4 Key Workflow Tips For Logic Pro | Maximize Efficiency

These days, making music is more than just pushing record on a tape machine and playing your guitar. Production is a huge part of songs ending up on the top charts. Having the proper skills and strategies is a determining factor in having efficient and fruitful music production sessions.

Among other professional Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) in the market, Apple’s Logic Pro is known for its user-friendliness. In spite of that, navigating through all the menus and options in Logic’s workspace can look daunting for newbies, especially if you can’t find the right tools and methods to achieve your artistic goals.

Like any other pro-grade DAW, there’s usually more than one way to do a task in Logic Pro. Practicing proper strategies to streamline your workflow can omit so many headaches and halve the time you spend in each session. In this post, I will go through five practical workflow tips that can boost your efficiency when producing music in Logic Pro.

1. Changing Important Settings

First and foremost, you should customize Logic’s workspace and preferences based on your workflow. Doing so allows you to make use of everything that you use frequently more straightforwardly and get rid of the unnecessary options that clutter your session.

One of the first things any Logic user must change is activating the DAW’s complete features. For some reason, Logic Pro strips down its options to provide a less daunting workspace for newbies. If you’ve just downloaded Logic Pro, here’s how you can access all tools in the DAW:

From the top-left corner of your screen:

•  Click “Logic Pro” and hover your pointer on “Settings.”
•  From the settings menu, Select “Advanced…”
•  Click the checkbox next to “Enable Complete Features.”

Enabling Logic’s complete features gives you access to multiple features, including color customization, markers, and more advanced tools in the Editor window.

Another important feature you should look into is the control bar and display at the top of Logic’s workstation. You’ll be using the tools available in this area quite a lot when producing, mixing, and mastering. Therefore, it is critical to create a layout that suits your workflow the most.

•  Control-click on the upper section of Logic’s workstation.
•  Select “Customize Control Bar and Display…”

One of the things I recommend adding to your display is “MIDI Activity (In/Out).” It allows you to monitor what notes and chords you’re triggering on your MIDI keyboard controller as you play. Another handy tool you can add is the built-in tuner. I use it all the time when tracking guitars in Logic Pro.

There’s so much more to change in Logic Pro’s settings and preferences. In another post, I have thoroughly explained 5 important settings you must change in Logic.

2. Organizing Your Project In Logic Pro

It is so easy to lose track of what is where when you’re working on messy projects. It might not seem much when you’re dealing with one or two tracks in your sessions, but when tracks get piled up and you start shaping the arrangement of your project, order in your project can save you a lot of headaches.

The first thing you need to consider is choosing the proper names and icons for each track. You can do so by double-clicking on a track’s name in the Track Header area to change the name. If you have left and right channels of the same track, you can add “L” and “R” in front of each track name to make navigation more straightforward.

Furthermore, you can control-click on a track’s icon and use a relevant picture that represents your track better. Logic offers plenty of stock icons to choose from. However, you can also add your own icons to customize your tracks even further.

Another method to make navigation in a session more straightforward is using colors. Typically, you’d want to assign a certain color to a matching group of instruments. For instance, you can assign different shades of blue to synths, green to drums, and red to vocals. There’s no standard way to go about it. Use whatever colors you like. The point is to make it visually more organized so that you can easily find the track you’re looking for.

You can open Logic’s color palette by pressing “OPTION + C” on your keyboard.

For more tips and tricks regarding organizing your Logic Pro projects, click here to read my post.

3. Using Practical Shortcuts

Logic Pro comes with a vast array of shortcuts and key commands that can save you a significant amount of time if you know how to use them properly. Moreover, by enabling Logic’s complete features from the first step of this post, you can even add your own custom key commands to further streamline your workflow.

It may not seem much at first, but knowing a handful of shortcuts for tools that you use frequently significantly boosts your efficiency. I have listed 20 critical Logic Pro shortcuts in another post.

For instance, the Strip Silence key command in Logic Pro can do a task that would otherwise take minutes in a couple of seconds. It allows you to remove all the silence in an audio file, which can be particularly useful when dealing with sampled drum tracks. All you need to do is select an audio region and press “CONTROL + X” on your keyboard.

Another good example of useful keyboard shortcuts in Logic is the built-in tempo detection. If you’ve downloaded a sample, or you’re collaborating with another producer and don’t know what the tempo for the received audio file is, you can simply press “COMMAND + OPTION + T” on your keyboard after selecting the imported region. Logic will detect the tempo and show it to you in a pop-up window.

4. Creating and Using Presets

Last but not least, presets allow you to jump into ready-to-use effects chains, reducing the time you need to adjust each parameter every time you’re looking for a specific sound. Logic comes with tons of practical stock presets in its library. Make sure to go through them and find the ones you like. If it sounds good within your project, there’s no reason not to use stock presets. The least you can get is inspiration for tweaking and shaping your own sound.

You can also save new custom presets in Logic Pro. If you have landed on a specific tone for your guitar or a sweet spot for compressing your vocals, you can save these in your library to use them across multiple projects. Here’s how you can do it:

•   From the Left Inspector Channel Strip, click “Settings.”
•   Select “Save Channel Strip Settings as…” from the drop-down menu.
•  Save your preset.

You can find your saved presets in the library by pressing “Y” on your keyboard and opening the “User Channel Strip Settings” folder.

For more info on using and creating presets in Logic Pro, click here to learn more.