Among the most venerable of software music production platforms, and arguably the deepest of them all in terms of configurability, Logic Pro has always made empowering the user to shape their own compositional and engineering workflows central to its remit. With so much to discover in Apple’s mighty DAW, then, it’s easy to miss those less obvious functional details that might make all the difference to your music-making efficiency and creative options – here are five that we reckon you really ought to try.

Alter MIDI Note Lengths With Gate Time

A supremely handy but relatively innocuous Logic feature since its earliest days (as made clear by the old-school analogue synthesis terminology), the Gate Time parameter in the ‘More’ section of the MIDI Region Inspector scales the lengths of all notes in the selected MIDI region(s) by a range of percentages, from 25-400%, or locks them to the very staccato ‘Fixed’ setting, or ’Legato’, which holds each note until the next one begins, regardless of the actual space between them.

Clearly, Gate Time is a powerful non-destructive tool for varying synth parts as they progress by shortening and lengthening their constituent notes from region to region, but beyond its obvious application to basslines, leads, chords and plucks, it can also be hugely effective with synthesised and sampled drums. Just make sure your source instrument isn’t set to any form of one-shot mode (otherwise MIDI note length will make no difference to the triggering action) and the length of your drum sounds becomes your plaything – make the snare short and tight for the verse, perhaps, then lengthen it for the chorus.

Get To Know The MIDI Transform Window

Another extremely useful MIDI utility that’s been part of Logic since way back when, but that many pass over because it looks so archaic and complicated, the MIDI Transform window provides a range of preset MIDI editing operations with which to make sweeping destructive (but undoable, of course) changes to any number of selected MIDI regions or events, and a deep workbench on which to create and save completely new ones. Presets include such fundamental transformations as ‘Transposition’, ‘Fixed Velocity’, ‘Random Pitch/Velocity’ and ‘Half/Double Speed’, as well as more esoteric mutations along the lines of ‘Humanize’, ‘Velocity Limiter’, ‘Exponential Velocity’ and ‘Maximum/Minimum Note Length’. And when making your own, you get to specify both the event selection criteria and the minutiae of the process itself, drawing on a comprehensive library of functions including an interactive graph for remapping the 0-127 MIDI data range for your chosen parameter.

There’s almost nothing you can’t do to your MIDI parts with the Transform window, although it must be said that, while the factory presets are perfectly straightforward to apply, the barebones presentation of the GUI (essentially unchanged since it was first added to Logic in the year 1473) can be off-putting when you want to roll your own. The manual does a good job of explaining everything, though, and scoring composers working with big orchestral sample libraries, in particular, will find the ability to instantly perform custom operations of their own design on massive multi-region selections a serious timesaver.

Accelerate Your Workflow With Key Commands

Logic is and always has been the DAW to beat when it comes to the implementation of keyboard shortcuts. Indeed, as a perusal of the Key Commands Assignment window immediately makes clear, it’s so flexible and open to customisation in this department that the possibilities can be quite overwhelming at first; so the best initial approach is to analyse the specifics of your own workflow, then learn (and, if necessary, edit) the shortcuts associated with all your most frequently used actions. The Key Commands Assignment window features a search field and view filters to help you find what you need in its seemingly endless list, and once you’ve got your operational essentials locked in and muscle-memorised, it really pays to explore the full array of entries, as the majority of them do things that can’t be done at all via Logic’s menus, and are unassigned by default.

Pretty much everything in Logic can be tied to a keyboard shortcut, so no matter what navigational, editing, arranging, mixing or project management function you want to make instantly executable, the Key Commands Assignment window has you covered. There are even key commands for applying up to 30 of the aforementioned MIDI Transform presets!

Skip A Section With Cycle Locators

Here’s a quick and easy arrangement tip guaranteed to reduce friction when experimenting with track layout variations. An all-too-common operation at the arrangement stage is temporarily removing a whole section of track (the middle eight, say) to hear how the sections on either side of it (the verse and chorus) would sound were they instead laid out contiguously – a major faff involving dragging the middle section out to an unused space in the Tracks area, then closing the gap, auditioning the result, and undoing the whole process if you don’t want to keep it. Tedious… and unnecessary! Instead, simply set the Cycle Locators to cover the range you want to ‘remove’, then Command-click the Cycle area to turn it into a ‘skip cycle’, defining a range on the timeline that will be jumped over on playback, thereby seamlessly stitching its neighbours together without actually affecting the contents of the Tracks area. Hit play and it’ll be like the skipped section isn’t even there; click the Cycle area again to bring it back.

Take The Tedium Out Of Region Slicing

If you’ve ever spent any time chopping audio or MIDI clips up into multiple equal-sized sections, you’d better take your shoes off, because you’re about to kick yourself. With the Scissors tool selected, hold down the Option key, click the clip in question at the distance in from the left-hand edge that defines the size of the regions you’re looking to end up with, and the whole thing will be instantly sliced up from start to finish accordingly. This works with the snap setting, too, so if you want to divide that three-minute long percussion track into 16th-note regions, you don’t have to precisely target the click – anywhere in the vicinity of the first 16th will do. A ninja editing move if ever there was one.

Are you a Logic Pro X veteran with a sheaf of self-discovered tricks and techniques up your sleeve? Share that knowledge with your fellow producers in the comments.