Working With Loops in Logic
The other day while in the studio working with a friend he said to me, “I just can’t work with Logic man, warping loops just sucks!”. I have to agree that to some extent other software might be better suited if working exclusively with loops, i.e., Ableton Live, or Fruity Loops, or Acid even. However, I’d like to give a few tips on how you could speed up your work flow working with loops in logic.
Clicking on the loop box located on the explorer bar will loop the selected region or regions until the end of your project.
You can loop any midi region, audio region, or folders even just by dragging the upper right corner of the selected region or regions.
If you repeat groups of regions over and over again, why not make them one loop? It makes your project much less cluttered and easier to manage. You can achieve this in two ways, one simply “glue” them together, or two, pack them into a folder. Folders are a great way of looping sections of audio which have been split up into regions.
You don’t HAVE to work with loops all the time, in fact one great trick to do is loop your region over the time of a phrase, then right-click and select “Convert loops to real copies”. By doing this you can chop up or modify whichever one of those copies you want in order to create fills, drop-outs, or simply add some movement to your phrases.
You can apply automation to regions by using the hyper-editor rather than track automation. Doing this is great for ensuring that your control changes are always carried with you when you copy or loop your regions.
Creating apple loops can be as easy as right-clicking on a region and selecting “Open in Loop Utility”. The process is easy and self-explanatory. One thing that sets Logic above Live is the ability to keep your content organized. So be sure to enter/choose relevant information about the loops you create then add them to your library.
Apple Loops can be converted to real audio simply by right-clicking on the region and selecting “convert to real audio”. This creates a new copy of the audio so you can modify it as you please.
Dragging the right corner of a region while holding down option will apply the time and pitch machine to the selected region. It will also snap to your grid. This, to me, is one of the most powerful tools yet. It means I can time stretch ANY audio.
Ok good! now go Loopy…