Help Me Move From Pro Tools To Logic Without Losing My Mind!!!

September 29, 2009 5:59 PM

ProAudioFilter! Help a long-time Pro Tools user switch to Logic. My major concern is audio EDITING more than creating. Bonus Question: I have Logic Pro 8 and I'm considering upgrading to 9 if it's worth it. Is it?

I've done quite a bit of searching online, but most of what I find is focussed on creating songs with Logic (which makes sense). I'm trying to learn editing. For example, here's a typical project for me: Let's say I'm creating a :30 commercial for an upcoming concert. I already have dry voicework, some sound effects and four songs to be used in the spot, plus various other audio stuff.

I'm really dying here as I try to work in Logic's edit window.

How did you make the leap from Pro Tools to Logic? Where can I find info that will help me make sense of this different way of doing things? I'm really excited about using Logic, but wow am I frustrated too.

posted by 2oh1 to computers & internet (17 comments total)

It would be helpful if you described exactly the sorts of things you're having trouble doing; there's such a broad range of stuff people do with audio that I can't really give more specific instructions without more details. It sounds like you want to be mostly working in the Arrange window, and maybe use the Sample Editor to fine-tune your regions. But I could be misunderstanding.

(Also, more generally, check out Logic Pro Help; there are folks in there using Logic in just about every way you can imagine, and they really, really know what they're doing.)
posted by uncleozzy at 6:46 PM on September 29

It would help to know more about where you're getting stuck here. What kind of tasks are you trying to do when you get lost? I mostly use Logic for editing too, as opposed to song creation, and generally find it a pretty good environment for that kind of work. I very much recommend the Logic manual (all 2,000 pages of it or whatever) as it's actually one of the better software manuals I've seen. A YouTube search on "logic pro" gives you a good number of screencasts too, some of which may be helpful as you get your bearings. Finally, studiofiles.net has a good bunch of Logic articles including some titled "Logic for Pro Tools Users."

If you are doing a lot of commercials and related work, I would take a look at Logic 9 for its new time-shifting features. They most probably would come in pretty handy for tweaking voiceovers or snapping a hit point in a song to coincide with something else (or the other way around).

Logic 9 has been crashing a whole bunch for me, especially when I do anything related to take folders and comps (this is running Snow Leopard and the new Logic 9.0.1 too). Might want to hold off for another point release or two. I did get an awesome price from the campus bookstore though (far less than even Apple's normal education price), which you should consider doing if you have some connection to higher education.
posted by zachlipton at 6:50 PM on September 29

Do you use tab to trans, elastic audio or beat detective? If so then definitely upgrade. I switched from pt to logic years ago but still feel like editing audio in logic is kludgier. But I like logic, good luck.
posted by jeb at 7:15 PM on September 29

I'm getting stuck with everything after the program launches. Literally. I'll learn the fancy stuff later. Right now, I'm trying to make sense of the edit window. I literally am just trying to chop up some audio tracks, drag them into place and create a simple mix with volume graphs and fades. I've been using Pro Tools for 15 years, thus explaining the difficulty of the transition to logic.

How do I switch ALL tracks from volume graph to "display off" (or whatever Logic calls it when you're editing the audio itself) and back again later?

How on earth do I get rid of all of that wasted space on the right of my editor where Logic displays track logos? Holy moly is that a lot of screen real estate eaten up by nothing.

I guess I was hoping to find some recent Pro Tools users who could help me figure out how to translate what I know into how it needs to be done using Logic. Logic seems so powerful, but editing seems really difficult.
posted by 2oh1 at 8:04 PM on September 29

I'm curious as to why you switched to Logic, though there are plenty of good reasons, because it sounds to me like what you're doing would be easier in PT. Logic has a lot of strong points, but compared to PT, editing *is* really difficult, IMHO. It's really annoying. (For example, there is no tab-to-transient, still. But you can use the marquee tool to make a rough selection, and then use the keyboard commands (left/right arrow to change the right boundary, shift+left/right arrow to change the left by default) to change your selection by snapping to transients. Cmd-\ will chop the region at the boundaries of the marquee selection and leave you with a new region)

What do you mean by volume graph? The automation lane for track volume? You can switch that off by choosing View->Track Automation or in the default key commands hitting A. If you mean the renderings of the track volume (logic calls it a 'Track Preview' IIRC) there's a way to keep it from calculating them in the Preferences->Audio tab, but I don't know how to go back and forth.

