show up so these are all but just some extra tips here while we get into the actual tiff so let's just go to our hi-hat where is it hi-hat closed and we want to paint in an eighth note hi-hat so i'll go here eighth note and i can hold my command tool to get my paintbrush and you know you might be familiar with this right you can just go along the lines and record a hi-hat and like that now what happens sometimes is you just oh you go up here and then you you don't get a straight line so to fix that just hold shift and it will go straight through and now there's a little tip and additive while you're holding shift so while we hold shift and we go down i'm automatically changing the velocity and go up and i'm making it hotter and but i'm going straight so you can kind of like wave and i can go back too if you mess up so you can kind of like with your hand like wave the shape of the velocity that you want so i'll just delete that and you can like i said you can go back so i might want it harder at the beginning softer harder softer harder softer you know something like that and if you're like oh i messed up go back and just do it again oh i scrolled too far so it just gives it a bit more of a human feel if you do it like that instead of the other way where it's just like straight reds that's going to be very machine like so do that little shift tool and i'm just i'm mostly doing this with with high hats but you can do it with anything else number 23 is doing force legato in piano roll it sounds super theoretical but it just means having midi notes run into every other midi note so if we change this brooklyn track software and sprint to a bass track open up my library by pressing y go base and we'll just do a subby bass press y bring that back and i'm just going to change this to pencil press command and draw some notes in here i can also preview it if i press this green button on [Music] side tip to this if you do um command a and and uh while you're making all the notes the same if you actually are holding shift option and do the velocity change at this moment it's going to make all the velocities the same so i just scroll down now all the velocities are at 20. now all the velocities are at 127. so that can be really valuable if you are working a synth instrument for example in these chords here oh boy we're getting a bit off topic on this t on this tip we're going to go back to it in a second it's a little bonus tip for anyone who's made it this far in the video i'll do command a and you don't you notice how i made those all the same right so a shift option made these the same now velocity notice how they're all different and if i want them all to be 127 i can't go over here command a and scroll up to 127 because that's only going to make the relative change in all of these what i have to do is command a shift option then scroll down because i have my velocity tool my right click and now they're all red hot okay back to this tip though where we're talking about force legato with a base track in context so maybe you played the bass on the midi controller and it looks like this and you have a bit of a bass line [Music] and you want all the notes to run into each other well you can't do shift option like this because you don't want them all to be the same length you just want them to run into each other so what you have to do there is command a right click on the one of the midi notes doesn't matter which one and then you can go um trim note n to selected forced legato now that's going to move every mini note into the next one so there's no space and there's no dropouts i'm doing that most the time with bass because i don't want the bass the low end to drop out at all or maybe you have a synth melody you have a piano part if you don't want any dropouts and you don't have a sustained pedal you didn't program a sustain in then you can do forced legato to have those run into each other number 24 is how we can make a couple things on how we can make midi feel more human let's go back to our region here where we have a chords this would not be human it's all red hot and let's change this back to a piano piano yamaha and press y to get rid of this area so the first thing is velocity and we already touched on that so you would go through these and maybe bring the entire velocity down just gonna take the preview off so it's not super annoying i would change the velocity of each note respectively that's the first thing to make midi feel more human but we've already talked about that the second thing would be um timing and having things not not completely quantized so you can do a couple things with that you can do command a and then we have the options to decrease the strength of the quantization so notice how they're all moving to the right and if you just go maybe now go to taste you know if you go too much it might just sound out of time you don't want things out of time you just want it to sound a bit more human so bring that down a bit that's going to make it sound a bit more human and also in the region editor is where we have more things where we can make our sound more human so up here drop down we have these things q velocity q length q flam q range q strength all of these q things have to correspond with this value up here quantize so if we turn this on uh by 116 the whole note now everything's quantized you see like it was but we're at 70 70 let's say and we have now the option to change these flam is cool slam is like when you play the notes kind of like a trill like one at a time i'll show you what that means if i increase the flam you can see the notes are played like one two three one two three one two three if you push the flam too much it sounds weird so maybe just go you know 20 ticks and now every note is not played the same and that's what humans do we don't play every chord the same so you can also cue the length maybe make not every note the same length you can also change the velocity here you can also change the strength of the quantization here more and the range of the quantization go in here and change the q values until you think your midi sounds more human and by all means you don't have to do any of this if you want more mechanical midi i wouldn't do any of this if you want more mechanical midi number 25 one quarter way through is midi in and midi out features in the piano roll editor it happens to do with these two buttons here what are they and what did they do so this one to the right is midi out which means it's technically a preview when you put midi notes in you'll be able to hear them right and when you click windy notes you'll be able to hear them this is super valuable sometimes when you're programming midi in it's also super annoying sometimes when you're editing midi so you can turn that off midi in is a really cool feature if you're programming midi in as well for example let's delete this if you have your midi controller here and you just click on a note it shows up so if you know for a fact you want to play a g major chord there's the g major chord and then you can go in and extend it and line it up if you know on bar 12 you know i want an a minor chord it shows up right on a minor so in context you might be like i know a progression i really like it goes a minor and then oops a minor then on bar 12 it goes c and then on bar 13 it goes f and then on bar 14 it goes g so now you have all the mini data in there and then you can use all the things that we just talked about like command a shift option moving them all the same length then change the velocities a bit now here's the thing because we made in those notes we didn't play them right so we put them right on the bar you can't really um you notice if i move the quant when i move the quantization of these this note or all notes down it doesn't change and that's because we didn't play it so there's no reference point of where to bring it back to so the midian feature is really valuable if you are more comfortable programming midi in with your keyboard versus the mouse number 26 is um more features in the region editor with regards to midi but also more valuable in my opinion for audio so let's move on from this yamaha ground and go back to this electric guitar [Music] so with this guitar we can do multiple things within the region editor without going into everything what i want to focus on are fades gain and reverses so we mentioned previously in the video on another tip to use flex pits for gain automation on some things the quicker way to do that if you are listening in context and we're listening to this guitar [Music] and i'm like you know what i would really like this part here just to be a bit louder i can go ahead right click and cut this you see what what's happening here is because i have my snap on beat it's not letting me cut the the division it's snapping right to vars beat 17 and i don't want that so i have to go back here and turn this to smart now i can cut in here and then i can increase the gain by clicking and dragging up and the click drag functionality is in a lot of places in logic so you can also click and write something in 10 or 1. but just you can click and drag down or click and drag up and then that will increase the gain this is a lot faster than going into flex pitch right and turning that on and having your computer run flex pitch so if it's just a couple things here and there i recommend cutting the region and doing the gain automation in here so that's one thing i use a lot with the region editor the other thing is fades whenever you do phase for example i have the command tool i might fade this and then i might crossfade this here in the region editor is where you can edit the fades too so i can go here and you can see i fade in at 113. if i want a larger fade of a thousand now we have a big fade and i can edit it here as well so this is where the fades are coming from we can also edit a curve here we can make it a curve 10 we can also click and drag up and increase that curve click and drag down and inverse the curve so this is where you can edit fades or you can actually just do fades at the beginning if you want to completely get rid of it and you only want a little little fade so just one because you can hardly see it here right sometimes that's good if there's just a pop that's happening like if there was just a tiny little pop on this guitar then but i don't want to i don't want to ruin any of this transient like i don't want to have a fade like this because i want that audio to be played then if you don't want to dissect and go into it so surgical with your tool just go over to the region editor and click in one the other thing is reverses so let's take this little note here [Music] and let's say i want that to be use this part as uh i want to reverse that audio to create some tension going into this actual guitar part what i can do here is duplicate this track command d i can duplicate this region and i'll get into these shortcuts in a little bit i don't want to overwhelm too much but the idea is to make a copy of this region come down here and then you have a reverse checkbox here just click that and now this guitar signal is reversed if i just solo this out [Music] and i might not want this at the this one at the beginning so i'll just cut that and then i'll fade it with my command tool and i will line it up here move it over a bit i'll fade it out now coming into this section we have something like this not too worried about the production the concept of how to reverse is really easy because you can do it in the region editor let's move on to 27 which is also a new category it's talking about production tips and the first one and we did kind of reference it when we were talking about region locks track protection so track protection is basically in track header components we can lock an entire track so if we're really scared that something is going to change and we can lock it and that's the purpose of that while you're producing or mixing and you you really like something and you don't want it to move so let's say we're really in love with this bass sound it's like super awesome bass and we don't want anything to be touched we go to track header components and it's under here it is track protect and because we have a check mark it's already on we could which is this button here lock it and now this track entire track is locked we can't move any of these regions trying to move them but saying you can't do that it can be really handy sometimes if you have a track with a thousand different regions or you have a track where um you made a vocal comp and um in context that's how i would use it sometimes when i'm comping vocals i might have a vocal track here with you know maybe 60 70 100 different regions because i'm comping different things and i don't want any of that to be moved timing-wise because i've locked it in and if i just have to move a mistake sometimes and click my mouse somewhere i'll just protect the track and then i can kind of rest my mind that nothing will be changed so i'll just unprotect that right now and move on to tip and shortcut and trick number 28 which is groove tracks while you're producing so if you're just starting a song and you have a bass groove you really like and or you have a drum groove you really like you want that to be the the principal groove of your song you can set that to intel logic to have other instruments move to that so let's say we love this bass groove [Music] and we want things to groove to that [Music] so what we're going to do is um groove track it also has to be in track header components so we right click track header components and then there's this thing down here called groove track so if we click that on nothing's going to happen here so you have to but you notice when i highlight over these colors there's going to be stars and this is what has to do with groov track basically i'm going to click that star and now when it's a star that's the groove track and you're telling logic make other tracks groove to this track so for example let's say i want the electric guitar to groove to it then i click the electric guitar nothing else will groove to it unless you tell it to groove to it and now logic is going to make that move a bit more and you can also tell logic how much you want to move the track to the groove track so if we go up to the region editor you can see already quantize base it's it's quantized to the base and you can increase the strength of that quantization if you don't want it to be moved that much puts down a zero if you're like i want it to be moved 65 then put it to 65 same thing for drums same things for piano anything that you want to groove to your groove track first set it up with a star and then click the check boxes and then you can um tell logic how much you want to move to the group track in the region editor number 29 is stretching audio this is great if you are importing samples for example let's do that right now and for the purpose of this i'll just import a logic sample um just an acoustic guitar here let's say we got this from splice or from the internet or a pack or something this is the same this the principle is the same we basically drag the sample in i'm just going to drag it up i'm going to solo it out and i'm actually going to get rid of the groove tracks right now track header components and just get rid of groov track so let's just have a listen to this guitar [Music] actually logic loops aren't great for this because they put everything in time so i will open up splice because i want something just a little bit out of time i'm just going to delete that and i'm going to just search piano and i'll just put a piano part in not worried about the sound right now but the purpose is that here you can see this piano part [Music] it's not in line with our tempo it's not on the grid we want it to be flush with the grid so in order to the shortcut for that is hold option and you're going to get a bracket with squiggly lines on each end and stretch it to the nearest grid and let go now it didn't work we stretched it the wrong way i think it's because i was just lined up on the grid we want it to be like this we're going to stretch it in for these to these four bars it's really going to speed it up let go have a listen with the drums [Music] now it's really killing the quality of the piano you can hear that so that's a perfect example of you cannot stretch everything because this the original piano is in 75 and we're going to 90. [Music] so we're really killing a lot of the quality so you can't stretch and put everything in time but that's how you would do it hold option get the squealy brackets and then move it over to the grid tip 30 is a transposing audio so same idea when you are importing samples into things or maybe you want to shift the entire key of your song because you want to sing it in a different and a different key so you want to transpose it up or down very easy let's do to this piano again so it's in c major here we can see it but we want to put this down so we want this actually in uh b so what we can do is option and go down arrow and now this is actually in b so if we want to go c sharp we go option up oops sorry option i did command option up now it's one so now it's c sharp a transpose up and you can keep going two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve up as high as you want down as low as you want if you wanna go octaves at a time you can go shift option down and that's an octave down shift option down shift option down shift option up up up by 12. so in context i'm doing this with samples if i know if i bring a c major in but i know my song is in b then i know i have to go down one and now i'm in key now the other way i do this is if i have a piano part here down here right what i might do it's just going to cut that there is i might actually say i like this piano but now i want another synth but a lower octave so i might do command d bring this region down and do shift option down so now this is the same chords but this one is a lower octave so it's going to give just a more rich a rich feel not a good example sound wise but a good conceptual example of how you would do that in context i do that a lot of the time i probably did it with these synths down here when i bounced these i may have i probably used the same midi for the juno and the keys but i would have shift i would have transposed them differently up different octaves so they're in different areas in the stereo image so you can have more space covered you can also do this in the region editor um like we discussed before in the region editor you can click this sleepy piano here go to the region editor and there is a transpose option so you can see we've done it down one you can click and drag and do that here click and drag up also as always you can double click in and just write an in a number and there you go so that's 30 31 would be using alchemy as your first vst that you should get used to before you go out and spend on a vst i use i still use alchemy in my professional productions so let's take a look without getting too deep just some things that you can look into alchemy is on my default software instrument if i click in the middle it opens up the synth and there's a ton of sounds there's 382 3182 presets available for you