The 39 Logic Pro Key Shortcuts for Faster Mixes

what a supercharge your workflow in Logic Pro by the end of this video you'll know the 39 essential key commands for lightning-fast logic pro mixing let's get started hello everybody Dylan Pines here with another mixing tutorial for you today we're gonna be talking about Logic Pro key commands it's no secret that the secret to a faster workflow is knowing as many keyboard shortcuts as you can if you're doing everything with your mouse ultimately you're going to be slow slow slow there are tons of different ways to automate what you're probably doing by hand and we're gonna be going through 39 of them in this video since there's so many I'm gonna be doing this a little rapid-fire and a quick disclaimer a few of these might seem kind of basic to you intermediate users but that doesn't make them any less important so with that disclaimer out of the way let's actually start with the basics these are some key commands that you might already know but you absolutely need to master first up batch rename this one makes starting out your sessions way easier if you're trying to go through and rename all of these tracks just double click on one name it male vocals and then hit tab and then you can just keep on going female vocals tab acoustic guitar hit tab and so on it makes it a lot easier to rename everything superfast rather than having to click rename click off click rename click off and so on next up we've got solo now this one like a lot of the more basic Logic Pro key commands is just a letter it's just the S key that's it so you can see if you hit s that gets so load to the s that could solo it if you hit it again it gets on so loads simple as that makes a lot easier than having to go over with your mouse find the solo button and click it next up is mute same thing as solo it's just the M key this one is super easy because you can just go through and mute several things in a row without ever having to use your actual clicker and if you can combine it with the arrow keys which allows you to go up and down you can very quickly mute several tracks in a row next up we've got select all now this is something that you see in a lot of different programs but it's super helpful in something like this especially when you have a very large session and that is command a that just selects all of the tracks all the regions if you have to do any sort of moving if you have to do any sort of batch processing that makes it super easy to get everything in one go after that let's talk about highlighting different sections so if I was trying to highlight different tracks all I would want to do is hold down shift and then click you can see I was able to grab all of these different tracks if I hold down shift and click lower I get to add these tracks to what's been what's been selected and then for Regions all I want to do is click and drag and you can see that I've got a little box that I create and as long as I'm holding down the mouse I can select whatever regions I need next up is record and this might be the key command that I use the most especially during songwriting because I'm always wanting to go on the fly I'm never wanting to move my mouse to find the record button it's super simple all you have to do is hit R and any kind of record an able track is gonna start recording immediately you can see I just hit the R key and all of a sudden I'm getting sound makes it really really easy speaking of recording after that we've got turning on the click track now all you have to do to do that is hit the K button that's going to enable it and turn it off next up is something that's super great for organization and that is opening up the color palette if I wanted to recolor any of these tracks all I need to do is click on it and hit option C and now my color palette is open and I can select any color I want the nice thing so I can select multiple regions and make them all the exact same color and then just X out of it or hit option C again and it's gone and here's an extra little tip if you want your tracks over here to be the same color just highlight all of them go up to functions and hit color track by region color and now all of a sudden the entire track is the exact color that you want finally for the basics we've got zooming in and out now there's a lot of different ways you can do this Logic Pro gives you tons of options so ultimately it just comes down to your specific preference so for me there's two different ways that I like to do it one is holding down command and hitting either the up or down arrow or the left and right arrow this is a way to predictably zoom in and out your session and if I'm not really thinking this is the way I like to go especially if I'm trying to get really really specific on one part the other thing I like to do and this is really something you can only do with specific Mouse's that have left and right scrolls and up-and-down scrolls if you hold down option and then scroll around you can resize any way you want it's really really helpful and as long as I have my mouse hovering over where I want to size in it's going to pretty roughly stick around where I want to go it's not quite as accurate as just going left right up and down while holding command but it's a nice easy quick way to get the results that I'm looking for all right so next let's move on to the heavy lifters these are some key commands that might be new to you you might not know them but you're gonna use them constantly throughout your sessions once you do so the first one is something I'm surprised more people don't know about and that is the marquee tool this is something that man every time I show a student this it blows their mind and it blew my mind the first time I started using it - if you hold down command and then click and drag on a region you can see it highlights a very specific part of the region and if I click it boom I now have a brand-new region that I can do anything that I want with and not only that but it also works in automation so if I wanted to automate just this specific part hold down command drag the selection I want click it and now I have a little block of volume that I can do whatever I want with it makes automation super fast and it makes doing my editing super fast as well now if I only wanted