Generally speaking, a lot of things about Logic make more sense if you think of the fact that while PT was designed as an audio recording tool that added MIDI features, Logic was designed as a MIDI sequencer that eventually added audio. This bias is pervasive in the PT vs. Logic UI. The fact that Logic now tries to hide this while maintaining its historical architecture makes it even more confusing. Like you may have noticed some weirdnesses about creating audio tracks and deleting/changing names/changing IO assignments and not getting the behavior you expect. This is because Logic is transparently creating objects in the Environment that behave reasonably, but now how you'd guess if you assume Logic works like PT. PT is a computer tape machine, Logic is a sequencer that lets you sequence chunks of audio. The Arrange window is really a sequencer window. Its just that some sequence 'notes' can be chunks of audio ('audio regions'). For example, until some super recent version of Logic, I believe 8, editing in the Arrange window wasn't even sample-accurate.

The takeaways here are two: (1) You have to use the Sample Editor. I thought this window was some little side thing for editing samples. In Logic, that's not the case. If you are doing a lot of audio edits, you will probably be either (a) spending a lot of time here or (b) shooting yourself in the face (with the caveat that multi-track phase coherent editing in L9 will go on in the Arrange window). In L8 the Sample Editor is a slide-up window by default, which makes you think "oh, this isn't a whole major area of the program." It is. Open it in a new window (Window->Sample Editor). (2) Even though it seems ridiculous, you are going to have to learn a tiny amount about the Environment at some point, probably when you least want to.

So, looking at your example of making the :30, probably what you want to do is add the four songs to the bin. [Note: I know nothing about using Logic with video]. You are going to want to include some part of these four songs in the arrangement. Create four audio tracks (in Logic 8, that's Track->Create Multiple in the Arrange window's inner menu, in Logic 9, its just Track->New... in same). You don't have to do this this way, but its reasonable. Go to the Bin. Add your audio files to the bin, or else, drag your songs onto the four tracks. You'll get big regions in this case that represent the whole song. Now, you want to select the parts of the song you are interested in. Select one of those regions and pull up the Sample Editor. This is where you are going to make the region. Click the man for view follows song position line, click the speaker to play, and use the mouse to select roughly the audio you want. You can use shift-mouse to change the size of your selection and the like...recycling icon to engage cycle mode, which will play your current selection. When you've got the right chunk, choose "Selection -> Region" from the Sample Editor's Edit menu. This marks off a new region in this underlying audio. In your bin, you'll see it. If you drag this into the Arrange window, that's your new region. Arrange it.

If you need to cut up your voicework, you're either going to want to do a similar thing, or use the marquee selection method mentioned above. Sound effects are pretty straightforward. You drop those in, you get new regions, fine. As far as I know, Logic has no ungridded mode, per se, like Pro Tools does. So if you find dragging regions around etc. is super-annoying cause everything keeps snapping to a meaningless grid, you need to turn your snap settings to a smaller grid, like samples or frames. That's the snap dropdown in the arrange window in L9, can't remember if its different in L8.

Oh, do you know about the tool shortcuts? That's clutch for editing. The basic, built-in stuff works like this:
- You can define one primary and one secondary tool using the dropdown menus in the Arrange or Sample Editor windows.
- Normal Mouse Click = primary tool.
- Cmd+Mouse Click = secondary tool
- Escape pops up the list of tools at the mouse position
- Each tool in the mouse-position pop up menu is numbered, so you can just hit the number to switch to it.
- You can define a right mouse button tool, but personally, I think this is insane, because so much stuff relies on right-mouse-button context menus, but I could see how a heavy editor might use it.

So like, if you are editing, you might want primary tool = pointer, secondary tool = scissors or marquee. That way you don't have to switch back and forth, you just have to cmd-do-whatever, then you're back in pointer mode and you can move regions, delete them, mute them, what have you. To quickly switch, use the escape menu. Pointer is the first tool so escape-enter always goes back to it (unless you remap those keys). Personally, when I edit in the arrange window, I end up doing a sequence of loose-marquee-tool-select-with-the-mouse, the arrow keys and shift arrow keys to change the boundary by transients (with Search Zero Crossings turned on to avoid pops), then ctrl-' to set Locators By Marquee Selection, the cmd-\ to cut at the marquee. Also, if you're working on music or things that have to loop, cmd-T is super useful. because it changes the tempo based on region length and locators.

For the editing you describe, I don't know if this matters, but there are a lot of PT editing features involving multi-track timebending that didn't exist in L8. Some exist in L9 under the rubric 'Flex Time'.

HTH-- logic can be insanely frustrating at times, but, man, its a lot of software for the dollar.
posted by jeb at 9:11 PM on September 29 [1 favorite has favorites]

How on earth do I get rid of all of that wasted space on the right of my editor where Logic displays track logos? Holy moly is that a lot of screen real estate eaten up by nothing.