to look through there's too many to even remember but also you can go to vance and you can design your own sounds here and if you click on one of these a and you go to import audio you can then get more sounds in here there's so much you can do with this synth and i don't want to design a synth sound right now but i want to show you it is possible and if you've heard things like serum or this kind of thing really really solid synth serum and all paid vsts are really good but this will help you get your feet wet i think before you get into that so it's not overwhelming when you buy your first virtual vst if you already have vsds and stuff no worries you can always still go back into into alchemy and supplement here coming back to browse you don't even need to get into the advanced thing if you don't want come back to browse look for a sound every sound you have has eight different options preset options within that sound and then you can just dial some of these a little bit here without getting so advanced number 32 is adding other plugins instruments anything from previous logic files that you have into this logic file that you're working in so for example this song i'm working in um i know for a fact i produced a song a couple weeks ago i really like the bass sound i didn't save it as a preset or anything i just know it's in that logic file and i want to go and get that file so one thing you could do is open up that logic thing bounce the audio look at what you did on the inspector window and then try to copy it but don't do that because that's too long do this instead go up here to your file browser go to this little icon which is your logic files and then go to the logic file that you know your file is in so for me i know i really liked a bass sound that i made and i know it's in the circles remake so i'm going to click circles remake and here are all the files that are in that session so these names here would be like these names in here so here's my base and then if i scroll to the right i can choose what i want to bring in do i want to bring the content i don't necessarily need the content but i just want the actual instrument i want the plugin that's what i need but for the case of this video i'll bring in the content i don't need the cells i don't need the sends i don't need the i o i don't even know what this is can't see it automation i don't need the automation and i don't know what this is keep bus number i don't need that stuff i just need plugins and i need the content for okay so let's add here it is base this is the entire bass track from the other session including what i actually programmed so i can just shorten this up we don't need that i don't need the file browser anymore bring that in now i can open up the base sound i can see what i've programmed in that's the exact base that i had a preset and trillion that i um edited a bit and i'd like it a lot and now i can play it directly on my midi keyboard [Music] and i'm ready to go with this song i can if i want to just remove that content and i can play along right away with my drums so in context i'm doing this a lot with tracks i'm producing because i don't save everything that i've produced right sounds i've made if i like a vocal sound if i'm producing an artist that i really like the vocal sound i can drag that in and sample that vocal this is going to save you a lot of time while you're producing because if you remember something you really liked just import it into file browser and you have it right away in your production session number 33 the beloved option plus click move which everyone uh needs to know which is just i'm just going to cut that and that is just holding option pressing left click and moving things over it makes copies so fast and you can do it like this you can do two at a time four at a time so that again is just holding option left click bring it over letting go of click first and then option if you hold option click and let go option that's not going to work so you have to go hold option click then let go of click first you can do this also with entire sections and of songs so if i want all of these and i want to duplicate the chorus before we um talked about this we could we could just go command r right and that would duplicate it here but if i want it over at bar 89 i can go highlight option click and drop it at 89. and now i have it there i could also go command our command command command or command r then delete those bring it over you know there's multiple ways to do things in in logic but option click is going to be your best friend with me for making copies of things option click actually has to little side thing here on this one as well you can do option click on things in pretty much most things in logic to reset things so for example this bass sound is set at negative 7.2 if i option click it's going to go back to zero option click back to zero option click back to zero this goes for panning too if i accidentally pan this base off the left option click back to zero this is just going to save you tons of time instead of just scrolling you know getting back up to zero just go option click it resets things option click back to zero same thing for plugins if you open up a compressor plug-in and you've increased the the ratio option click brings it back you've increased the threshold option click brings it back so think of option click as like a reset thing and a copy making tool in in the session view um what else does it go for oh yeah right here on the sends if you have sends to like a reverb and let's say something like this you can go option click and that's going to go full send up to zero so this is really valuable like if you it's just so much faster than doing it like as you would scroll scroll scroll where zero there's zero went past it oh and before it went past it oh pass it it's hard to get on zero sometimes but just go option click zero option click zero so option click reset but option click also making copies in the session view here number 34 is making copies of plugins to other tracks very quickly for example in context if i have two pianos and i'm editing a piano here and i have a tape delay on this piano and let's say i want this tape relay to be on this piano below so one way to copy that over you could copy the channel strip but this is going to copy all the plugins you just want the tape delay what i would recommend is open up x this is your mixer if you just press x it's going to open up this window and your mixer will open up by default with whatever track like the highlighted track here will be the highlighted track on your mixer so we have yamaha grand let's just you say i'm out ground one and yamaha grand two so yamaha rand one is going to be highlighted here here we go so we just want it over on yamagaha grand 2 which is here so all we have to do is hold option and drag that over and now so it's the option click it's the same it's the segway into the option click tip before it's just holding option you can kind of as you can make copies of regions you can also make copies of plugins i can do this over here i can do this over here i'm copying all these plugins like this and then you can just delete the ones you don't want and i'll leave that one there and then just press x and you're now down number 35 happens to be i think one of my favorite tips of workflow productivity tips with making beats is saving drum patterns in the step sequencer how we would do that well let's open up a new step sequencer track new software instrument track and we're going to um go over here go to drum machine designer now we're going to exit this window down i'm going to x the library just going to zoom in cycle at the top here and solo this for a second press e and go to the step sequencer so if you're not familiar with the step sequencer it's okay um what i'm going to do now is load in a drum set so we can work with some sounds right now so i'll go i'll have to open up my library again and just go to electronic drum kit let's open up an 808 for this circ this case close the library back here opening up the step sequencer there are many different types of patterns you can use with drums but there are some standard drum patterns that you you might like maybe it's a four on the floor kick or you have a certain beat pattern that you like save these patterns so you can reuse them as starting points even for your next sessions so for example if we just have a kick snare maybe kick snare pattern like this now we can save this pattern so we can call it our four on the floor snare pattern and in order to do that we will click this little window here the user patterns you see i have a four on the floor pattern already i can go here and go save pattern and i can just call this um for floor and snare maybe and now that's saved so now we can if we delete this entire drum track and we start from scratch new software instrument drum machine designer and we load up another 808 flex or even a different kit and an atlantic kick kit doesn't have to be the same we go to our step sequencer by pressing e and we can go to if that was closed just open up this again go to user patterns and we have four on the floor and snare and there's our pattern using the same kick and snare options as it was even though the kit was different you can also use use the template patterns that are available so open up this again if you don't see any other thing to the left you gotta go to the bottom here and scroll this is kind of bad design i think but you go to templates here and you can see oh sorry patterns there are also templates patterns is what i want to discuss and you can go to drums and then you can choose any pattern like let's look at robot funk this is a robot funk pattern like a full on pattern let's listen now this is using the atlanta drum kit so we can go over into our library and change to the 808 flex now we have the 808 flex sounds with this same robot funk pattern kind of don't like the robot funk let's try the modern analog [Music] you know this is what you get with some of these patterns and they're not always that good but sometimes you can get inspired let's see here that's a cowbell right let's get rid of the cowbell [Music] and maybe i don't like that huge open hat [Music] you can see there's different regions at the top here we can also just start changing the steps if we just want to be this [Music] have a look at different patterns that are available for free and logic to boost your creativity and and get inspired okay let's get on to tip number 36 let's remove that and let's talk about recording reverse reverbs actually and how you would do reverse reverbs we kind of made one down here earlier in this video with the electric guitar and i deleted it already that's okay because we're going to start something from scratch you've likely heard of this kind of reverse reverb stuff before and you can do this on on anything that has a transient and what i mean by that is something kind of that looks like this actually like a triangle on its side that has something hard at the beginning that sustains and lasts through so a great instrument that does that is a crash hit and we're gonna do it with a crash hit in this video as an example so new software instrument and i'm gonna go open up a drum kit any old drum kit right now not worried about the sound t p to make a region and t t back to select double click and look for a crash hit this is fine so i got this crash it here i'll make it a bar in length and i'll make it i'll increase the velocity right click and bring that up swallow that out just to crash it right it sustains pretty long so what we want to do is add some reverb over to plugins and add a reverb i'll do space designer and i'll just look for a big preset so yeah large space let's do indoor spaces sure a big old church so now we have a big old church reverb on this crash [Music] lots of reverb great what we want to do now is bounce this in place we want to bounce this to audio so we can reverse this thing so i can do control b don't want to bypass the effects and i do want to include the tail that's very important and i'll have normalize on press ok we have it down here same exact sound but it's going to be a lot louder because i've put normalize on so i'll just quiet that a bit [Music] we just click it go over to our region editor we've already discussed reverses just click reverse the idea is you line up the reverse here that comes in right to your chorus or where you want it to come in and i just right click to cut that and i'm going to maybe have it start well actually i'm not sure probably bar right here this beat so i don't i'm going to remove that and then i'll go command fade that in so right now in solo and i'll just press s to solo this here's what it sounds like so you've heard this kind of thing before right adds great suspense coming into the chorus here you can also bounce this in place again so ctrl b and then reverse this and have this come in like this so it's kind of moving in it's like crashing into one another we can fade that out [Music] you'd have to play with it to get the right kind of vibe going you know [Music] and that's what production is playing with things but the idea is that's how you would do a reverse reverb on things now let's move on to tip 37 though which is you can actually make the same thing with just the reverb sound and i wanted to do this as a new tip because i also do i record reverb for different instruments to make pad sounds so how do you record reverb from a different track let's focus on this guitar for a second [Music] what i'm going to do theoretically is i'm going to put a lot of reverb on this track and then i'm going to have another track here that's going to record just the reverb from this guitar so i have this setup in my production template already which is makes it really easy to do and i'll walk you through how to do this so i'm going to turn my plugins on on the guitar i'm going to leave the reverb off just ignore that right now now i'm going to output this electric guitar here to a different bus output this will be my bus effects bus 18 pad effects so now we're going here my electric guitar and is coming to bus 18. and in bus 18 it has a super massive reverb and in in an eq which is doing nothing right now but i could do something like this just to clean up the lows and the highs so if i play this track now it's going to be wild because there's going to be a lot of reverb so have a listen [Music] what i want to do now is set up a new track and record just the reverb i don't really want that the pluckiness of the guitar in there so what i'll have to do is add a tr an audio track and have the input of the audio track not to be my interface because i'm not recording it i want the input to be plus 19 because that's what this track is here it's going to bus 19. so we have the guitar coming in going to bus 18 coming up here into here bus 18 and then out to bust 19. so it's just a bus ride that's all it is and then we have new audio track the bus has to come to make a stop into here so we need to change this input to bus 19. now the bus is coming in here and it's going to go through these plugins but we don't need any plugins here and it's going to go to the stereo out so once we record enable this track it's going just to want to freeze it once we record enable this track boy now we're just going to record in here the reverb so let's do that let's record [Music] [Applause] [Music] so now we have we can call this reverb pad if we solo the reaver pad it will just be the reverb sorry mute that [Music] and then we can go back to our guitar here and we can change the output back to the stereo out because we want our regular guitar sound so we have a regular guitar sound but we have that reverb pad way behind it but we have our normal guitar here and then this reverb pad [Music] you can just mix it in ever so slightly and okay so you can also extend this further you can filter that you can add your own effects on this reverb pad right now this is all it is an audio track that sounds like a guitar with reverb on it so i can eq this like this i can automate it like this going up to like have it as a suspenseful thing [Music] you know that can be really cool to have automated going into a course and we will touch on automation and how to do that we'll leave that for another example it's a future tip down the line so not to be discussed right now number 38 is the slow down and speed up fades feature in logic which is a super underrated cool production hack trick you can do and let's do it on the electric guitar again you know what it sounds like [Music] so we would do it just like we would add any other fade for me my fade tool like you know by now is in my option tool there and i add the fade i'm going to edit a little bit and now if i right click there on the fade you'll see fade in speed up so i'm talking about the speed up thing if i click that it's going to change color and now it's going to sound like this super cool right and it's that easy and then at the end we can do a fade down so if i just move this over for a second and fade this down right click slow down it's gonna sound like this [Music] and then and we don't have to have it that much if we don't want to we can curve it out maybe like this [Music] you can get creative it's more of a production thing in my mind so that's speed up and speed down with fades in context i do this sometimes as a quick intro for things if you need it or before a drop sometimes you can drop everything down and then lift it up back in the chorus number 39 is saving your own audio bloops the things you've made as apple loops so the loops that you can you can create loops that will be could be available for here only for you that are locally on your computer let's say you really like this loop it's an 8 bar loop and you want that for future use available in apple loops you right click you go to export expo add to loop library and then here you say no you you name it cool guitar loop you can have it as a loop or a one shot one shots typically this would be a loop because you'd want to loop it but a one shot you might be like you've designed a snare sound you like or a kick sound or one thing that you it happens at one thing that's what a one shot is provide some metadata so you can find it later on click click create once you do do that will be available in here under the metadata that you saved it in and you can go and click and drag it in and use it in any of your further projects number 40 using latch automation so we kind of touched a bit on automation when we were working on this reverb pad a few tips ago so let's get back into that and we will automate the filter going up and we can um talk about why you should use latch automation for productivity when you're producing quickly how you how you might want to automate that is go into automation by pressing a adding the plug-in you want right like the filter going to the filter finding out where the high cut frequency is or for example if you want to do a logic eq going to a high cut frequency drawing it in and that's how you could do it this is fine however i'm just gonna undo that what's faster way is you don't even have to go into automation you don't even have to press a ever what you can