to split a region in half then I'm going to be using my next key command and split region by playhead and that's just command T so you can see if I move around every time I hit command T I'm going to get a brand new region that I can mess with so this is just another way to be able to split your regions up quickly you can either use the marquee tool or you can use split by playhead all right after that we've got a few movement key commands specifically ones that allow you to move the playhead left and right so it's super easy all you have to do is hit either the comma to move left one bar which I'll zoom in here so you can see it or hit the period to move right one bar it makes it really really easy to move around the session without having to go around find exactly where you want to go click and then just really hope that it snaps to the grid so let's say you want to move more than one bar maybe you want to move 8 bars so you can quickly move around your session you're gonna be hitting the same buttons you're just gonna be holding shift at the same time just like that makes it really easy to quickly quickly move through a session especially if it's really long now the easy way to remember that is if you look down at your keyboard you're going to see that the comma and the period buttons also have the less-than and greater-than signs kind of like a left and a right arrow that's the little memory trick that I've used to make sure that I know exactly where this key command is all right after that we've got a key command that I use all the time and that is just turning off and on a loop so in Logic Pro you've got these little bars right here that allow you to loop a specific part over and over and over again now if I wanted to turn that off all I would have to do is hit C if I wanted to turn it on hit C again it makes it really really easy again because you don't have to go up here and actually click on the loop all you got to do is hit C and you can just move around hit C and it'll start you right where you need to be now the reason it's C in Logic Pro is because it actually calls its loops cycles so C for cycle instead of L for loop so next up is a personal favorite of mine and that is hiding tracks so in order to keep your session organized you're probably not going to want every single track to be visible you're probably gonna want to have some tracks turned off and hidden especially the later ones maybe that you use for editing or maybe they were just ideas that you had that you want to be able to access for later so you don't want to delete them all you want to do is hit H on your keyboard then you're gonna see this little H button pop up now let's say let's say I don't really want to keep any of these final few tracks well all I'd want to do is click on the H and then drag down and then if I hit H again on my keyboard boom they're gone but they're still there if I hit H again they show up they hit H again they're gone and if I want to get rid of them again just click hold and drag and these tracks come right back nice and easy okay these next few key commands are gonna keep you from having to deal with this annoying mixer this tiny little mixer window that pops up down to the bottom I'm really hate this thing I love Logic Pro but dealing with this mixer has always been extremely annoying to me so the next few key commands are all about getting a better view of the mixer the arrangement window even the piano roll so first up let's talk about showing the mix window all you need to do is hold down command and hit - and you can see a full-screen mix window pops right up now let's say I wanted to see the arrangement window the window is just on well then you're gonna hit command 1 ok and then let's say I wanted to see the piano roll you know I wanted to edit some MIDI notes that's gonna be command 4 usually these three windows are the windows that I have open all the time and I'm just cycling in between them just depending on what I need in the moment now how do you cycle between the open windows well you can either just hit command one command two or command four but sometimes logic will interpret that as opening up a brand new window and it will open up to arrangement windows or - mixer windows so what I like to do is to actually use command tilde and that just cycles in between in all open windows that you have for a certain program this actually is not a Logic Pro key command this is a Mac key command so this is a great tip if you have maybe two or three different you know internet windows open and you wanted to cycle in between them command tilde it's gonna work for that too or maybe you had two or three different Word documents open and you wanted to cycle between them quickly command tilde it's gonna do that too so between command 1 2 and for command tilde that's pretty much how I do all of my switching what I'm actually doing my mixing so the final key command in this section is to solo only one track at a time and that is holding down option and clicking on one of the s buttons now you might say that that doesn't actually make anything faster you know you're still going and clicking on s buttons why would I want to do that well the cool thing is if I go and click on s buttons right now it's just soloing and unsolo whatever I click on but let's say I wanted to listen to one part and then I wanted to listen to another part back and forth maybe to compare them well if I held down option check out what happens all the solos go away and only one specific track gets soloed but let's say I wanted to listen to the bass if I hold out an option and click now only that is so load it takes away all of these different solos and gets rid of all of them just for the one that you just clicked on it's super helpful especially when you're doing editing or if you're doing some really nitty-gritty mixing work it speeds up your workflow like crazy ok so now I want to talk to you about automation opening up automation the old-fashioned way means going up here clicking on this button and then no you have access to whatever automation you need but for me I like hitting a instead super easy super simple it's another one of those basic logic pro key commands that you should be using already but one thing I really love with automation one key command I love is