From the course: Logic Pro X Essential Training

Controlling playback - Logic Pro Tutorial

From the course: Logic Pro X Essential Training

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Controlling playback

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- [Tutor] Knowing how to hear, what you want, when you want, is an essential skill to have, when working in Logic. In this movie, we'll learn about how to use, the control bar tools, and the LCD display, to control playback, precisely and easily. We already know Logic plays in real time, when we hit the space bar, the play head moves across the screen. (gentle electronic music) We hit the space bar again, it stops. And remember, Return, moves the play head to the beginning of the timeline. To position the play head using your mouse, you can point and click, directly in the narrow bar, right at the top of the tracks. You can also do this while you're playing, and the play head will skip to any location, that you click on. You can even go backwards. (gentle electronic music) To hear a specific amount of time, you can use the Marquee tool, which you can access by holding down, Command. You get the little crosshair, and you can actually make a little area or selection, and when you hit play, the play head will play, only that, in and out point. I'll try that again, so you can see how that works. You just make a little selection anywhere, I'm doing it in this track, I could do it down here, it doesn't really matter, that designates a playback section, for the play head, once you hit the space bar, plays in and out, from that point, and stops at the end. Up here, we have transport buttons, which should be familiar to you, if you've operated a tape machine before. You can play, stop, by clicking up there, you can click this button, to also get back to the beginning of, in this case, the Marquee selection, but if I de-select that by clicking elsewhere, I can click this button, take me back to the beginning of the project. I've also got pretty typical, fast-forward, rewind buttons, and I've got a Cycle button here, which we'll talk about in a moment. To the right of these transport buttons, is what we call the LCD display. And this gives you a numeric indication, of where you are, in your project. Now, Logic keeps time in bars and beats, which are actually subdivided further, into divisions and ticks. And there's four beats per bar, there's four divisions per tick, and there's 240 ticks per divisions. That's the finest increment. You want to get to 240. Notice that, you can click and drag, in this area, to change the values, as I'm doing now. I can click all the way up to 240, and then we should flip over to the next division. Let's see if that works. Yep. So, that's one way to move this round. You can click and drag, up and down, with your mouse, and move the play head to that bar, or beat, et cetera. You can also double click in here, and type in a value, so I can type in, 2, space, 2, space, 1, space, 1, return or enter, and the play head will go to, bar 2, beat 2, division 1, tick 1. And you can also do a shorthand version of this. Double click in here and type for example, 5, enter. It'll take you right to the beginning bar 5, beat 1, division 1, tick 1. That's a real quick way to go to a specific bar. Oh, 17? Double click, 17, boom. Your play head goes right to 17. After the bars and beats display, we have our tempo display. So the tempo is, the actual beats per minute, the tempo of your project. So right now, we're at 160. If I solo the drum machine track, I can actually click and drag in here as well, and slow down the tempo, in real time, which is a real awesome feature. Or I can speed up. (fast drumming) You can also, as you might imagine, double click in here, and type in an amount. 160 goes to 160. Notice that, the LCD turns yellow, when you have a track soloed. Just a visual indicator, that you have a solo track. And to the right of the tempo, we've got our time signature. So 4/4 time, means that there's four divisions per bar. You can click in here, and change to, for example, 3/4, which is like a waltz time. That's your musical reference, of how many beats per bar. To the right of that, we have the default project key signature. Now by default, all projects start with C major. You can change the key signature here, right up here in the LCD. Now, if you want to change the content of your LCD, you can do that, with this pull-down menu, on the right of the LCD. You can change it to, right now, we're seeing Beats & Project (Large). So, we can change it to, let's try a Beats & Time (Large), what does that give us? That gives us something really interesting, actually. It gives us, the bars and beats, but it also gives us, SMPTE time code. SMPTE is a standard, it actually stands for, Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers, but it's a time standard, about how you can measure time, and instead of bars and beats, it uses hours, minutes, seconds, frames, and subdivisions. And you might ask, why does it start at hour one? Well, that's actually a SMPTE time convention, so this is a way of counting time, that's used professionally in audio to video. And as you imagine, just like the bars and beats, you can click in here, and go to, different minutes or different seconds, by clicking and dragging, or typing it in. So if I wanted to go to, five seconds, I can do that. It goes right to five seconds. There are some other custom views, you can get to, by using this pull down menu. So I can choose the most custom one, is the one that's actually called Custom, and that gives us, a whole arrange of different views we can look at. We see SMPTE, we see bars and beats. We also see some great outnumbers here, which will activate once we turn on, Cycle mode, which I'll talk about in a second, and we have our tempo. So this kind of shows everything. I actually, usually keep mine on this view. Doesn't take up too much space, and you get to see all the things at once, right? But speaking of Cycle mode, what is Cycle mode? Cycle mode is a range you can define, that tells Logic to play, and then loop within a current area. So, you can activate Cycle mode, with this little loop to loop button. And if I turn that on, I see the little yellow strip, up in the top of the tracks area. That's our Cycle range. It has an end point, it has an out point, which you can actually define, by clicking and dragging. And once you have a cycle range established, if you hit the space bar to play, Logic will then loop, within that cycle, and when it gets to the end, it'll return. And it'll do that forever, until you hit stop. As I said, engage or disengage Cycle by this button. You can also click directly on the little yellow area, or even better than that, type the c key, turn Cycle on and off. Now notice when I turn it on, these numbers in the custom view, tell me, my in and out point, of my cycle, and as you might imagine, I can click and drag these, to also define the cycle length, in and out point. Now that's a lot of stuff, up in the top, of our Logic main window, but you can even further customize what's up here. If you right click, in any of the empty area, you can say, Customize Control Bar in Display, and you have a lot of options to customize. So for example, if I wanted to put in, Play from Beginning, I can add that, and you see that little button showed up. So, you can customize your view even further, with that little sub menu. All you need to do, is right click to get to it. So going forward, you'll be able to use, the Control Bar, up at the top, of the Logic main window, to hear what you want to, quickly and easily, as you compose in Logic.

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