do is with latch automation it's always available in this area here just so you know if i open up a again you see the read drop down retouch latch right this is also available here retouch latch right and it's available there because we don't have to go into a we don't have to go into this window we can just go over here press latch now this means when i press spacebar and this track starts playing whatever i do to this track it's going to be automated so let's do a quick a small volume automation and then a filter automation so i'm going to press space bar and then i'm going to increase this fader up over time [Music] [Music] okay now let me press a just so you can see that but we don't have to because we know it's in there here it is volume we just program that in then if you want to go in and edit it more you can zoom in and we can go hey okay you know i want to make that nice and clean i can go like this and then that's fine you don't have to do that though so let's do the filter automation because we still have latch we can still open up a plug-in and then we can now automate this filter to open up [Music] [Music] now that's in there x go back to read it's super important that we go back to read because if we don't and we touch anything while the song is playing it's going to program that in so then we don't even have to go into a because we know that's in there we can just take a listen back and we know that's programmed in there so that's the benefit of using latch automation just go over to the right press latch program the thing you want in and then you can just quickly start quickly get those ideas out tip number 41 which has to do with automation as well is you can use um quick access automation so if you have a controller with knobs on it where you want to use the knobs to control the automation like when i was doing this filter if you would rather not do it with your mouse which i'm doing but a knob so you can be a bit more tactile bit more surgical you need to go to uh the settings which is logic preferences automation and down here it says automation quick access put that on and then assign a knob so if you have a knob here i don't because i'd use she's uncomfortable using the mouse but if you'd rather start turning the slowly move turn the control up and down you want to assign and then logic will know and then you press done and that's it then you can go back to the automation and do it with the knob easy as that number 42 still on automation is if you prefer later on when you're producing and getting more narrowed in on the automation and you're doing it within the automation window so for example in a typically you would have to click in right and then create dots and then from there you would you know create more dots and make sure you're not affecting everything on the left and the right of that an easier way to do that let's just go back here is with your marquee tool so this is when i might switch to marquee tool and then i'll draw a square on this region let me just zoom in here and then click in and you'll see it's created two dots for me so i can go right away and just go up and it has those two dots down so it's not affecting anything to the left to the right and then you can just affect that region then you can go in with this one sorry and you can go down so that's also a super fast way use the marquee tool to your advantage if you'd rather program it in with your mouse and using dots like this number 43 which also is on automation is if you're unsure what parameters to choose inside automation so for example let's just take a look here if i'm in a and i want to automate a low cut frequency or a high cut frequency with the channel eq for example and it's i don't know where to choose that in the channel eq because you have to go down here and choose what you want to automate right what's easier in my opinion is just go up to mix you have to turn something on this is probably selected off for you because it's default selected off it's auto select automation parameter in read mode if you click that on and then you can click on anything here like this now it's available in the automation it knows it's just connecting those two together so if you go over here and scroll down like you want this to do a high cut frequency just click that go back to your automation then click in now you have a high cut frequency and you can program that in with dots or like we said sorry go with your marquee make a square click in and then you have the thing and you can program it in that's a easier way instead of having to go search through all the parameters of the plugins because that can be really cumbersome as well if you're using paid plugins like if we're using um let's say a paid reverb for example like a vintage verb and logic still will will calculate that so we can go here just mix valhalla mix great go here click in now i've got my valhalla mix i don't have to go through the valhalla verb here and go even though it's not that actually complicated here sometimes it can be so when in doubt go out to mix turn on auto select automation parameter and read mode and then you're after the races with automation number 44. let's talk about side chaining and sidechaining your kick specifically we'll also discuss a little bit on how to sidechain your reverb theoretically what a side chain mean when your bass is playing because the the they share the same low end frequency the bass is going to be ducked a little bit when the kick happens to leave more space for the kick and you can determine how much it's going to duck which means reduce the sound of the bass and sidechain is a production tool you can use on any instrument on a synth on a vocal on on anything it it's more of a production thing in my mind than a mixing thing because it gives a pumping effect there's a rhythm effect that comes with side chain and you can also determine the rhythm of it based on what we're going to go through right now how i like to do side chaining is i set up a track called the ghost track and this ghost track is going to be our rhythm and it doesn't really matter what the sound is but in our purposes we'll make it a kick and we'll call it a ghost kick so track new software instrument track and we'll just go to a drum kit any drum kit and we will just make a region here a long region for the entirety of the of the trap of the song bring it up here call it a ghost kick and this is important i'm going to change the ghost kick output to no output so there's no sound that's why we call it a ghost kick and then i'm going to just go to the kick here okay so i can just make a pattern here and so what i'm doing is option i'm right now i'm doing option cold click to make those patterns i can also do this and do command r so this would be a bar pattern not much pumping going on if you want to do like a four on the floor pattern let me just move those over to bar one here a four on the floor pattern would be more something like this we just command our command our command r and then we can command our all that multiple ways to do this to make different copies of things command r is pretty easy though and then we can go over like that again command r so that's basically the entirety of the track so now we have a four on the floor kick that's going to give a popping effect on any base and i will add a base just to show you what that actually sounds like so let me just add any bass here a subbie bass will do and i'll just play some notes in here two three four [Music] let's just use that as an example we will actually probably get to do this to go over some of the lessons that we've already done all the command a shift option make them all the same size and i'll quantize that by a whole note and remake them actually do command a and i'm going to make them shift option and all the same velocity so right click and about 120 and another shortcut i will go shift option down to move it down a whole octave because i programmed it in too high okay so we have our base now how do we make this sidechain pumping effect with this ghost kick we need to add a compressor to the base there is already compressor so we could just go and add it here and now i will go to side chain you'll see this on every logic plug-in and i can go or every logic compressor sorry and i can go to instrument because our ghost kick is an instrument that's what we're looking for right now down here ghost kick so what's going to happen now is there's going to be a pumping effect of a four on the floor kick with our base and you're going to hear that when i play the bass now [Music] you can hear that right there's a lot of clicking going on because i'm really compressing it but you hear it for the sake of hearing it this is without the compression sorry this is without the compression [Music] this is with the side chain now we can choose any other rhythm we want here in the ghost kick at the beginning here we can have a rhythm like this if we want it doesn't necessarily need to be four on the floor from a production perspective you can get quite creative with these rhythms and you can go something like this it can be anything you get the idea now it will sound different when we play the space that's how you would sidechain something choose a rhythm with your ghost kick instrument and this is important what the instrument is it's more the pattern of the midi and then go to the instrument you want to have the movement add that compressor and link it up in the compressor so we'll link it up here in the drop down go find the instrument there and then it will provide that rhythm when you're in the compressor something i didn't mention is the more threshold you go down here the more pumping effect you're going to get now theoretically we can also do this to a vocal and its own reverb you can side chain the reverb to the vocal signal so that would mean whenever the vocal is playing the reverb is being brought down in volume it's being ducked and whenever the vocal is not singing the reverb shines out so that can be really cool because in lead vocals sometimes when the person is singing you want it to be up and close right and you want to hear the vocal and you want to be up front in the mix but when they stop singing you might want that voc that reverb to fill that empty space and you would do it very similar to how we just did the instruments but you basically would go to your reaver wherever your reverb bus is and you would need to compress your reverb with your lead vocal so i will do maybe another video on that without getting too extending this video too too much tip number 45 is turning audio files into midi files yes this is possible if you get a midi or sorry an audio file that you really like the melody but you don't know what it is and you want to recreate it in midi or you want it to edit it a little bit you can choose any audio file let's do it with the our electric guitar down here and with our guitar we can solo it out we have an audio audio right we can open up our editor by pressing e and we already have flex pitch on but we want to go to this dna symbol go flex and go flex pitch uh yeah this is fine we can reapply this all of these little blue things are midi notes so that's what we want so we just have to highlight them all actually i don't even think you need to highlight them all since we have the region highlighted we can go edit down to create midi track from flex pitch data click that and then it will put a new track software instrument below with your default software instrument so mine's alchemy and we have this midi data [Music] so it is right it's playing the right notes the sound is wrong so we might want to go in and change that sound or at least you know what the pattern is like and you can go and edit it and do as you please with the new midi data that you've taken from an audio file tip number 45 and now we're in a new category as well we're talking about workflow productivity this first one is semicolon it's a shortcut that moves region to the playhead and i'm using this a lot for example if i know and you can do this for regions and multiple regions so let's just unsolo everything if i know i want this bass for example this bass region to come over to the beginning of the verse i just have to press semicolon and it will snap there i can also do that with multiple regions like i was saying if i want this little yamaha grand these two regions here semicolon and it all jumps over number 46 is how to manage zooming going in and out very quickly and you've probably noticed me doing this throughout the tutorial and how am i doing this and what is my personal workflow so for me i'm more of a mouse user so what i do is if you hold option and scroll up and down on your mouse you will make the tracks fatter if you scroll in you will make the tracks skinnier so i'm going up and down like this and then if you also hold option and scroll left or right then you will make the tracks wider and then thinner but you can really only do that if you're using a track pad right and i have a mouse so i can't really scroll left with my mouse so what i do and what my work around is for that is i have a track pad in my i use a mouse on my right hand and a track pad in my left hand so i pinch zoom with my left hand to make the tracks thinner and fatter or wider sorry and then i scroll up and down with my mouse to do that so if i'm like wanting to get in on this area quickly i'll go option scroll down and then trackpad scroll wide trackpad up now i'm here so essentially what i'm doing here is just moving these are the shortcuts to what these things are these is this is fatter and this is wider if you're also more comfortable on the keyboard with this kind of things you can do option up and down and left and right so if you're on the keyboard with your two hands pressing down pressing up while i'm holding sorry command i've said did i say option you hold command up and down and command left and right you can zoom in quickly number 47 is duplicating tracks i pretty much in context only duplicate tracks i'm rarely ever going up here and adding new tracks under the track menu because if i know i want a new software instrument then i just go to a software instrument of what i have and i command d so i just command d on this base and then i might go in here and change like you know i wanted a a synthesizer or i wanted a paid instrument down here if i want an audio track and go down here this is an audio track i can press command d now when you do this you're copying you're making a duplicate of the track right so this is a bad example because i just made it made a duplicate track of a reverb recording where we um have a different input so i might get confused if i go and start recording this track as a vocal or something and i realize the input is bus 19. i need to have that as input 1 or something not that big of a deal but that's what command d is you can press it multiple times to get multiple instant instances of the instrument and you can also go highlight them all and go command backspace to delete multiple tracks but an in context example of how i might use this would be okay so i have this piano part and what i would do if i want a lower synth and we kind of went through this example i do command d to draw a new software instrument i would change to like a pad sound so i just go here and search pad and let's just for the purpose use anything then i would copy option click hold the region down and then shift option down to bring it down 12 semitones these are all the tips before this if you haven't watched it up in up until this point in the video and now we can use this we can lower that [Music] obviously really wrong pad sound but maybe something [Music] number 48 is using the period and comma keys to jump left and right in your session if you are maybe up and close doing some recording um whenever you press um period you will go to the right whenever you press comma you will go to the left and this happens to do with bars it's not based on your nudge value like when we were talking about nudging if i go right click and change my nudge value to yeah tick and i go period it's not going to move over a tick this does happen just to be with bars so it can be quick for example if i'm here i go to my mouse click here it might just be quicker to just go comma and click play right so many different sounds going on in this song right now will be quite a clean up job later 49 is how to quickly copy channel strip settings from other tracks to other tracks we talked about copying plugins from track to track this would be copying all the plugins from a track um so we have this electric guitar track here we've we've processed it right if we go and add a new track because we want to add a new guitar and we call this electric guitar 2 we have no plugins right we want to copy all these plugins the way to do that is option command c so i can go here press option command c go down arrow and then option command v and now on this track i have all the same plugins because i want the same tone on this guitar i'm also doing this a lot with vocals if i want if i add a new harmony and i want the same tone of the harmony in the same processing as harmonies before i would do it like this as well so very very similar to how you would copy and paste anything command c command b this is just adding options so option command c option command v now if you're asking yourself does it make sense to have two tracks with the exact same plugins sometimes it's not that big of a deal but if i if i went and go and i went to add let's say three new audio tracks and i copied these plugins option command c option command v option command v operation command v you can see even the volume is going over it's all the track settings this is where it starts maybe not to make as much sense because every track now is the exact same plugins you'll likely want to bus have an aux track a bus output where one track has all the the plugins and then you send the audio to that one track and we'll get into bus outputs later on so not to worry about that right now just to have that on your radar i can delete those and get to tip number 50 tip shortcut trick number 50 which is command u and basically command u is i'm using the cycle all the time that's how i pretty much play stop and play my tracks if you go to a region and press command u the locator up here the cycle locator will go to that region if i go to this command u contextually i would do this if i know i want to go over to this section and i know i want to loop it and work on that section a bit instead of dragging my cursor over playing it or going over here and cycling at the top and making sure i'm all lined up it's easy just to go click the region of where you want to loop and then command u and then you're cycled at the top tip number 51 is pressing shift and moving the playhead so what i mean by this the playheads here if you press shift hold shift sorry and click on any gray area so what i mean in this gray session area the cursor is gonna the playhead's gonna jump to that so i'm just holding shift and so if i'm working in context if i'm working on this this chorus here with this bass line and i want to hear it right before the chorus i might have to play it here but instead of clicking and dragging