Not sure what you mean by this, but the LEFT side track nonsense can be configured if you right-click a track and choose "Configure Track Header", but you can still only reclaim so much of this space (I have no idea why) when you resize it by dragging after hovering over the dividing line. You can hide that whole other block by clicking "Inspector" in the main top button area. The right side of the Arrange window is used by all the Media stuff in L8 and L9 by default (Loops, Bin, Channel Strips, Software Instruments. If you click the Media button, it goes away.
posted by jeb at 9:18 PM on September 29

OOPS!!! I meant on the LEFT side of the screen. Not the right! D'oh!
posted by 2oh1 at 10:09 PM on September 29

I thought of some other stuff that might help you:
- Download one of those PDFs of Logic keyboard commands so you have them in front of you. Grokking the architectural difference of Logic vs. PT is important so you don't feel totally lost, but one of the things that will make a big difference is getting your editing speed back.
- Producer BT made a set of key commands that he put on his website years ago. BT was trying to get lots of logic people to use the same keyboard commands, which I still think is a good idea, but he also assigned a lot of PT keys in the set. So if you google BT Universal Logic Keyboard Commands, you'll certainly find the file of commands and the descriptions, and installing that might give you back some missed PT commands.
posted by jeb at 8:07 AM on September 30

Thanks Jeb! That's helpful.

The editing I do in PT is really basic, except that I do a lot of it. My work is definitely edit intensive. There are a long list of reasons why I want to leave Digidesign behind, but the biggest reason isn't a shortcoming of Digi's. It's the upside of Logic. Bang for the buck, I thought Logic was a steal when it was $1,000, and I wanted to switch. Then, when Apple cut the price in half for the entire suite, plus jampacks etc... how could I resist? I bought it, but I've struggled with it. I realize I'll have to learn new ways of doing things, but that's fine.
posted by 2oh1 at 10:14 AM on September 30

MacProVideo has a bunch of quite stellar tutorial videos on Logic; you can watch any and all for a month for $25.
posted by dpcoffin at 11:17 AM on September 30

Seconding MacProVideo generally, but if you are already pretty experienced on PT, the introductory Logic material in 101 and 201 and so on will have the useful nuggets you want ("oh, so thats what the anchor point does in the Sample Editor") buried in loads of a basic DAW info you already know ("Audio is represented as zeros and ones in a file on your computers hard drive...").

For certain sub-areas, MPV can be really helpful ('give me the rundown on the EXS-24'), but I haven't found it to be super-great from a "I get the basic concepts of making music on my computer. Tell me how Logic has decided to present this functionality."
posted by jeb at 12:47 PM on September 30

Quick tip: hit the "A" key to toggle track automation (e.g. volume, pan, etc... curves) on and off.

Quick tip #2: The editing tools aren't the more obvious things in the world, but they are your friends. The slice tool (scissors) and the fade tool are both really handy for editing tasks. You can set one tool as the primary tool and another as a secondary tool, which comes up when you hold down command, so you can easily split a region or insert a fade as you edit.
posted by zachlipton at 3:04 PM on September 30

How do I return the playhead to ZERO? When I press RETURN, it seems to go to zero, but then when I press play, it returns to wherever it last was rather than zero.
posted by 2oh1 at 3:48 PM on September 30

0 on the numeric keypad, or yeah, return should do that too. Not sure what to tell you here.

The general solution to this sort of thing is Opt-k to pull up the key commands, then search for something like what you might want. it might take a few tries. playhead won't bring it up, but beginning will. then check the key command or if there is none set a new one.

Also, the key commands are different based on your keyboard and Logic guesses them based on what kind of computer you have. So Macbook Pro = you probably don't have a numeric keypad, so it doesn't set up numeric keypad shortcuts. This drove me crazy when I switched to a macbook pro (with an external keyboard) and I was like GAHH WHY DOESNT ZERO WORK ANYMORE!!! In the keyboard commands dialog, there's a dropdown call Options. Make sure you select what you've got.

Also in that window under options, there's a preset for "Pro Tools Compatible". might help you out.
posted by jeb at 4:28 PM on September 30

I'm using a Mac Mini with the wireless keyboard, so I don't have a keypad (I prefer not having one, actually).

Even if I press ZERO on my keyboard, the playhead appears to change to 00:00, but when I press the spacebar, Logic starts playing from where it last started playing rather than at 00:00.

Oddly enough, if I press return while Logic is playing, playback jumps to 00:00 and continues. But, if I press stop and THEN press return, when I press play, playback begins at the previous spot rather than at 00:00.

I know there's a setting to change this behavior because I've done it before... but I can't for the life of me find it now.
posted by 2oh1 at 4:51 PM on September 30

Sorry, no idea. I'd take it to LUG or logicprohelp.
posted by jeb at 5:24 PM on September 30

Thanks for the help Jeb! You've pointed me in the right direction. LUG, here I come. (I'll check out LogicProHelp too)

Cheers!
posted by 2oh1 at 11:38 AM on October 1