5 Logic Pro X Tips & Tricks

Here are a few random tips & tricks that you may not know about that can be of great use, or great time-savers, while producing music on Apple's Logic Pro X.

1. The Brush Tool

When drawing in MIDI notes, often you will use the pencil tool to draw in each individual note, but this can become time-consuming when you begin clicking multiple times to input the same pattern. What's even quicker than copying and pasting, is using the brush tool that allows you to draw a line of notes as you draw the cursor along.

2. Track Stacks

Using Logic Pro's track stacks, you should group together certain tracks as it makes mixing much simpler - a huge factor in music production is organisation. This also means that the tracks in your stack can share one fader. In addition, any effects added to a stack will affect all the tracks in the stack in the same way, giving them a consistent sound.

3. Sustaining MIDI Notes

Do you ever record or draw in some MIDI and then decide you want the notes to sustain until the note changes? And then have to manually select and adjust the notes? Well, no more. Open the note editor, select all of the notes that you want this to happen to, then go to 'Edit', 'Trim' and 'Note End To Following Notes'. 

4. The Marquee Tool

The marquee tool is one I found out about only recently and has saved me so much. As opposed to manually selecting every single point for the automation, the marquee tool allows you to drag and select the range you want to automate.

5. MIDI Compression

Often when recording in MIDI, it doesn't sound exactly how you want it to, sometimes due to the weighting of the MIDI keyboard you used. Rather than spending ages automating the velocity of each note, just let the 'Velocity Processor' MIDI effect do the work for you. It lets you choose a threshold point, above which the ratio will set the amount of velocity reduction.

So those are my 5 random tips & tricks that could save you a little bit of time if you didn't already know about them!