the playhead over or instead of cycling at the top and pressing spacebar i can just go hold shift and click there and then press play on my spacebar [Music] same thing if i want to jump to the next chorus just hold shift click here and now i can press play again [Music] i can also hold shift and double click and then it will automatically play shift double click automatically played number 52 is inverted cycle range so as we know from the top here we can cycle anything by holding clicking and holding and making this yellow bar and that's going to loop that second section it's called cycle what inverted cycle range means so if i'm working on this pre-chorus here and i'm not sure about the pre-chorus yet i might want to skip it i might want to hear what the verse is like going right into the chorus so how i'm going to do this is i'll make a cycle range where the pre-chorus is then i'm going to hold command and click on the yellow then it's going to just turn it into a yellow box here so now when i play through the verse it's going to automatically jump right to the chorus [Music] and that's great that gives me the idea of of what a the song could sound like in context without certain sections number 53 would be saving presets in plug-ins so every plugin in logic or paid plugins have saved presets let's say we we are a guitarist and we use a lot of we record a lot of guitars let's say and we have an eq that we like maybe it looks something like this and we know we really like this template as a starting point for us to eq our guitars so we can just save this little shape here save this preset we'll go at the top save as and then we will say electric guitar that's electric guitar that's good save and then when i go to add a new audio track and i record another guitar and when i go here to eq the guitar i can just go up here electric guitar and now i can start with that shape and then i might go and edit it or might not have to but this is going to save you save you time same thing goes for every every plug-in um eqs compressors if you have a compression that you really like it's the same thing you really like this compression you can save it and this will always save it in a certain file it will always open up in the finder window of the file that it should be saved in so don't go and change the folder here because this is important because it's going to be in the folder structure that's on the that's that will show up in here so it's important when you go save as don't go and save it to your desktop or something because it won't be you won't be able to find it later in the plugin i have a preset that i use in alchemy as an 808 preset so i'll open up alchemy and go drop down here you can see i have 808 bass this is just an 808 sound that i made in alchemy and then i saved it as a preset in alchemy so you can do that as well with instrument instruments if you have a piano sound that you designed save it as a preset you can also save it as an instrument so we'll get into channel presets and that kind of thing a bit later but you can save things um right now we're just talking about presets in plugins with that are right in here and then this list will grow if you save more presets let's move on to 54 which is channel strip settings and saving channel strip settings this kind of like plug-ins saving things that you've done in the past to help you be more productive i have i do this a lot so presets are a channel strip settings sorry are on this side this is your channel strip basically this vertical line here and if you have an audio track for example and this is your vocal track so over time you have a lead vocal and you start adding you know adding auto-tune and you start adding reverb and you add more compression and maybe you're adding a de-esser you can see the list is getting long right so how do you save this channel strip settings so plugins you go at the top here and go save channel strip setting as and i'll just do this to show you i'll go i already have a lead vox you can see it's greyed out here but i'm going to just do it lead box 2 and i can delete this later and i'll show you how to delete them and where to find them lead box 2 save now i can when i'm in my new session for example let's say we're in the future and i run a vocal track i can go to over here setting and down here are all my presets so there's my lead vox2 just click it and now i have all those plugins and the beauty of it this is when you save channel strip settings if you have made edits in the plugins that those will carry over over as well in the channel strip settings so in this new vocal here you're going to have you're going to have all these plugins but also what you did within those plugins but there is a difference in saving presets with audio tracks midi tracks and drum tracks these are the three fundamental tracks within logic so an audio track here it's blue you'll notice when we go save channel strip setting it's under the track folder this is important if we just cancel that and we save a channel strip setting with a mini instrument it's under the instrument folder so that's important to just distinguish the differences not all channel strip settings are in the same folder and we'll get into folder hierarchy later on and where you can find those actually in your computer to make changes if you mess things up or you want to clean things up tip number 55 um let's continue on presets channel strip settings but we want i want to talk about patches performance patches and why you might want to see a performance patch versus a channel strip setting go over the side and hover here you see how there's a little arrow coming up this is the presets for this specific plugin so this arrow here is the channel eq this arrow here is the presets for the plugin if you click on that arrow it's going to open up the library and you can see here's our electric guitar preset that we made previously so you can just get to it from here you don't even have to open up the plug-in that's going to save you even more time or the compressor we can see they can we don't have any presets for the compressor although these are logic stored presets so we can just go in there and choose a logic preset same thing for any of the other plugins here also the same thing goes for any midi so let's go to our yamaha grand when we click that you're going to get all the preset instruments that are available within the sampler so this is presets of plugins this arrow is presets of the instruments within this instrument plug-in so that's how to differentiate that and that's going to help us explain the next thing where if you want to save a channel strip setting you would be saving the instrument plug-in and the plug-ins itself right so for example if we add a piano track let's bring it up here and we choose um actually we want to choose maybe a vintage electric piano and we do some some things on it we compress it again yeah we add some reverb and maybe we add some delay okay and we really like this electric piano now we can save this in two ways we can save it if we right click here we can save it as a channel strip or we can save it as a performance so let's save as performance and we'll go modern classic tutorial just so i can reference that later program number okay so okay now we've saved it as a performance and you can see in the library here this is where we can see the hierarchy of the the folder structure it's always important to look what parent folder you are down here as well you're in user channel strip settings so performance we have zero modern classic tutorial okay so if we add a new software instrument and we go to user channel strip settings performance there's our modern classic tutorial double click and then we have it here so why would you ever save a performance versus a channel strip setting to be honest i don't really know the difference it could be more detailed to routing i think when you have bigger projects with you want to save maybe a routing like if you want this piano to be bus somewhere else for now i would just honestly stick to channel precip settings i just wanted to give you the option of what this actually is essentially it does the same thing as a channel strip setting so we could just go here save channel strip settings and you'll notice in the instrument not in the performance folder so it's technically in has the same parent folder but this is one down so you can see there's our modern classic here we can go back up a level and that's we have our performance so we can just save it as a channel strip setting now let's go back up a level here user channel strip settings and we'll click on that and we can see all the options of folders we have there's something called user patches here in terms of how i differentiate user patches in channel strip settings i use my user patches for instruments that i like so like if i design a retro 60s base here or if i have a drum sound i like i use the patches for that and then i use my user channel strip settings for like my lead vocal settings all the plugins and that's how i just that's how in my mind i differentiated i'm not sure if that's actually the right way to do it but it's just clean in my head too i said patches be like instrument and performances use channel strip settings as like all the plugins and stuff and what you want you can also load up a patch and then load up a channel strip setting so let's do that right now for example let's add a track let's say i'm starting from scratch right and i want to make some drums so i want these to be drums so i'm going to load up a patch which is a let's load up the 80s kit so this is a patch that i've saved it has all these drums in it kick snare snare punch clap shaker hat loop and big clap and then you can go into each of these tracks here and then load in a channel strip setting that you want to load in on this track so if this was a vocal we could load in the vocal channel strip setting that's how i differentiate patches in channel strip settings whenever you want to save anything it's always on the left side go to the folder you want to save it under so if you do want to save it under a patch and then just the bottom right here it's save or you want to save this these channel strip settings go channel strip setting and save and it's always on the left side here number 56 this is a quick and easy one it has to do with holding shift again shift is like a magic button and it does a lot of things in logic so sometimes in context i find myself working on a vocal and i might have eventually like all these plugins open and it's getting a bit crazy because it's filling up the window right so instead of just exiting all these down one at a time you can actually just hold shift on anyone and press x and they'll all go away even if two are open it saves you time xing nexting by clicking both just hold shift and now both of them are going down number 57 let's talk about bouncing tracks again we briefly touched on this when we talked about slow computer problems at the beginning this is the same thing as committing in pro tools it's great for your computer but it also mentally helps you commit to things for example if we're working on this baseline and we've really we like this baseline we're committing to it bounce it in place because this is going to save your computer but also mentally you're just going to move on from that sound and you're going to be able to create a flow while you're producing so the shortcut for that go down here bounce track in place and you can see it's ctrl command b so we can go up here control command b and we're going to you can add it to a new track if we want but let's replace the track and we don't want to bypass and we we let's include that if we want i'll normalize will be on and we'll press ok now this is going to bounce in place and that's going to mentally help us commit to keep moving on now one other way you can do that if you don't want to do that just command z i'll go control command b i'll put this on a new track and bounce this out and then we could freeze the other one and hide it that's one option we could do so we could then have this track which is our which has the plugins this track which is just the audio i'll go up here i'll freeze it i'll press spacebar and then i will mute it and then i'll press h pressing h is going to open up this button and it's going to hide that track once i press h again this track is going to disappear so now i just that's in the back end it's frozen i don't have to worry about it it's not going to slow the computer down and but if i was like oh my gosh at the end of the production i want to make a change in the sound i can't do that in the audio right now but i can bring press h bring this back up unfreeze it go to the the sampler make the change and then recommit the sound that's another thing you can do if you want to okay cool little trick though on top of this is if you want to bounce not in place but bounce out to just share something you can always just go let's say let's just delete this audio and let's just unmute this for now we can open up a finder window here or let's say you have hot corners on your desktop and your mouse goes to the right or the right corner or the left corner whatever and your desktop comes up you can just take the region and drag it into your desktop and now that is literally bouncing into my desktop right now in my finder window and it should be right here there it is subby bass subby bass you can do that with any track and it's bounced as a wav file number 58 is a quick way to get the zoom tool up if you're working with audio a lot and you need to zoom in quickly you can do that very quickly so let's say let's go back up to our guitar here now we've talked about the pressing zed and that will really pop it up and you can press set to get back down but whenever you press control option that's going to get your zoom tool up so just like it is like if you went down here and chose the zoom tool in your on your left click you can always have that option to go control option and you can always have the option when you go control option and then you can just make a little square around what you want to zoom in so if it's this area you know you could just make a square here and that's going to zoom in on that area you can make another square again and we'll zoom in you can zoom in as far as you want and whenever you want to get out of that you can just press z again i personally in context don't use the zoom tool very much hardly ever maybe at the end when i'm doing some editing with fades and things and i need to zoom in quickly but i i'm just getting so used to now zooming on my left like using the trackpad my left hand the mouse and my right hand that i'll just scroll in like this and go in pretty quickly like because because the pinching on the trackpad works so well i'll just scroll out and now scroll back up just want to give you as an option control option you have your zoom tool if you'd like the zoom tool that's the quick way to do it you don't need to have it in your toolbars it can become really quickly in your left hand here number 59 is using the pay-per-click link inside the plugins if you've ever opened up a plug-in let's just work with an audio track for now new audio track and you have a vocal and let's say you open up a plugin what is this plugin right what is this purple thing if you ever if you don't know what that is and you've always seen it before and sometimes it's purple and sometimes it's not basically what this does is it links the plugins together on separate tracks so if i have this on i'm just going to create another audio track here command d and actually create four audio tracks and i'm going to have a pitch correction because this sometimes happens to me in context this is an in context example i'll have when i'm doing harmonies and i'm going to just copy the channel strips over again so before that um in an earlier tip that was option command c i'm going to go option command v to paste this these channel strip settings on these vocals so now all these four vocal tracks are the same you can see in the left window here okay so now that because they're the same and the plugins are in the same order when i open up a pitch correction plugin and i'll just actually sorry i'm gonna need to have to rename these one so you can identify the difference in the plugins one two three and four okay so let's open up vocal one in the pitch correction you can see vocal one and i'm going to click this paper click link button on when i just click on the vocal track 2 it automatically changes to the plug-in in the same position so this is and because i have the pitch correction at the top it's this vocal two now i can go down and now the plugin is vocal three if you don't have these links on and i click vocal two this plugin is still vocal one so i can't go and ch if i change this it's actually changing vocal one track not vocal two so this can be really handy if you need to change something that is in every plug-in very quickly because if you don't have this on you go okay if we have to change the key of vocal one i have to go to major scale c sharp if we want to change everything to c we'll have to go c close the plugin down go here open the plugin up go to c close it down open it up you get the idea with um pay-per-click link i can just click on it go to the next one c go to the next one c and go to the next one see and you see how much faster that is and it's in reference to the first plugin so if this was a compressor at the top now if i open up the pitch correction and link and click on vocal two it will open up the compressor so that doesn't make sense in our use case but it does make sense if this is way too big it does make sense i'll probably do 75 sorry it does make sense if the plugins are in the same order number 60 is another handy shift shortcut that you can do and this happens to do in the inspector window and holding shift and clicking on the bus outputs will show you will give you where that's going in the right side so let's say i'm working on the reaver pad and i want to know where this bus 7 is going i want to know where bus 2 is going sorry bus 11 and the stereo out so if you click on it bus 7 it's going to open up this window where you can change things if you just hold shift and click it's going to change where it's going to and it's going to show up right here so if i do shift click 11 it will change this to bus 11. same thing with basically everything if you hold shift just like i was saying before very valuable tool hold shift and the stereo out then you'll get all your master track here because if i don't have the stereo out here and i want to change something on the master track or let's say i am putting a master chain on this instead of opening up x scrolling to the right and going to my master track here i will just close down x click um hold shift click stereo out and now i have it here so then i can go and make my changes to the master track number 63 and moving on to a different section organization and mixing this first one is using markers and colors to organize your track so throughout the video you notice i've had i do have markers so let's delete those and we'll make some new ones markers are very valuable because