Basic Editing in Logic

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Click here to download some sound source material or look in eCampus.

Finding Sounds

  1. Run Logic Pro (from the Applications folder on the local disk–you may want to drag the icon to the dock at the bottom of the screen for easy access).
  2. Click Empty Project and click Create to make an audio track.
  3. Save the session in a place in your home folder where you know you can find it again. Remember to save your work regularly. If a storage drive appears on your desktop named with your NetID, then that storage space is just for your files. It lives on a network server and will appear when you log in on any computer in the department. If you don’t have this storage drive appear, then any storage available to you is either public (anyone can see it) or temporary (it will be deleted when you log out). In that case, store your files on that computer to do you work, but copy or upload them to your own storage device/server before logging out.
  4. Drag a sound file into the Arrange window.
  5. Play the file (press space bar) until you find a sound with interesting properties. For each sound:
    1. Hold the command (apple) key and drag to select the sound. (By default, command switches to the Marquee Tool.)
    2. Double-click the selected sound to make it into a separate region. (A region is a block of sound that can be moved around independently.)
    3. Drag the region down to a new track to separate it from the the source file. (Each track contains a series of regions in time.) If you need to create a new empty track first, click the Track menu in the Arrange window, select New Track, then follow the prompts to create more Audio tracks.)
  6. Use the Text Tool to click on each new region you’ve made and give it a descriptive name. (Press esc to choose tools.)
  7. Select all of your new regions by dragging an area around them.
  8. In the Arrange window, click the Audio menu, and select Convert Regions to New Audio Files. Click Save in the Save Regions dialog box. This turns each region into a separate file on the hard disk. Before this step, each region was just a pointer to a position in the source sound. Now, you can edit and process the new sounds without affecting the original recording.

Editing Sounds

  1. Using the Pointer Tool, double-click a region to edit the sound inside. This will open the Sample Editor window at the bottom of the screen. The Sample Editor window has separate scroll and zoom bars and tool selections.
  2. Click and drag to highlight any unwanted sound at the beginning or end of the region, and press delete to delete each selected area.
  3. Select a portion of the beginning (no matter how small), click the Functions menu at the top of the Sample Editor, and select Fade In. This is to avoid clicks when sounds are suddenly cut off.
  4. Select and fade out a portion of the end.
  5. Select the whole sound and click Normalize on the Functions menu. This amplifies the sound to full volume. Normalizing all your sounds sets a level playing field when you start to make decisions about mixing sounds together.
  6. Now, change the sound! Try any of the following, in any combination:
    • You’ve already made some decision with fades, you can apply fades again for more creative effects.
    • Reverse the sound (Functions menu).
    • Cut off the attack or the decay (remember to apply fades to any rough ends you make).
    • Try the Time and Pitch Machine (on the Factory menu).
      • Make sound longer or slower by entering a negative percentage in the Tempo Change field. Positive numbers make it shorter or faster.
      • Make the sound higher or lower by entering a value in the Transposition field. One cent = 1/100th of a semitone; there are 1200 cents in an octave. What does Harmonic Correction do?
      • Click Process and Paste to apply the time and pitch changes.
      • Repeat the process to make the sound slower/faster/higher/lower than it would let you do in one step.
      • Refer to the manufacturer’s documentation (Help menu) to learn more about what a function/option/control does
    • Remember to combine these steps in different ways for different results.
    • Try making multiple copies of a sound and editing them differently for great variety or subtle variations:
      1. Click the region in the Arrange window.
      2. Copy the region and paste it as many times as you want (Copy and Paste are on the Edit menu).
      3. Remember to select all the copies, click the Audio menu in the Arrange window, and select Convert Regions to New Audio Files. Otherwise, your new changes will overwrite your previous changes to the sound, and you’ll have no variations!
  7. Before arranging your sounds into a composition, you may want to set the Bar ruler (at the top of the arrange window) to display time in minutes and seconds instead of bars (measures) and beats. To do this, click the icon at the far right end of the Bar ruler, and select the option that suits your needs best.

Bouncing your work down to a single audio file

  1. When you are ready to create a single audio file from your work, check that the tracks you want to hear are unmuted and audible, and mute any unwanted tracks.
  2. Find the highlighted area on the Bar ruler (at the top of the arrange window) and click it so it turns green. This will indicate what time arrange to include in your bounced output. Drag the edges of this bar (called Locators) to fit the beginning and end of your sound excerpt.
  3. Click the File menu and Bounce…
  4. Select a name and location to save your file, double check the sound settings (use AIFF or WAV, 16-bit, 44100Hz sample rate, interleaved, with no dithering, and check the Normalize box, unless you have a good reason to do something different), then click Bounce.
  5. Check your work. An easy way is to find your sound file in the Finder (Mac OS X’s file browser), then single-click the file to highlight it, and press space.