From the course: Logic Pro X Essential Training

Setting up for the mix - Logic Pro Tutorial

From the course: Logic Pro X Essential Training

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Setting up for the mix

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- [Instructor] When you're mixing your project organization is key. In this movie, We'll set ourselves up for completing the final mix of this song. Let's get familiar with the mixer window. We'll type command two to open the mix window. Now here reviewing all the tracks as they are listed out in the main window. And we know that because the tracks button is lit up at the top of the mix window. Now if I wanted to show all tracks even ones that aren't part of my main window, I can click all and I'd see a whole bunch more tracks including general midi tracks over here and even click tracks. So some of these are not showing out in the main window but if you want your mix window to reflect what's in the main window, you can click on the tracks button and then it updates to show those tracks. You can also filter the tracks you're seeing by type. So if I only want to see audio tracks, for example, I could turn off all these other track types. You can also just option click on a track type you want to see. So if I want to see just instrument tracks option, click on that and all the other track types get turned off and I see just the instrument track. And then I can turn on the other tracks one at a time. Different track types. Now another thing you might want to do when you start mixing, is reorganize your tracks. So let me go back to the main window for a second. And for example, if I wanted the drums to go to the top of the main window, just click and hold on the track header and you can pull that up. So it's usually nice when you mix to organize similar track types together. So for example, I'd put all the background vocals together. And notice when I do this and then I pop back to the mix window. You can see that this track order reflects the order of my main window. So I put all the background vocals together and there they are together here in the mix window, and the drum kit is now the leftmost channel strip in the mix window because it was the top track in our main window. Now another organizational method you can apply when you mix, is to color code your tracks. Now there's a way you can do this back in the mix window. You can actually give each track a channel strip color. So for example, if I click on the sunset kit track I right-click, I can say assign channel strip color and then the color palette pops up and I can make it yellow for example, let me do the same thing to the lead vocal right next to it. Right-click assign channel strip color, I'll make that pink. Now going back to our main window we noticed that we don't see those colors here. That's just because our track header has not been configured to show the channel strip color. So I'm going to right click here and I'll go to track header components and we want to say track color bars. And when I do that, those colors we had in our mixed window now appear in our main window. And one more thing about color coding your tracks, to me I think it's nice to have your regions on the track reflect that track color bar. And there's actually a pretty simple way to do this. You select the tracks you want to have the track color reflected on the region color. Then you go to functions and you can say color regions by track color or option shift C and the regions on the track now reflect our track color. Now I've gone ahead and color-coded this whole project in a different version. So I'm going to go ahead and open that up and we can take a look at what that looks like. So here I've gone through and color coded all the tracks and the regions on those tracks. Another method to set up when you're mixing, is to set up groups on a track by track basis. Cause track groups can help you mix quickly and efficiently If you have similar track types that you want to operate together. I'll show you what I mean in the mix window. Here for example, we have our background vocal tracks the three purple tracks. Now I can drag a selection around all three of these tracks to highlight them. And then their faders will move in tandem but that's only happening because the tracks are selected together. We can actually make a track group to also do this behavior. So we can go up into the group area which is this gray rectangle here. And we can say group one new. And since they're all selected, they'll all join group one. And that popped open our group settings where we can name the group. So let's click in here and lets type this BV group. And now it says that in our group settings and now even when the tracks aren't selected, all of the faders will operate in tandem. So that's really helpful when you're mixing because you might want to just turn up or down all the background vocals together, for example. Now one last sort of mixed setup thing I want to show you that I've found particularly useful back in the main window, is that we've made an arrangement for the song using arrangement markers. And that's cool to visually see where things are going to occur, but we can also copy those arrangement markers into regular markers and I'll show you why I'll do that. So if I click into the marker pull down menu, I can say create from arrangement markers and it'll copy the arrangement markers down into the marker track. I can go ahead and close this group settings here. Once we've done that, I can open up our list window pane on the right-hand side. And I can actually, because I have the marker selected. I can see all the markers here as a list. Now this is nice because when I'm mixing, I can option click on any of these names. I can say, Oh, I want to get to the second or the first chorus in the song, Option click and my play head goes right there. You can listen to that chorus. Want to get to the outro, option click and the cursor moves right there. So that's a really nice way to navigate around your song while you're mixing and pop around in different sections. Now it might seem a little time intensive to do all this organizing, but you'll be happy later when all you want to do is make creative judgments not organize as you're mixing.

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