it's just going to help you visually keep organized but then i'll show you some other tips on how they can work as well so whenever you want to add a marker you can go to this drop down here marker and you can press the plus button you can also do option apostrophe and that's just going to create a marker where your playhead is so what i would do is when i'm making the song and i have a demo i'll listen through option apostrophe pre-chorus and you can see we're starting to build them up here [Music] i think it's the chorus i think no it's not so i'll delete that one and then option apostrophe here for the course [Music] i forgot it we've done so many changes i've pitched that base down earlier in the tutorial so things are sounding a bit weird but um that's okay so this is the chorus so you get what i mean i would go through the rest of the song pre verse intro now that i have the main sections i can copy these so i can go command c bring this over to sorry i want to bring the verse over and then i'll call this verse 2 pre-over pre-2 maybe chorus over now they're all the same color let's just go option c option c will always bring up the color box and then you can just let's click the verses make them blue let's click the pres make them a darker blue and let's click the choruses make them a pink and let's make the bridge and the intro in orange so now we have a more clear view of what's happening in our song and we can snap this up and they'll still be at the top if we want to play a section quickly we just have to hold option and click on the marker so i'm holding option my left hand now and i just click in the middle of chorus and that's going to snap the playhead to the beginning of the chorus use colors keep organized it's going to save you in the long run let's move on to 64 i believe yes 64 which is adding icons to keep organized you'll notice here on my side i've added lots of different icons i like to add icons that's a subjective thing if you don't add icons well everything is going to look probably just like this and it can be from a bird's eye view maybe a little too the same after a while because all the audio tracks will be like this you might have some midi tracks that might look differently or you might have a bus track that looks like this and then you might have some software instruments that look like this so it's fine you don't need to do it subjectively i like to add what i'm actually playing so this is a bass so i will add a bass this is a a kick drum so i will go to drums and i will add a kick drum this is another bass so you get the idea it's a completely subjective thing a lot of other daws don't even have this you can also take this away if you don't want it if you don't want the pictures at all and you're more used to pro tools where there's not that kind of thing right click go to track header components and then go to where is it here track icons and you can take that away sometimes that's cleaner if you don't want that i'm personally a fan of track icons number 65 is grouping tracks together with groups or summing stacks and this is really really valuable and this is going to help you in the long run with your computer processing and productivity so let us take an example here let's say four different audio or five different audio tracks and let's say we have harmonies harmony harmony one harmony two you get the idea how many three harmony four and harmony five so the purpose of grouping these tracks together would be one organization it's just gonna snap these up in a folder and it's gonna keep your session view organized but two it's also really good for processing and this is where we're talking about aux outputs and bussing so if i go shift command d this is the shortcut to creating a group you can create a folder stack or a summing stack let's i'll show you what a folder stack is first folder stack just a folder there's nothing you can do on this track it's created for you sweeps and transitions let's say it's our harmony folder it's simply organization if we go down we can see the tracks we have in here and nothing's changed within the tracks and this new track that's created this holder track we can't do anything on it except move the volume up and down which is also handy because whenever we move the volume down it's going to relatively change the volume of this whole sound right so if you mix these four five harmonies together in context like that you're like this is a good mix i like these harmonies then you can move that entire group up and down and that's going to help you mixing when you get to mixing let's command z that a bunch of times and go now over what a summing stack is summing stack will look the same so i'll do shift command d and go to a summing stack and it's going to be the same thing but look not really actually not look the same it's a bit different so say harmony stack we have our five harmonies here and now on this stack you can see it's a little yellow icon and we have an option to actually add more stuff here more plugins and also change the volume so with that that means whatever plugins we add here if we add an eq and a compressor that's going to eq and compress every single track within here which is super handy because if you're going to have a plug-in that's the exact same on every track here well don't have that just put it on this one track because you know this harmony 1 is going to this this harmony 2 is going to this they're all being fed to this output and you can see that in action by going to harmony one the audio is up here it's coming down hits the plugins and look it goes to this thing called bus 26 what is bus 26 it's this harmony stack click on this harmony stack then you can see the input is bus 26 that's the routing of of things and we didn't have to do any of that routing right all we had to do was press shift command d and logic has created all that routing for us so you can see you have bus 26 for one bus 26 for two bus 26 for three and bus 26 or four we didn't have to do any of that and for five if we go command z and just flatten the stack for a second you can see harmony one now is going to stereo out like it should when we add an audio track everything goes to the stereo out and as soon as we do shift command d then it changes the routing now everything here goes to bus 26. so in this harmony one if i know this eq if i know i was want to add a low cut and i do the same thing on every harmony right and look because we have the paper click on we can just go down a track and it's going to open up that plugin because this plug-in is in the same sequence and i can go and have the same plug-in the same eq on every track here that's a bit of a waste of time because since these tracks are going to this track it just makes sense to put the plug-in on this track instead so we can go to the eq and just do the low-cut here and then it's fine of course you can go in and do more you can have a low cut and then maybe on this track you want to do something else it's totally fine to have plug-ins on these tracks but the fundamental to understand with busing tracks is if they're in a group like this in a summing stack and they're being routed to this a main track and that main other track don't duplicate um plug-ins because that's going to just um not be great for your processing speed it's all about just being organized with your processing speed there's no wrong answer with doing everything separately on the track alone it's just not very organized and your computer is going to really have a hard time running if you have duplicate plugins on every track when it comes to harmonies in context this example i would compress these harmonies together i might add some reverb or i might add some more delay but typically i would compress these so they all crunch together not crunch but they're all they're squishing together more and that yeah i might bust out some reverb or i might bust out some delay for example just to test out what it might sound like now that we're just on the idea of folders and summing stacks i just should quickly talk about groups as well and what groups are because they're different groups are actually you can group tracks together and then whatever you do to one track will affect another track and you can tell logic what you want to affect as well so let's take a look at the guitars as an example we'll just use two tracks open up our mixer by pressing x and you can see our shaded tracks here we have this group section and we can click in and have a new group group one now you can see it both says one here and something popped up over here you can see groups name this guitars press enter and now i can press x and you can see it says guitars so what happens now is here is where we can actually tell logic what i want to affect in the group so if i just want to affect the volume for example so that means whenever i do whatever i do to this will affect the other one see i'm moving the volume up it's going to relatively change the volume of this guitar as well but if i want to change the sense or i want to change the color all of these things will change when you affect one so that's the benefit of groups i primarily use groups for sends and volumes because volume is important if you're going to raise one up you relatively want to change the one that's with it because you want to make sure things are balanced well number 66 is organizing third-party plug-ins so you've probably def if you have a lot of third-party plugins here's what your workflow is like you go down you want to add a third-party plug-in you have to go to audio units find the manufacturer go in the manufacturer and figure it out that way can be quite annoying sometimes because you don't know remember who made what right if you want an eq was it an eq that fab filter made or was it an eq that izotope made okay how do you organize this you can do this um in the plugin manager which is at the top here logic pro preferences plugin manager and here is where we can organize our plugins let's say for example i use the fab filter eqs i can just go to the fab filter folder here and then i can drag any of these plugins into the logic categories here so i've already done this here you can see eq i've taken the pro q2 and put that in there let's do something else so let's go to the sound toys i use the sound toys decapitator a lot so i'm going to bring that in to distortion i'm just going to drag it in there and now when i go to distortion it's in here decapitator so what this means is and you can go through all your your third party plugins instruments too and put them in different categories now i go to my audio track and as soon as i go to my plugins i can just go to distortion and then go to my decapitator right here and bring it up i don't i no longer have to go to audio units sound toys decapitator so you can see it's just much faster instead of doing this to doing this it's just going to save you a little bits here to save you lots of time let's say you want to reorganize that you don't want the decapitator there anymore then let's go back to the preferences plugin manager you just have to go to distortion where is it here and delete the decapitator by pressing backspace you're not going to delete the cavitator it's still going to be within soundtoys you're just deleting it from see it's right here you're deleting it from that folder so don't worry about just pressing backspace and you can also do multiple at once right if you want to move all these all your fabfilter ones in there you can go and do it that way you can also add your own folder say my vocal stuff or my distortions or my compressors let's say my my compressors and i go to let's say i will use a you know a fab filter compressor we'll put that in there where's my compressors then we go done go here and you can see my compressors number 67 we briefly touched on this idea before but where the heck are all the files located about logic on your mac how can you go in there and clean them up if you want to delete things just like any computer it all runs throughout a hierarchy of file files and folders really so go to a finder window and if you locate your root fied folder here and go down to music and you can see logic this is where your logic files are but there's this thing called audio music apps and here is the money folder of where all your things are your plugin settings your patches your alchemy samples your own samples i don't even know what that is articulation settings but the thing i want to touch base on is your channel strip settings so here we touched on this before if you made a channel strip setting you want to delete you can for example what one did we make before i think was an instrument performance we made this modern classic so i can go in here and just move that to trash and now it's no longer there i can go to the lead box 2 we made that i no longer need that move that to trash and you can also make your make new folders in here and you can create a folder and you can set your own hierarchy and that will work um you don't necessarily need to do that if you just like what's going on here already another folder kind of secret folder that you might need to know when you're installing plugins is the library so if you go up to go here and you just actually hold down option see why i'm pressing option this thing shows up library just hold it and click on library they kind of hide it because this is actually where things go down in your computer and you can really if you delete things and move things around it's going to mess up your computer so be cognizant of that and you can go to audio plugins presets sounds this is where your plugins live and the presets of the plugins so for example the fab filter presets the you have if you have trillion or any you know any vst it's going to go down in here when you install plugins it should do this on the back end for you but sometimes for example when i installed trillion once i had to go in on the back in here and like move a component around or something number 68 is let's talk a little bit more about mixing now this first little shortcut tip here not actually not a shortcut more of a tip is the mid-side option on an eq or actually on any plug-in on the plug-in you can on an eq in logic you can see there's an option here right here processing stereo left only mid only side only so mid side is popular like mid only would be if i down change this and i actually eq do a maybe a bell curve like this this actually dip in 7 db at 1 500 hertz here only affects the middle sound so if you have an instrument that's panned to the left or the right it won't affect that frequency on the sides it's only going to affect anything in the middle otherwise if you wanted to affect only the things on the sides you would go side only or if you only want to affect the eq on the left right only or left right left only how i might want to use this in context is if i'm finding that with the vocal because the vocal is mono it's right at the middle that maybe i have a synth bleed or a piano or something that i want to just um still have present but i don't want to be fighting with a vocal i might do a dip maybe at 500 hertz right or between 500 and 1000 and i might do mid only so it's not affecting the width of the piano at that frequency it's only affecting the middle which will leave more space for the vocal there so that's what mid-side is in an eq and whenever you open up a plug-in you'll see in logic like you can also do dual mono on everything right or stereo so if you do dual mono on something this is going to give you the option of affecting the left the left signal or the right signal and now if you do if you go and do stereo on something it's just going to affect the whole stereo image so dual mono and stereo is the option if you're wondering what to choose all the time choose dual mono if you want to say i only want to affect the right side or i only want to affect the left side you know so that's what i would use do a mono i don't to be honest in when i'm producing i don't really do the dual mono thing i will just do stereo and then um but i will do mid side with eq'ing now a little side thing with the logic eqs for example let's i did this little bell here and um at mid only if i do like a low cut here it's doing also only mid only with the pro q2 eqs you can actually have only this one you can isolate this specific band down here to be mid-side and then i can choose mono so there's a little m here and this this band is not affected is just affecting the stereo image everything and only this is affecting the model so you can just isolate it a bit more that's just a plug-in difference between the fab filter which like really focus on making great eqs the logic one is just your stock logic eq so it's a bit less flexible let's x that down and get on to number 69 which is busing tracks at the same time this is pretty fast and easy you have two tracks that you want to send to the same buses you can do this at the same time so if i have a base track here and i also have another let's say a sub base and i want to send these to the same reverb well i can send reverb right i can go over to sub bass and send a reverb actually to my bass verb and i can just send it a little bit like that but if i want the same thing if i want the same send here i can actually do that at the same time by just let me just remove that all you have to do you we could group them like we did before in the same tip but if it's just the send you want and you don't want to have them matched up later on you can just highlight them go send bass verb make a little bit and now both of them will have that send sub bass will have it and the bass will have it so you can and if you highlight again and bring them down they'll also both go down if you highlight tracks together it's kind of like a temporary grouping in a way with sends and volume same thing with volume you can highlight them and that this will relatively change the volume tip number seventy is using shift click in the mixer window if you are using the mixer window a lot like i was saying before i don't use the mixer window so much but if you are this is a good tip for you if you don't know if you want to know where bus nine is just press shift-click on bus nine and that's going to highlight this square with a white s well it's like a white rectangle that went around i'll do that again so you can see it in action shift on this one and this little white square here so then you know oh this is the bus okay i can go and add a new plug-in or i can go and add a send here that's really handy when you when you have like hundreds of tracks and you were like where the heck is bus nine or this bus and you go over and you have so many buses you don't know where they are so just go over shift click and it's going to bring you over to that exact thing it's really only good if you're doing it in the mixer window because you can also just do it like we were saying earlier in the inspector window so if we're on the sub base in our and we in our session window here i can just click it here and i'll no shift shift click here and i'll know it will show up here so for me i'm always just working in inspector and session view again i'm rarely opening up the mixer number 71 is creating a