oftentimes I want to actually go in here and turn volume down over time but a lot of times just the regular fade that I've just made it doesn't really sound all that musical and so one thing I love using is the automation curve tool now to access that you're just gonna hit T which brings up your tool your your tool menu right here so I'm gonna hit T and then I'm gonna hit W now if you look down here you can see that W right here is the automation curve tool and all of these are great key commands for you to learn but specifically I want you to look at this one now check this out now I can move this so that it's really steep at the beginning or I can move it to where it's really steep at the end or maybe it's really steep the beginning and at the end and nothing at the middle or vice versa it allows me to make my automation way more musical way smoother it allows it to fit sort of the musical vibe of the arrangement rather than just being a plain Jane straight line which honestly never happens in nature so now let's move on and talk about the piano roll there's a few key commands and logic that I love using whenever I'm in the piano roll these aren't all of the key commands that you're gonna be using if you live in here like if you do electronic music there's tons and tons of key commands for the piano roll that make it work so much better but here are a few that for me I use almost every single time I'm writing any kind of synths or piano melody or anything like that so first off the most basic one is going to be quantized notes so you can see right here I've got just a little bit of a random scale I'll hit play right now and you're gonna hear it's pretty out of time so what if I wanted to put that in time well all I'd have to do is select everything and hit Q on the keyboard well now you can see and unfortunately there's one that got messed up but overall now everything is on the grid and everything is totally lined up with the grid it's in time let's listen you get the idea now obviously if you don't want it completely on the grid maybe you want to keep some of the the feel of the the original performance luckily over here there is a strength slider so you can see the closer goes to 0 the less quantized the closer close to 100 the more quantized so I usually have mine set to kind of like 70 and then I will just grab stuff and hit Q where needed luckily I'd already quantized that but I'll set my strength where I want then I'll select stuff and hit Q now what's the next thing I'll do well if I'm wanting a very smooth performance especially if I'm doing some kind of synth where it's like monophonic and I don't want any breaks well I'm gonna want to remove the MIDI note overlaps now there's not really a ton in here so I'm actually gonna just make a few and that's just basically where you have too many notes going at the same time which could be honestly just very very odd if you're doing some sort of instrument where you know that triggers something internally and makes it have either a chord or makes it flip too early so all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna select everything and I'm going to hit forward slash and now you can see I've cut everything so that there's no overlaps happening it makes it way way easy to actually do that now let's say great you know I don't have any overlaps but I want all of my MIDI notes to connect I don't want them to be touching each other but I don't want there to be a break every single time one note goes to the next so I'm going to grab everything again and I'm gonna hit shift and then forward slash again and that's called forcing legato now what that does is exactly what I said now every single note is pretty much exactly touching the note next to it without actually touching so listen to it now piano may or may not be the best example to show you what I'm talking about but if you use since you know how valuable that keystroke is finally I have the two keystrokes that I use the most when I'm writing using the piano roll so the first one is to move a note up or down a semitone and that's just me clicking on the note and then holding down option then using the arrow keys up and down to move it one semitone at a time this is really really helpful if you're trying to get harmonies right that's the thing I use it the most for and then the next keystroke that I use is to allow it to go up or down an entire octave and that's just shift and option so it's the exact same thing it's just you're holding down shift instead of just holding down option that's really great to make sure that you're getting the Tambor where it needs to be that you're getting the arrangement right sometimes I just like grabbing everything and shifting it down one octave just to see what it sounds like or shifting it up one octave to see what it sounds like and that way you don't have to select and then drag and just pray to God that you don't accidentally get it off time or off key because that's really easy to do all right finally we are to the extra stuff these are key commands that I use all the time you know they may not be power lifters I might not be using them every 10 seconds but there's still things that speed up my workflow significantly so here we go first off is turning off and on groups and that's gonna be shift G now if you don't know what groups are basically down here there is this little gray box and if I select group now all of these are grouped together now the cool thing about that is that means if I turn this down all of the volume faders go at the exact same rate there's a lot of other cool things that you can do with groups but sometimes I want to be able to set one volume fader by itself and then turn the group back on so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hit shift G and you can see that this just got grayed out and now I can move my volume anywhere I want them to if I hit shift G again check that out now they are all working in ratio with each other all over again so next up is showing and hiding plugins this is something that's really helpful if maybe you've got several plugins up you're doing you're mixing you're in the thick of it but you just realized you accidentally selected maybe the wrong region or you need to go in and check something that's actually on the arrange window you know