Exploring Logic's Main Window - Logic Pro Tutorial

- [Instructor] The Logic Pro Main Window is the central hub, mission control of a Logic project. It's a place where you can manage all the elements for your song, all while maintaining a global point of view. In this movie, we'll explore Logic's main window and understand what all the different areas do and how we can use them to manage a project as efficiently as possible. The center area of the main window is the tracks area. In here you'll see all of your tracks horizontally laid out in the timeline fashion. Tracks are individual lanes where sounds live. Audio tracks like glitchy audio or sample contain sampled audio and those are shown to us in terms of audio regions. So like aliens rhythm dot 11 is one audio region and I have it selected when I click on it. When I click on aliens rhythm nine, I'm selecting a different audio region, in that audio track. The regions can be freely edited at the start and end points, and they're associated with corresponding audio files on your hard drive. Other track types are software instrument tracks, so like synth pad one and synth pad two. Those are software instrument tracks. Now those don't contain audio. Instead they contain MIDI regions. So they're shown here in green. The default color coding is green for MIDI, blue for audio. So bubble synth is an example of a MIDI region. Retro machines is another track type that contains MIDI. It's a software instrument track, contains MIDI regions except instead of a synth, these are drum machine MIDI events. You can see there's like a lot more discreet little dots because it's actually a drumbeat or this is big synth pad, so it's a long MIDI note. Well let's hit space bar and we'll start the playback of Logic and we can hear what's in our song. You'll notice when I hit the space bar to start, the playhead starts moving across our screen left to right, and when I hit space bar again the playhead stops. I can use the return button to return the playhead to the beginning of the song. If you wanted to zoom in and out horizontally on your tracks, you can use the zoomer controls on the upper right. So the one on the right most zooms us in and out horizontally. So if I go to the right, we get closer up. When I go to the left, we zoom out farther. And vertically, we can do it with the one next to that. So I can make the tracks taller or shorter that way. There's also some nice key commands for that. It's just command left and right arrows for horizontal zoom. Command up and down arrow for vertical zoom. Now I'm going to talk for a second about this leftmost column. This is called the inspector. You can show and hide the inspector by clicking on the I button or simply just by typing the key I. Now this has some different information over here. Let's talk about these two areas at the top here. When I select a track, for example sample, and I open up these disclosure triangles, we have the track inspector here. This will update depending on what track you have selected. So right now I have an audio track selected and I'm seeing information about that track. When I click on synth pad two, this inspector updates to tell me information about that track. Now the area above here is called the region inspector, that changes its contents depending on what region you have selected. So notice I have trippy flute currently selected and it's telling me information about that MIDI region. When I select the sample audio region, it updates tell me information about that and so forth. So I click beats changes to that. So those are two inspectors that let you identify and change parameters depending on what region you have selected in this case or what track you have selected in this case. Now also in the inspector below it, we have what's called the channel strip. So that's this vertical column here. This also updates depending on what track you have selected. So right now, because synth pad two is selected, I am seeing the channel strip for synth pad two. Now, if I go and click on retro machines, that now updates to show me the channel strip for the retro machine's track. And it contains a fader and a panner that can control the audio output of any individual track that you have selected. So for example, if I hit play and move the fader up and down, I will be changing the volume of the drum machine. Let's check that out, turning down the drums, back up the drums. To the right of the channel strip, we have the output fader. Now this is a global output of all the tracks together in Logic. So in other words, this controls the output level of everything. And if I hit play, I can turn the whole song, all the levels of all the tracks down by changing this fader. Okay, so we're going to go ahead and hide the leftmost inspector and let's move over to the right hand side of our main window. Now over here we have some different options, some different windows that can appear on the right hand and they're all controlled by these buttons over here on the top right. So first we'll look at the browser and notice when I hover over this, it tells me that there is actually quick keys associated. Browser, you can open and close by the F key. And basically the browser shows you a overview of all the media associated with your project. This is giving us a view of all the audio files that are attached to a project and their individual regions. So for example aliens rhythm 11 and nine are two individual regions that are from a parent audio file. If I move this out called aliens rhythm, no clip. Okay, so backwards symbol, that's the name of the audio file and the region in that case. Anyway, this rightmost window pane shows us all the files associated with our project. Let me go one step over and show the next window pane, over here or the next content of the rightmost window pane, which is our loops browser, and you can open that and close it with O. If you think of a big loop, O is kind of like a loop. Open that up, this shows us all of the Apple loops. Apple loops are content that comes with Logic Pro. So these are actually prefab loops and MIDI loops that you can drag into your project. And this is a comprehensive list of all of the Apple loops that came with your Logic install. Right next to that, we can update this window to show notes for our project. So if you wanted to edit notes for our project, you can type in notes wherever you want to and these will be associated with your project and saved with your project. You can also do notes by track. So if you wanted to write yourself a little note about the sample track, you can type in here and edit and say, I like this track, or whatever you want to say. And finally we have the list editor. This is an interesting way of looking at what's happening and when it's happening within your project. So you can see when I move the playhead all the way to the left, this scroll bar moves with it. So it's kind of moving down the list, as I move the playhead to the right from the beginning to end, it's telling me in what order each thing happens. So this is a global view, since I have nothing selected, it's telling me a global view. First thing that happens in the project is the beats region starts, then the aliens rhythm, then eventually the trippy flute starts. So all these things are happening in this list. Now if I go into a specific MIDI region, it updates to show me what's happening within that MIDI region. So it's kind of a very up close and very detailed look at what's happening either in your project globally or within any given MIDI region. You can use this list view on this right hand column here. So I'm going to go ahead and close that. And there's one more window pane to check out and it's one that goes across the bottom. We're not currently seeing it because we haven't turned it on yet. But to access the bottom window pane, it's about these buttons right here. So when I click on the leftmost one of these, that's our smart controls button, and this will update again depending on what you have selected. So this is showing me smart controls over some parameters associated with the sample track. Now, if I click on a different track, like retro machines, it gives us smart controls over the drum machine. So smart controls are really quick and easy access to the most important parameters for any given track at any time. And you can actually update and edit these as we'll see later in the course. After the smart controls, we've got a handy way to look at our global mix so we can update the bottom pane to show our mix view by clicking on the mix button. And now we see all of the tracks channel strips together at once. So we can kind of do a quick mix down in the bottom of our main window. And finally we have our editor. This also will update depending on what we have selected. So if we select an audio region, we'll get to see an up close view of the audio within that region, and we can use this area to edit that audio. If we click on a MIDI region, we can see for example, the piano roll view. This is an up close view of our MIDI notes. And I can also use the same zoomer tool to zoom in and out of this. These are actually individual MIDI notes, within this region, and I have access to them right in the bottom half of our window once I turn on the edit pane. So now that we're familiar with where things are in the main window and how to show and hide them, you'll have a better time navigating this all important workspace area, in Logic. Of course, we just scratched the surface, and in the coming movies we'll dive deeper into how to use all of these important areas to make great music in Logic.