track from a bus track to do certain things on this bus track specifically in this case in our example automating things let's say for our purposes we have this um let's say where is this reverb this big verb here and we have a lot of thing we have a lot of tracks being sent to this big reverb and we want to automate this reverb on everything in our song so we can create a track with this aux track we can go ctrl t we can also right click and you can see create tracks ctrl t let's create this track and if we go back to our session view here we'll see big verb if it's like any other track we can do things to it we can add plugins and we can automate things so just like we did in automation we can go right away to latch and we can automate something we can also press a and we can maybe click on the mix and now it says mix in here so now we can click in we can use our uh let's say we want to automate the reverb down in the chorus to make it more dry let's make a square here click and we'll bring the mix down in the chorus and now keep in mind every track that's being sent to this reverb will go down in the chorus number 72 using analog eqs in logic for free you know the eq you can also click this box and that will bring up an eq for you we've talked a lot about this eq already here in eq we have this vintage eq collection and these are modeled these are free in logic console graphic tube let's open up all three just so you can see what they are and these are all oh i had link on so i couldn't even open them up but now we can open them all three these are all just eqs modeled after professional um hardware eqs i'm not sure which ones they're modeled after but i know they are modeled after something i believe this one is modeled after the neve eq i believe anyways they have different flavors why you why use different eq's you might ask like well the same question goes why might you ride a different type of bike or why might you use a different type of guitar they all do the same thing bikes all get you to the same place and guitars will all is good every guitar is a guitar the same thing goes with eqs you can use a different eq because it's just a different thing has different color different flavor guitars have different wood bikes have different colors different types of you know parts on them it's exactly the same thing with eqs these eqs here are very they're not in kind of non-color eqs they're just for shaping sound great for subtractive things like taking away frequencies and stuff these kind of eqs actually have a color that's why you can like boost certain signals and we'll give give it a certain flavor and what i mean by that flavor color those kind of words try it out and see what it does to your sound this one i really like and i also really like this one i very very very rarely use this one here i might do some high gains in this one i might do some high boost and i use the drive function and the different presets here both will sound different and that's why people use different eqs that's why people have hardware eqs and on their on their desks and that certain thing it's just another added flavor of things going to press shift and close both these plugins down 73 hiding tracks we touched on this briefly when we were talking about bouncing you can hide tracks at any time by pressing h just press h and it's going to bring up these h's on this window when you press h the hidden tracks will be in green when you press h again the hidden drags that were in green are now hidden so whenever you want to hide and you can click and drag things i can hide everything right now now it's a lot cleaner right and i can bring those back and press h again and now those are not hidden i hide tracks a lot when i'm not using them and i want to forget about them just because it clears my head space but keep in mind when you hide tracks you need to they will still be active in the background logic still logic has no idea that they're you know where they've gone basically you need if you're going to hide them make sure you mute them because they'll still play in the background often times i'm like playing a song and there's some weird sound and i'm like where the heck is that sound coming from and then i open up h and i realize oh i didn't mute something that was hidden so you gotta mute it if you're gonna hide it and if you are thinking about hiding you should also think about freezing because that's also just going to save you computer power and if it's hidden you it's kind of like making it inactive in a way but it is not inactive if you had it you need to freeze it and mute it then hide it that's what would be my recommendation number 74 muting regions this is quick and easy and often very beneficial if you don't want to mute the entire track but you want to mute a region click on the region and then press ctrl m now that region is muted so in context sometimes i do this because i'm let's say i'm working on this this between the chorus and the verse here into the pre and i'm like i'm not sure if i want the guitar there yet so i'm going to cut it here and mute this and so i because i need the guitar here right i want to play through and go into the pre-chorus but i'm not sure if i want to produce it in the middle there yet but i'd rather instead of just deleting it and having it gone i'd rather have it there just so i know to myself in the future oh i'm still thinking i'm not sure about it if i want it there or not maybe i'll go back and do control m and have a listen but sometimes if you just delete it you'll forget about the idea that you actually might want to have it so that's what i that's how i use the region mutes number 75 is splitting midi files or midi tracks onto their own separate tracks and this mostly has to do with drummer tracks specifically so if you are working in drummer tracks so if we add a new drummer track here at the top and we have this little yellow thing there's a couple things we can do here to actually get this into midi if we right click go convert convert to midi region and now that yellow thing that yellow drummer track is now midi data so if we solo this have a listen it's the same thing as what that was now we can go back on that if we want to we can go right click convert and convert that to drummer region and it's the the same thing if we want to go back into the editor and edit it again so don't worry you can always go back on that however let's take change it to midi again so right click convert convert to midi region now let's separate each of the elements in the drum set into their own file and we can do that by right clicking midi separate by note pitch now we have every drum thing in their own track here let me just solve that again so everything is on their own track now i think this is a logic bug but whenever you want to solo one instrument like the kick the snare or something it solos everything else so you actually can't listen to the element individually and when you add a plug-in to one track for example distortion it adds it to every other track and i don't that seems very wrong and i think that's a bug let's backtrack a bit let's delete this and start from scratch with a new drummer track and i'll show you a better way to approach this if you want to work with drummer tracks in logic so go to the library and when you choose your drummer track you'll notice that you have like the options here but at the bottom you have these things called producer kits and then it's basically every it's the same names bluebird brooklyn these are the same names as you saw in the in the drum kits right we have east bay blue sorry bluebird brooklyn detroit garage east bay if we go to producer kits it's the same thing bluebird brooklyn you know there's a couple of new ones but they all have pluses beside them so these pluses mean when we click on this drummer track it gives a folder for us so these things are already let me just make some space here these things are already separated into their own elements so this is a great way if you want to use drummer tracks because it's going to give you more flexibility to mix now when we move this over in order to get these down in the um their their respective fields here there's a couple things we can do we need to take this mini region and drop it down to the overhead section and you'll see by automatically doing that it's changed it to midi now what we can do is bounce this track in place and i'll show you what's going to happen when we do that file bounce track in place and then we want to make sure add um include instrument multi outputs as additional tracks we want to make sure this is clicked it's important and normalize overload protection only okay now watch what will happen here bouncing so it's split into audio the respective files we have our kick where we can solo it have a listen we can have our kick out our snare bottom snare top and we have all the elements here so now we have the flexibility to process and solo out each element here we don't have the flexibility to change the sound anymore in the yellow editor as you would in the drummer track so if you're going to do this make sure that the pattern you have at the top here where it was in yellow if i just command command z a bunch of this make sure this thing here is the pattern you actually like then you can drop it down bounce it in place put those all into audio tracks and then you can process and mix it with your song properly if you want to do this with the step sequencer it's the same thing this is what i usually do because i'm making my drums in the step sequencer with samples most of the time so i would go track if i just get a drum machine designer up here quickly and i'll show you something simple i'm just gonna this is my drums and i'm going to make a actually i'll just use a logic drums the 808 flex and i will open up the step sequencer by pressing e and clicking step sequencer now i'll make a simple beat and here they're in yellow right and if i click down they won't be on the tracks as well so same thing like we did before right click convert and remember all the used all the fields that you recently used will be at the top here but for reference convert to midi region right click again midi separate by note pitch and now we have them in here where we can solve them out and process them differently number 76 in the category here is project settings productivity what things can you do in your settings to make it more efficient and this one has to deal with when you open up logic if you've ever opened up a logic before it always opens up the previous uh project that you've had right and that's can be annoying because you want to start a new project why is it always opening up the old project but maybe if you like that then don't change it you can skip this tip because we're going to show you how you can open default projects up in logic so how do you do that go to the top here go to logic preferences general and here we have project handling make sure that's clicked we have startup action create new project using default template this is what i have and then i've chosen the default template here which is my production template so you're going to likely see probably open most recent project you probably have that but that's by default so go here you can have it ask what you like to do you can um create a new empty project maybe that's the best or open most recent project open existing project it doesn't matter for me i like to get started with creating a new i have just a default template of what my productions are and if i know i want to open up a recent project then i'll just go to my finder window and i'll go to my logic folder which i put on the side here and i'll reference the the actual project that i want to open simple but an efficient tip before that i would always just open up logic it would open up the most recent project then i would have to go up here open again or open recent and it was just taking up you know a few minutes of your time to be make you less efficient number 77 have you ever opened up the logic in it and it asks you we can't locate this file and you have to either locate it or skip it and you're wondering why and it's annoying it's just another thing you don't have to worry about so where can you find those files to locate or how can you ignore that so here's how you can stop that go to logic and if you go to the top here in your file browser these are all the files you have in logic and files that you can import so if you go to um a project here we have project in all files so it's a perfect example these ones with kind of orangey red exclamation marks logic can't find those files and it's saying something happened along the way we can't find them do you want to locate them or do you want to ignore them so for me i don't need those files because i'm not using them in this session so i can just right click and delete them i'm backspacing i don't need this one click backspace click backspace then it won't get the notification of saying hey do you want to locate these files or do you want to skip them it's fine if you want to just skip them however if you need to locate them then you have to go on your computer somewhere and actually locate that file and just link it up to this section so logic can bring it back into the project number 78 is expanding your most recent files so file open recent so you might only see five i think i have this says 10 you can even make this more and it's just a quick way to get back to old files go to logic pro preferences general project handling again and recent items system default or you can have that as 50 if you want that seems i actually have it as the system default so that's fine for me similarly on this in project handling number 79 is um increasing the amount of auto backups that your system makes so actually that's almost a tip on its own you do have auto backups so if you make a mistake and you're like lost a bit you've done too many editings you can't undo anymore you've passed the uh the amount of undos you can do go up here file revert to these are all auto backups that your system makes and you can say 10. i have 10 backups here and they're all timestamped with when that backup was made this is something logic does in the back and you don't have to worry about making these backups however if you want to increase the number of backups you have you can do this in preferences general project handling again and auto backup last 10 alternate versions last 100 alternate versions this feature has saved me often where i've just made too many mistakes and i'm too deep i need to i've done too many things that i'm a bit lost that i need to revert to something maybe an alternate version the day before or the morning where i can get back to something number 80 is project alternatives this is a great feature in logic you can have multiple versions of this project in the same file so everything is named retrograde at the top here this is the name of the file however we can have different versions of this project with totally different ways things look for example file i'll show you where it is project alternatives we have this one thing here retrograde if we make a new alternative let's say in context how you would use this so let's say this is the produced version of the song i might make a new alternative to mix it and i'll keep this as as it is nothing will change with this one file project new alternative and then it might say retrograde mix one okay and now you can see here at the top retrograde mix one so i can go now and make changes to this without affecting the other alternative let's delete this bluebird file let's delete this piano at the top here we've made some changes now we can go back to project alternatives and go back to retrograde and it's going to load up the new retrograde and now we have everything it didn't touch any of this so don't worry if you delete files if you change the the processing you change everything it's a completely new project within the same logic files so i would recommend doing that instead of going up here and like duplicating the project and then having two files of the project just have it in the same project and use project alternatives if you want to you can always edit the alternative names here edit alternatives and you can go in and rename the the alternatives if you need to number 81 have you ever named your project terribly at the start because you don't have a name for your song yet and then you have the silly name for the whole time for your logic file no no problem you can change that this happens to me because whenever i start a song i don't know what the name of the song is so i'll save it as something like song session june 25th or something so then when i know the name of the song i go to project management rename and then i'll rename the song so when you are in your finder window in the mac it will now look like that number 82 is using project templates to increase your productivity i've briefly mentioned a couple tips before that i default open up a project template when i open up logic let's start from scratch here so this is what you would see if you're starting a new project in logic right new project recent starter grids by the way you can start with a full-on grid that logic gives you tutorials there's a demo project here the one thing i want to talk about though is templates so logic gives you a hip-hop electronic songwriter orchestral music for picture in a multi-track template cool you can start with those however my templates is the thing that i want to cover and i have a production template and a songwriting session template so let's open up the production template what a template is it just is a saved logic file with things already in place ideally that you can get started with the ground running so i can right away just get going playing something on the piano hit work you know arm this track get an idea out i have plug-ins on the tracks ready to go i have an eq a compressor some distortion ready just to be turned on and edited if i need to i have my vocal chain set up i can turn that on and edit that if i need to have the bus sends ready things are in place for me to just kind of click on and get going right away the other thing with templates um you can save are the sends and your routing for example um if i just go to any track here i have a juno synth and then i have these sends you can see i have all these sends that are ready to go in this template it's like when you open up a logic session and it's an empty project these will likely be empty right and this whole window is going to be empty so for example if i start playing some piano and let's just say you know let's just record a couple like a chord here cool c okay i'm getting started on this song idea it's not a great song idea but the idea is here with the template is now i'm like oh i want to add some reverb to that i can add a big reverb and you know what i want to really make it wider i can add a widening effect to that and already it's going to help you produce a lot faster if you can save some routing in your templates and i would save reverbs i would save delays i would save chorus effects and making things wider like that number 83 is taking the logic sound library and putting it on an external