let me go in here I've got a bunch of different ones I can bring up so let's say I've got all these up and I need to go and check a region about something well I can go in and X out of all of them that takes forever or I can hit V all that does is show and hide the plugins that's it Fayette V again there they are I hate V again they're gone now I do still have to go in and X out of them if I truly want to get rid of them but it's a great way to be able to go in access the arrange window if I need to or the or the mixing window if I need to turn up or down the volume or something and then get access back to all of my plugins all right the next two key commands are better ways to set your cycles so let's say I wanted to listen to this particular acoustic guitar track over and over again maybe I'm doing some mixing or I'm doing some editing but I don't want to go up and actually draw in my loop let me move that out of the way so I show you what I'm talking about well all I'm gonna do is hold command and then hit you and that basically sets my loop to the parameters of my region and it turns my loop on it makes it really really easy to very very quickly set up your cycles now another great keystroke for setting up your cycles is to set your cycle by your markers so let me get up a marker real quick so I've got one here let's say I've got another one here and let's say this is my this is my verse this is verse one and I only want to listen to verse one well if I'm in verse one right now and I hold down control option and see all of a sudden my cycle is going to just loop where this marker is it's only going to loop verse one this is super super simple and super super helpful for really quickly getting your cycles going for specific sections ok the next key command is great for editing and that is nudging left or right so if I was wanting to go in here and I was wanting to make sure that this was as in time as possible you know it might be playing a little ahead of the beat or a little bit behind the beats so I might want to nudge it so what I'm gonna do so I'm gonna select it and I'm gonna hold down option and then I'm gonna hit either the left arrow or the right arrow super simple that's going to allow me to get it better in time and then up here you're gonna be able to set the nudge value to whatever you want it to be it could be super big if you want it to go one bar at a time or it could be really small if you're just wanting to go by milliseconds at a time this is great if you're really trying to get super specific with the timing now for logic in order to get access to this you do have to click this little drop down box but honestly I tend to do my mix with this open so just so you know it's sitting right there another great way to move around different regions is to slide without snapping now I love the grid in Logic Pro I love that it's smart but sometimes I'm trying to set it really close to the bar and not directly on it and it gets really annoying when I'm trying to put it in between here and here and it just will not let me do it so all I have to do is click it and then hold down control and you can see it's no longer on the grid I can move it wherever I want even if I'm just wanting to move it super small I can it's no longer on the grid now be aware you do have to click and then hit control if you hit control first and then click it it's just going to think that you're trying to right-click because that's just how max usually work like if you don't have a mouse that can right-click and if you hold down ctrl or right-click for you so you want to grab it click and then hit control so the next key command to me it's a little bit like a magic trick and that is to capture a MIDI recording so let's say you are messing around on a piano you're not recording you know you're just basically playing around you know you've hit play maybe you're listening to stuff behind you and you're playing something you really like I'm gonna play something that it's gonna sound probably pretty bad but it doesn't matter let me show you what I'm talking about I'm just like oh yeah these chords their revolutionary they've never no one has ever written chords like this The Beatles ain't got nothing on me and then you hit stop and you're like oh no I cannot remember what I just played it's been lost a time well guess what if you hit shift and then are look at what just got created down there you've got a little region that has everything you just played in it it's super easy it's basically listening to everything that you're playing on your MIDI controller and if you hit stop and you really wish that you would record it what you just put in you absolutely can go back in time using a time machine and create a recording all right now let's talk about a little duplication if you want to duplicate a track super quickly you know maybe because you're recording several takes or you're writing or you just don't want to take time to create a new track just hit command-d and then a new one is created right below it does not bring the region with you it just creates an exact copy of this channel and the channel strip it's really really simple if you want to get the exact settings of the channel strip that you just had before honestly I use this all the time I use this more than I even use just creating new tracks it's a bit of a bad habit because sometimes I have to go in here and turn a bunch of stuff off so try not to overuse it but I love it I love it so much it saves so much time and then if you want to duplicate a region just click hit option and drag and you can see now I've got a brand new copy of this region I can put it anywhere I want in the session and just whenever I let go of my cursor but there it is nice and easy if I want put it down here there we go okay here's a cool tip what if you have several regions in a row like this and maybe you think this one sounds great and this one sounds great but this one you're wanting to take out of the arrangement maybe it's just not fitting in the song but you don't really want to delete it you know you might end up deciding you want to keep it later well there is a way to mute only that region and that is clicking on it hitting ctrl and then hitting m and now you can see that only this region is muted there's no regions beside