The Song Fight Bulletin Board

My recording life just changed. I discovered the Track Follow feature in Logic.

Select a region and copy it anywhere else while holding SHIFT+OPTION. Rather than a copy, you'll get a region that follows the original region-- any changes you make to the original region will be played in all of regions that are "following" it.

So far this works for everything I've tried, even Drummer. I used to create a section in Drummer for like, the chorus of a song, then have to try to copy the settings for that section to every other chorus section whenever I made a change. NO LONGER. OMG.

I was looking at the Step Sequencer tonight, thinking "but why can't i pick a pattern number for it to play. how do i use this like a pattern selector?" That's what I was Googling for when I found Track Follow.

LIFE CHANGER!

JB

OMG I'm going to have to remember this

this is huge!!!

Huh, that's interesting. In Adobe Premiere, you can kind of do the same thing via nesting, but it's easy to run into problems with too many nested nests, etc.

Wonder if this exists for Pro Tools, because I would 100% use this for drums at the very least. As of now, I just color code my parts, so like any change I make to a red part, I have to copy/paste to the other red parts.

I think this "follow" functionality has been in Logic for a long time but it used to be called an alias. And I never bothered to try using it because it seemed fiddly and weird at the time (like 7.x era) and so I forgot to ever give it another try.

These days Logic really wants to push people to use "arrangements" for this purpose but those are pretty annoying to deal with, at least with what little I've tried on them.

I think this is just a simple alias though, like I don't think you can't modify one instance to make it follow another region while also maintaining its own changes from the followed region. So, not much like Premiere nested clips. But that'd be a neat idea for how to build a music system, which is something I'd thought about occasionally over the past, like, 20 years (but I've never had the wherewithal to try building something that complicated).

Ugh the Arrangement track is useless. It almost works exactly opposite to any way that I’d want it to work.

It seems really good for making boring dance tracks and cookiecutter pop.

No if it was good for that I would totally use it. It just requires a workflow that seems unnatural to me. Like if you change a thing all of a sudden the Arrangement track is broken and you can’t do what you want anymore. Eh, not worth even getting into I just hate it.

I wonder if the arrangement track was their temporary attempt at competing with Ableton, and if that'll get removed sometime in the future now that the live loops mode is a thing.

This wouldn't be the first time Logic had a temporary thing that ended up being removed because it didn't fit into their longer-term plans (for example, the chord track, which got quietly removed at some point and sorta-replaced with the key signature track, which doesn't actually do the useful stuff the chord track did).

I think the key sig track probably is useful for things like the chord player midi plugin, and maybe the pitch correction and maybe flex pitch quantizing? I think I’ve used it for that to fix some issue once...

The only thing I've seen it directly affect is transposing/modulating loops automatically, and that's a thing that the chord track handled better and with a better UI.

I use the Logic arrangement track all the time (and occasionally the key signature and tempo tracks). I don't necessarily do anything fancy with them, but I do really like to have a good clear structure set out and visible for organisation purposes.