drive this is often helpful because you don't have enough space on your computer or it's just making your computer run slowly it is a lot of space i think the sounds make up almost 50 or 60 gigabytes so if you want to put that in a different external drive go up here logic pro sound library and then relocate sound library so just click that and you can see here are some of my drives that i have locked into the computer and you can just click one of the drives and put it there i do recommend the g-drive mobile um drives i like them a lot this one here actually i shouldn't unplug it because it's connected it's like two and a half inches wide and like a centimeter in height and it's like two terabytes very sturdy um and and it's an ssd drive so it works really really fast in general though when we're talking about putting things on external hard drives and having space i think it's important that you stay you do stay organized as much as you can with this kind of stuff so it is a good idea if you're going to be in this music production world for a while to invest in an ssd a hard drive with two terabytes or even more and where you can have your samples on it where you can do backups of your projects with time machine for example up here i have auto backups with time machine on it just backs up all my logic pro projects so i know i'm not going to lose anything number 84 in project settings and management is using bookmarks in your file browser on the right side so again we can press f and open this up and then we have this bookmark here whatever sounds you use a lot you put it in your bookmarks if you want to put a bookmark in navigate to your house your home here go to where you want let's say this acoustica you want this folder in your bookmarks right click and then you can say add uh bookmark acoustica and that's going to show up in there number 85 is overwriting any shortcuts you have in logic this is i think i don't know if all daws do this i know for a fact pro tools doesn't do this overwrite shortcut features and it can be good and bad to i think do this as a daw it's great because you can really customize your own workflows it's not as great if you go to a studio and they're using logic and then you're not used and you're not used to their shortcuts because you don't have them so i wouldn't if i if i can make a piece of advice to you watching this right now not to go overwrite everything in logic but if there's something you want to customize a shortcut for you you can go and overwrite it so go logic pro key commands edit and then you can see here these are all the key commands in logic you can see there they're basically there are hundreds so you can use this as a learning tool and just search for something and maybe there's a key command for it already and you can use that so a key command that i over over wrote was shift one and i don't even know what i overrode anymore but whatever what what i do with shift one is when i'm on a track and i press shift one that's going to open up the first plugin on the chain and for me it's most of the time all the time except maybe on vocals it's an eq so if i know quickly i need to eq because some eq something i'll go to my bass press shift one and now i have the eq i go to my guitar melody shift one and you know i might be closing it down however like we were discussing before if you have the pay-per-click on pay-per-click on and you're doing this type of eq you don't need to press shift one at all you just need to go to guitar melody and now it will shift to this eq that has to do with where the plugin is on the chain i actually got this tip from another youtube video um they are echo sound works and i thought that was a really really valuable tip that's improved my workflow which is quickly opening up plugins it doesn't have to be eqs and it doesn't have to be this as well the idea is that you can overwrite anything if you do something a lot think of overwriting it or trying to find out what the the shortcut is number 86 is changing the default answers to some of the notifications you get in logic so in this example specifically in context i have a bose speaker over here and sometimes when it's on logic is going it says like hey do you want to use the speaker as your default device while i'm producing a session and it's it's annoying so you can change the default answer so you can quickly just press enter and get rid of that notification go to logic pro preferences general then go to notifications and you can see here do you want to use the audio device bose color sound link you can have it as use if you want to quickly say use all the time that it comes on or don't use check your notifications there you might have some more that i don't have and then you can change those default answers just to save a bit of time number 87 is recording pre-roll and auto colorizing takes inside the project settings i mentioned this before but if you haven't watched the video before we have logic pro preferences which is kind of like global preferences and then in file we have project settings so this is different we have different settings here we can get specifically in the project so if you open up general again you'll get them all at the top here so these are different windows right if we can go file preferences general not to be confused with preferences and settings we have preferences at the top and then we have settings so i'm talking about settings now so in recording when you're recording you can count in a bar like we can change at the top here with this one two three four we can also count in you know multiple bars what i'm talking about here is record pre-roll where you can actually have logic record three seconds before before it starts or four seconds before it starts for me i like the countin and i'm okay by having a bar and then choosing it with what i have at the top here and you can allow tempo change recording and you can auto colorize takes this is handy if you make multiple takes eventually they're all in blue and i like to have them with different colors when i'm making different takes just so i can know like hey i like the red one but i didn't like the blue one and then i can remember that so i'll show you what record pre-roll is in action so if you record record pre-wall with three seconds and we go to an audio track and just record something basic in here we'll just go input two because i don't want to record my voice and we'll just solo that and record something so it just waited three seconds before it actually started recording you can see if i just delete that and i change that to zero seconds you'll see it just starts recording right away and i press r it just starts recording so sometimes you might want that if you would just rather start it having a record so you know okay whenever if i want to record a guitar here i'll just know personally that i'll go bar before and just press record and it will go there if you'd rather have that type of workflow i just got used to saying like if i want to record a vocal that starts at the chorus i know i'll just have to put my playhead there and press record and then logic will start it here a bar before because i've told them i want it to go in a bar we record over this it will be different colors now we have a blue and or or yellow i guess and an orangey red number 88 is if you don't like take folders in logic you can change what happens when you record over another audio take so by default when you record we just saw that when we auto colorized in the tip before if we record over this now i have the count in so just gonna record for um yeah one bar and a half and then record over and we'll be different colors like we saw in the tip before but also by default logic is going to re create this take folder you can snap it up and it's i do like take folders but i am switching it sometimes depending on what type of recording i'm doing so you can go to not the project settings but the preferences and for now i'm not going to go logic pro preferences anymore because this is taking time the shortcut to get preferences up quickly is command comma so i'll reference that now for the rest of the video and then i would go command w to bring that down so command comma preferences up command w to bring that down here we are in recording and overlapping track recording so we're dealing with audio in this example if the cycle is off create a take folder okay if the cycle is on then create tracks and mute or create track alternatives let's do create track alternatives so in this case if i delete both of these put the cycle on record [Music] let's say i'm doing some vocal takes here singing i forgot to mention as well a brief tip of the pre-roll before if you want to do a pack pre-roll you can just press space bar and r when you're recording so i have i usually am on count in and i'll press r because i have this cycle here and it's going to go through right [Music] but let's say i wanted to just start the recording right here i can press space bar and r and it's going to start right here so that's great in context if i'm doing my own vocal takes and i already have a line a vocal part that i like here but i just want to re-sing this part then i'll save time instead of starting the recording from here i'll just go spacebar r and then it can sing there and notice while i've been doing this there's no take folder over here but you'll notice there's alternatives app to g now we have a b c d e f g so we can go back to a take we can go to b take and if you prefer to work in that you can and we can always go um you can say show inactive and then you'll see the takes here so if you want to do a quick comp you can just go through them like this if you want to if you want to look at a just press a and press play and then if you want to snap out just press the x at the top and you're back up with f and this is with cycle on by the way so if we have cycle off we're still going to create a tick folder so if we press r and now we'll create a take folder with these take alternatives it's getting a little meta here so there'll be a take folder with two takes and one has a massive alternative in it so we have take two then we have take one which includes all the alternatives so it's a bit meta same thing for media midi you can create take folders you can merge overlap creating track alternatives and the same thing with cycle on number 89 is customizing your control bar and display how do you customize it go to the drop down here and go custom this is a i have a custom one in place but you go to customize control bar and display here you just click on the things you want in this this entire top bar it's not just this window by the way it's this entire top bar let's go back here and i'm just going to unclick the things i don't want the library yes i want that the inspector i want that question mark i want that toolbar i want that i'll keep these because i do sometimes click them rewind it fast forward do i ever use those no so here they are rewind fast rewind i never press stop or play with that i'm always using this spacebar sometimes i press record there i never press cycle so i'll remove that and i'll leave caption recording capture recording off right now we will get into capture recording in a little bit the custom llcd for me i i like the positions i i like to know where i am the locators i don't really use the the locator so i'm going to have that off the sample rate i don't need this 44.1 for me i'm okay to know what i had at in settings very speed is something i won't get into now but you can increase or decrease the entire speed of your track i don't need that tempo i really like to have the tempo and the time signature and division i do like to have that because i want to know the value of of the grid i'm looking at key signature i really like to have because i'm constantly referencing the key signature midi activity i like to have because whenever i press my keyboard i want to know if the logic is referencing it performance meter is good because i want to look at my cpu thing if it's like crazy if it's going out crazy i know that i have to freeze tracks or do something and then we have all these other things we can add what i know and we'll go through all them now but what i would recommend adding you might want to add if you're recording you might want to add this low latency mode and this software monitoring button software monitoring is when you click that you'll be able to hear yourself in your headphones it's the same button here as what you would press in preferences if i open command comma go to audio and go to general system monitoring it's the same button see if i click this here it turns green low latency mode is just going to do some kind of algorithm on the back end that's going to save as much possible speed or processing speed as it can to help you get a lower latency on your recording and latency is just the time it actually takes from the sound to get from it where it's pl being played or where you're singing to where it actually it comes out and is in logic and you what you can hear in your system monitoring so i'd recommend doing low latency if you're going to do system monitoring because you don't want to hear your voice and it's like a little delayed it's it can be annoying you could put everything up there if you want and over time you'll you'll gravitate towards things you you like to use number 90 let's talk about buffer size a little bit we mentioned low latency in the previous tip so buffer size happens to do in preferences general and edit um audio sorry devices i always have 10 24 unless i'm recording and then i'll bump it down to 128 if i find the latency to be too slow then i'll bump it down to 32. and if that's too slow i might change an interface if you don't know what buffer size means the lower you go the the lower latency you're going to have the higher yo the higher latency you're going to have once i'm committed to sound bounce it and that will help reduce latency as well when you start recording audio this all comes kind of down to the the point where you're ready to record vocals so if you have your track ready you have a vibe going and you have 10 different tracks or 20 different tracks with 20 different software instruments it's not a good idea to record vocals with all the software instruments live you should freeze them all or you should bounce them all and then do vocals the other thing is if you don't want to do any of that bounce the entire project so from here just go command b and bounce it as an mp3 or a wave and then open up a brand new logic project so go file and you know new from template or new new project completely and empty slate import the wave of your song and then record vocals in that brand new session i do this a lot of the time unless my session is mostly audio and it's not heavy on the computer that way i know that i can record vocals i can record lots of different vocals and because as soon as you start recording with your computer you're going to your computer you want the focus to be on the recording all the cpu power to be on the recording number 91 is uh undo settings so if you aren't a whole we talked about this before with backups but if you are in a hole and you you made some mistakes and you want to just command z isn't working for you anymore you can go back up here edit undo history and it shows you an entire history of of when you did edit undo or or command z now i use this in context if you want to go command z but you don't want to press it like five times because you liked what you did you did up until that point but maybe like five steps before that you wanted to undo that one here's where you would go and change it so you can see it's 11 25 and 11 11 we did a switch take or comp and you can see it's highlighted that for me if i go to toggle take folder disclosure and click that and it's highlighted what i did there and i can go and undo that specific task it's really handy for stuff that you do with plugins or in the mixer window and that's why you can include parameters from mixer and plug-in so if you just did stuff with your plugins then you can just go and look what you did with your plugins and then undo something there when in doubt you want to change something that you've done in the past maybe it's just one thing but you don't want to change anything you've done up until that point go to your edit undo history look for the thing whether it's in your mixer or the plugin and look for that thing and undo it but don't hold this undo button number 92 is division markers in the display window i talked a little bit about this when i was going into the lcd custom display here this number four and where i'm switching it sometimes so what this number has to refer to is the actual display window here let's zoom in on right before the chorus let's just zoom in here we have at quarter notes here and that's what these lines are so if we zoom in more it's only going to show a line on that marker you choose at the top here so it's quarters so it's going to be you're only going to have quarter lines and this is helpful if i'm producing something here hi-hats whatever i would put the right timing so maybe it's 16 and now i have 16th lines so i can say like hey i need my vocal to be in time on this 16th note then i can drag it to this line or whatever so if you're wondering why your session here doesn't have a lot of lines and you want to have lines bump it up and then you once you zoom in you'll have those lines number 93 and now we're on a new section of and sorry new category with recording and this first one which is 93 is actually just pressing k which stands for click even though it's spelt wrong okay when you press k it turns on the click super simple you might not know this one already it can happen in action while you're recording too so if i have an audio track up and i'm recording a vocal and i'm actually like maybe recording in my chair right here and i press record and i'm like singing and halfway through the verse i'm like oh no i need to click just press k now the click is on and i can continue recording and maybe save that take i find myself in that position a lot because i don't always like listening to the click when i'm producing right so i'll solo that off and i'll press k to turn the click off go record again and it's off so i have to go and press k 94 is using live loops when you're recording and just starting it with a session actually to generate ideas and brainstorm if you don't already know an idea of how you want to start a song i don't recommend using live loops if you have your song you have the idea you have certain parts just get right into the session view here and start recording however live loops is a new feature in logic within the last year and it's great to get ideas and so in a nutshell live loops has these squares here where you can click this these squares and record something in audio midi drummer tracks it's all the same you can still do it in in the squares here each square represents a different idea so let's do a really quick example if i just scroll over in the session and if i'm starting a song from scratch here right go to bar 97 just so i'm not um fussing with any of the track we have in place and we can use apple loops as an example so i will