it that are muted as well and if I want to unmute it control M and there we go now the cool thing about this if I go to my piano roll this works on piano notes too if I hit control M that's going to mute it and control M that's gonna mute it if I want to mute this entire section control M and now if I hit play can't hear those notes at all a really really useful key command for very quickly getting better arrangements all right we are almost at the end so let's talk about a very important one and that is bounce in place it's something that a lot of new Logic Pro users and even intermediate logic pro users don't really know what it does and they don't really like to use it I use it so much I love baking in effects partially just because it helps with CPU and partially because you know it keeps me from having to make tons and tons of decisions and then feeling the need to go back and redo those decisions like it makes my decisions permanent so I can focus on whatever I'm wanting to focus on in the moment so if I wanted to let's say you know let's say I had some Melodyne on here I'm not actually gonna do it and I had some some compression on here and I wanted to bake that in well all I'd want to do is make sure that I had this track selected and then I would hit ctrl beep and if I do that this little bounce regions in place thing comes up I want to make sure bypass effect plugins is definitely unchecked for this I don't want to include any volume or pan automation and I'm gonna hit okay and now I've got a brand new audio track that's got a little bit of Melodyne on it and a little bit of compression baked in it's great if you do a whole bunch of editing and you want to make sure that all of those edits don't get lost over time now another great thing is let's say that you have a little track stack let me make one right here and you know I've got a compressor on my track stack we'll just leave it at that for now but let's say I wanted to turn this track sack into one track I wanted to basically just turn it into a single region so that I could get rid of all of this stuff underneath it well all it'd have to do is hit ctrl and then command and then beat and that is bouncing a track in place instead of bouncing a region in place so I'm hit okay so now you can see I've got a brand new audio file and it is all of these things put together on one track this really is a game changer if you're trying to take like a hundred and fifty tracks from your session and turn them into 20 you know if you are trying to really focus in on working on specific busses this is a great way to do it so speaking of track stacks which are incidentally my favorite organization thing in logic here is your final tip a lot of people really like the idea of track stacks you know because they allow you to actually organize your session in a way where you can minimize everything and it's not quite so stressful to look at but they don't like you know making fifteen or twenty and having to go in and individually open all of these tracks it's just a hassle there is actually a key command that will do it for you but it's custom it's not something that you actually have stock with logic so all you have to do is go up to Logic Pro you're going to go to key commands and then edit and then if you type in close you're going to see open closed track stack and for me I put in shift command F I honestly don't remember why I did that but I've pretty much memorized it at this point so if you put that in and you hit learned guess what I can do with shift-command F now I can go in and I can very quickly open these up look at their insights fiddle with stuff and then shut them down the cool thing too is if I select all of them I can open up all of them and I can minimize all of them super easy super fast I mean I might have saved an hour in my mixes whenever I learned how to do this because I love using track stacks to organize and so I would just have tons of track stacks I hated having to go in and individually open and close every single one so that for me is a huge game changer of a key command but if you don't use track stacks well you should start using tracks next that's gonna be my little PSA of this use track stacks they're great I love them so much so there you go 39 essential Logic Pro key commands if you're able to memorize all of these I mean you are going to speed up your workflow like crazy I know that it's sped up my workflow by learning all these over the last several years so I can guarantee it's gonna help you out as well but here is the thing getting a faster workflow is just one small piece of the puzzle if you're trying to get songs and mixes that are ready for the public you got to learn more you can still get this perfect and still end up with an amateur sound if you're making mistakes in other areas so that said that's why Rob mazes you know the founder of musician you see him on all the videos half the time he put together a free workshop where he shares the seven steps to making radio ready music at home you know he's created a new approach to home recording and mixing that's gonna help you do all this stuff so much faster and so much better and honestly it hasn't just worked for him over 36,000 people have already been through this workshop and they've seen results in their music in just a few days so if this is something that you're interested in it's your turn if you want to learn the exact seven steps that will take your mixes to a professional standard in under a year and keep you from wasting precious time and money and effort on the wrong things then go and watch the free workshop now just click the link on screen or in the description below to get your own access it's completely free and trust me you're gonna love it and if you're new here don't forget to subscribe we make tutorials and tips just like this one every week on this channel we'd love to help you grow well that's gonna be it for me this has been Dillon pines with musician on a mission and remember create regardless [Music]

Channel: Musician on a Mission

Views: 60,192

Rating: 4.9726653 out of 5

Keywords: musician on a mission, rob mayzes, home studio, home recording, logic pro, logic key commands

Id: Bc9h9gjtbW4

Length: 34min 6sec (2046 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 03 2020