The Song Fight Bulletin Board

The new MacBook Pro with Logic Express seems to play nice with my M-Audio OmniStudio, both MIDI and audio. So I think I will be using it for a while (it's pretty darned convenient).

Has anyone here who has traversed the broad field that is Logic Express (or any other flavor of Logic) found where all the mines are laid? I'd like to step lightly over them.

What in particular are you looking for? It's a big playing field.

Here a couple things I've found very helpful:

- Create a template song setup that has your standard instruments defined (2 electric guitars, 2 acoustic, bass, drums, 2 lead vocal, 4 backing, etc.). Open this and save-as each time you start a new project. Put a tuner as the first insert for guitars, and option-click to activate or deactivate it.

- Learn the key commands. Create custom key commands.

- Command-click and drag to rearrange inserts and affect their signal processing order.

- If you use many tracks with effects (reverb, delay, etc.) learn to "freeze" each track once they're set up. This frees up the CPU for the other tracks, tasks, etc.

- When recording a challenging section, set the cycle range for the section you need to record (click and drag above the tracks where the measure markers are and it will turn it green). Then when you hit record it will start at the beginning of that section and loop, recording each take, but it doesn't erase the previous. Then when you look at the region you've recorded (the audio segment) you'll see a little triangle that will expand the audio segment and show you each of the takes stacked one on top of the other. You can select various portions from each take and assemble an awesome track from all the takes. You can also separate these out into individual tracks to create a huge chorus or multi-tracked solo. This is truly magical.

That's a start. Hope these apply to Logic Express, I use Pro.