load up a new audio track here and an apple loop and let's say we want to start with a piano [Music] okay 70s rock piano and we're going to take all these in 110 and in e major here so some different ideas of rock pianos audio track again and we're going to look for a bass in e major and 110 bass and we'll filter by key so going to e e major so scroll bar go e and we'll take this we want something in the range of 110 because it's going to be stretched so this is perfect raw garage base and the idea is we're trying to find ideas to for for a song and i'm doing it with loops just because of the sake of this video but you can be singing in these boxes you could be playing things on your midi controller you could be playing things you could it doesn't have to be audio tracks it can be drummer tracks and it's meshing all these ideas and seeing how they work together and then once you find some cool ideas that work together you can record them into the session view let's just test and see how these ideas work together let's try this idea with this the base right below it turn this one on [Music] okay not really working together let's try let's keep the bass running but we'll switch the the piano so you can see the timing of it i'll zoom in for you you can see each isn't having their respective timing so once this it's all based around the tempo and beats so when this piano is almost done four beats i'm going to switch it to this piano it's going to happen in time ready now so the bass hasn't stopped but we switched the piano let's try this bass with this piano two three four now so with live loops everything is in time and is running in time which is right to test new ideas because you don't have to fuss about the timing you have to put when you play things things will land on beat and it just it just depends on where you press play to what beat you land on for example if we do that again let's just stop let's just stop the let's play the piano and whenever you want to stop things is there's a stop button on this side here so we're just playing the piano and if i want the bass to land right on b1 i just have to time it mentally two three four one but i can click it a bar a beat before [Music] it's not actually that bad i'll try this piano coming in i beat one two four [Music] okay so let's say these two are two ideas and you might have multiple tracks here with different ideas and you can go click through them right simplicity case let's say we like this so we're going to record this in so let's press arm and record so now i'm recording in the session view here nothing's happening because nothing is being played inside this view so let's say i want an intro with this rock piano so i'll press play and it will start recording you can see it coming in up here okay so let's say this is kind of my intro base okay it doesn't sound too good but you're i think you're getting the ideas maybe here we come is a in the next bar is a chorus piano and we drop the bass out so be like this and everything is recording in time maybe the next bar we come back and bring everything in so one two three four and now we can shut this down press stop at the bottom close session view or live loops sorry and now we're in session view we have two tracks and we have our idea where we can actually get in and start processing processing things we have we can cut things move things around and you have more of a starting template with ideas you've chosen we can move on to tip number 95 which is changing the sound of the metronome so the metronome here you can go to metronome settings and here you can actually choose what you want to hear the metronome to be is it just the bars and beats or do you want the groups and divisions as well the tone or the volume and the output as well so the output is valuable to use if you uh in my case i use i might route the metronome output output to a different output if i want to hear the mesh the click in my headphones but not out of the speakers and why would you want to do this this is good for a live performance if you want to have a click in your ear what if you're doing in-ear monitoring and you're using logic on stage i do that so i'm there's a click in my headphones that's routed out to a different output but what i'm sending to the mix the onstage you know mixer they're getting a clean mix without the metronome if we close this down and open up our mixer by pressing command two we can also press x but command two opens it up in a branch a big window and you'll likely see single tracks all you'll probably have it on tracks if we go to all we'll be able to see our click track because basically the logic that's what logic is doing it should be somewhere down down here oops i think someone is there or wind is coming through so here it is click and you can see it's default club geist which is just a clicky sounding thing you can go and change this to an alchemy send whatever you want you could also go probably if you might want to change it to a drum draw sorry i'm not a drum kit designer but actually a drum kit a drum synth could work you could change it you could change it to anything ultra beats strings it basically is just a software instrument so you might want to actually go and change it to a drum a drum kit and you can actually choose the drum kit you want to hear i leave it as the clop geist it's fine for me i'm used to that kind of stuff but if you're like really hate that sound no worries go and change it here also if you don't want to deal with that kind of stuff you can you can kind of just work around it with just using a drummer track like if you add a drummer track here they're in yellow and they're all in time already with your bpm they're perfectly in time so you could just kind of have this at the top and maybe do like a simple and soft drum set without fills you know a simple pattern you know this is essentially a click as well and you can choose a pattern you want to play with if that's going to get you in the mood and get you playing more in time then do that or change it and change the clock guys to a different instrument number 96 is setting the game properly on your interface when you're recording instruments like let's talk about vocals and guitar specifically when you set up your vocal let's say now i'm coming into the interface right now so i can go track new audio track this is how you would get going and you want to set the gain properly so after get your input right make sure that the input here is the input that you have in your interface now if i type in press i here which is monitoring i can see my voice coming in here and i'm talking and i'm talking if i talk louder it gets it jumps up more so it's negative 11 here if you're recording vocals it's okay to record them in at around negative 10 if you want even even less you could go a bit more if you want but the idea is record vocals you can always push them up later in post-production but you can never if you peak on a vocal you can never bring that down so it's okay to leave a lot of head room which is what that's called when you're recording vocals if you're recording speaking vocals like me i usually record them yeah negative 12 sometimes even negative 18 because i know it's just speaking and i can bring those that up later i'd rather not record so much of them the room around me because there's cars outside and as if if you as you've heard throughout the video there's sirens and stuff outside too so the workflow that is once you have your input set up and you can see your instrument or your voice coming through here then you would turn the gain dial on the um on your interface while looking at it so if i increase the gain here it's going to increase the the amount of green and this number is going to get closer to negative 10 negative 5 and you don't want to get two and you don't you don't really want to get in that yellow range this number is called the peak number and it will stay at the highest number that it reaches so if i just click it's at negative three right now right and now i'm talking and let's say i do that and i'm resetting the gain on my interface if i don't click on this number it's still going to be set at negative three so it's important when you are doing the gain thing to make sure you click on this number so you reset that you have to reset it by clicking on it if not you know now i'm at zero and i might be resetting the gain and be like wow i'm still at zero i've been i'm so soft here no it's because it's that was the peak value of your most recent thing before you reset it so reset it set it do a check gain check reset again gain check gain check and that's the workflow to properly gain your gain before you start recording vocals number 97 is recording with quantization on we talked about quantization earlier on in the video and how to do that and how to maybe maybe make it more of a human feel and add a new software instrument track no not a drummer track and if we go to our region editor and have quantize on let's say by 1 16 or any of these values let's just say 1 16 side note to this if you click on quantize you can see classic quantities and smart quantize classic is is what most youtube videos are about it's how it's locking things in classic quantization smart quantize will make it a bit more human it will try to be smart to what you it thinks you're trying to do maybe it might be cool to try that out sometimes it can go terribly wrong but it also can make it more more cool sometimes and more human so worth trying out let's keep it in classic for now with this use case of what we're trying to do basically i'm going to just change this to a drum track and i'll show you that you can record with drums with quantization already in place so i have my midi controller here kick and snare and while i'm recording it's going to quantize it while i'm just doing it if you play a little before the beat the notes aren't going to happen so you kind of have to be a bit delayed and you'll see what i mean while i'm doing it here [Music] okay now let me look at the mini data here you can see everything is quantized by 1 16th note [Music] okay number 98 is the sliding s and sliding m options that we have in logic sliding s's i mean if you click on it on a track and you want to solo it you can also click and hold and scroll down and you will solo all of this track and you can also click and hold and so unsold the tracks same thing goes for mute and the same thing goes for hidden tracks if we open up the hidden tracks by pressing h and we're like you know what i want to hide all those tracks i'm just holding clicking and holding clicking sliding clicking dragging this type of functionality is really kind of a fundamental thing throughout logic also things also works for volume and panning so you don't have to like pretend to go left with your mouse or right you can just click and slide down and click and slide up this one's fairly straightforward but it works for volume two you can click it and kind of go anywhere with your mouse like i can be down here and scrolling left or right just know that click slide works with things it goes it goes it goes with monitor um this monitoring as well like we talked about previously in the video if you haven't watched those sections you can go option click to reset things so if this is soloed the guitar the drums and the synths and we instead we don't want to go up here to unsolo them we can just go option click and there you go number 99 is blowing up the signal while you're recording because you yeah you want to you want to see the the signal and how big it is also make sure that you're not being fooled by the size of the signal if you have this on so it's up here this is like the thing you can click this on or off and it will make the signal fatter if you hold that it's going to bring up this sliding thing so you can tell it how fat do you want to make it skinny fat or like really really fat and where you leave it is where it's going to be by default the shortcut for that if you click on a region is command plus command minus command plus and you'll see the fatness so what i was saying just a second ago don't be fooled by the the signal like for example if it's like this and you think your signal is coming in nice and good there's it's fat and you must have a lot of gain don't be fooled because maybe this is on so when you're just know the actual fatness of your signal before that's on so this is what the signal fatness is this is really helpful while you're getting into the details sometimes a signal won't even show depending on where you are i'm going to blow this up and you can see wow there's some stuff in here this is maybe a lip smack this is air this is room noise whatever you can go in here and cut that out if you want and then i can fade these and we'll zoom out and we'll go to tip number 100 which is the notepad right here i primarily use the notepad for lyrics if i'm writing a song but if i'm producing i'm not really writing lyrics so what i would use the notepad for is i might be producing this baseline and i'll i'll just make a note base edits i got to come back and do base edits and snap that back if i don't make that note i just might never make the edits in the base because i won't remember it just so i don't forget these things all those things will come up in your head where do you put them put them in your notes number 101 because why not do two more bonus tips because we've made it this far capture recording if you are starting a session let's say you're in a blank session here let's just make some room and you are have a piano track up here you press record and you're like let's get some of my good ideas down you sit over on your controller and you start playing you press space bar because you want the click on and you start playing a melody idea that comes to your head because you're super you run to your computer and you're super stoked about it so you click spacebar because you want the click on not a great melody but then you're like i got it on and you're like no i didn't record that's okay logic is listening when the playback is on so you just have to press this button with the red with a circle around it and the red dot in the middle and now it's here it's exactly what i played it's called capture recording and in order to turn that on we briefly mentioned it a couple tips before go to custom customize control bar display and have this on here capture recording and that will show up with a red dot with a white circle around it logic is listening right now even though it's not recording so here we go again and we press capture record and we have that in there so don't worry if you didn't record it's likely you still have it there in in logic in there like kind of saved memory they have on the back end number 102 and the last tip in this long video so just thank you for watching and making it this far in the video and if you got anything from this video would be great if you could give it a thumbs up and maybe a subscribe this one is test out your mix with a mastering some mastering plugins on it and what i mean by that is tested it with a compressor and tested it with a limiter because this is going to give you the idea of what it will sound like more or less when it's mastered because when you master something when you compress all the the master chain and when you limit it when you raise the gain it's going to change the way your sound mix or the way your mix sounds you might have to go back in your mix and level some of the things differently and so when i'm kind of near near done on the mix just erase this track now this mix is going to sound bad because we've added so many things throughout this video but let's just take a listen it's not so bad it's going to be good and fine for our purposes so what you would do is go over to your master chain here and if you don't know if you don't see that here just press shift and click stereo out that's going to make it show up in this section don't worry about this why it says negative 4.3 here that's just because i'm recording um and and taking the output of logic to make this video and i don't want to burst your ears while i play back that's why this is low so this should be at zero for you so what i would recommend you put a compressor on there and maybe just a lot of compressor if you don't have any paid compressors maybe use something like a classic vca and compress the mix so we're gonna and have that thing have that needle jump to negative three negative five and see what that's doing to your mix this is a test we're not mastering our mix right now but while we're mixing and while we're thinking we're thinking we're close to being done we can test it with these plugins on to see if we need to rebalance things while things get louder so put a compressor on there and then put a limiter on there if you don't have like a paid one a really good paid one is by fab filter it's called pro l if you don't have that you can go logic has one two yeah limiter and you can bump this gain up until it's really crunching things maybe you're reaching maybe negative 10 um l-u-f-s and this is what i meant by l-u-f-s we want this number to kind of reach i mean the spotify pro songs they'll reach negative six in loudness sometimes this is a mastering discussion of how loud your master should be should you have a more um should you have a dynamic master should it be just crazy loud throughout not going to get into that just showing you where you kind of should put your master just in terms of of how we can reference it while we're mixing so let's increase the gain [Music] and keep in mind because i'm i have negative 4 db that i should normally have this at zero right but i'm keeping that down just so we don't hurt our ears in the video as you might realize at this point [Music] you might just realize that the the snare is too loud and it needs to be taken down 2 db or you might realize something else needs to be eq'd or some things are fighting because the mix is is changing and you haven't heard it with all that compression and limiting on it so that is 100 logic pro tips tricks and shortcuts leave a comment a question i will get back to all of them if with an answer if i know the answer if you want to stick around for more videos um subscribe i will make videos about logic music production just to help you guys with your music production careers if you're in it for a career i am a music producer myself i'm also a singer songwriter and i have my own music online so if you want to go check some of my own music um feel free to do so i'll leave a couple links in the description if you're curious and i hope to see you in the next video

Channel: Charles Cleyn

Views: 95,792

Keywords: logic pro tips, logic pro x tutorial, logic pro tips and hacks, logic pro x tips, logic pro x hacks, logic pro tricks, advanced tips in logic pro x, logic x tips and tricks, logic pro x tips and tricks, best logic pro x tutorial, produce with logic pro x, logic pro x editing tips, logic pro tips and tricks, how to use logic pro x, logic pro x beginner tutorial, logic pro tutorial, logic pro x shortcuts, ultimate logic pro x tutorial, logic pro x tips and hacks

Id: KPQ2tKD3-4I

Length: 220min 36sec (13236 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 21 2021