Logic doesn’t have a straightforward way to apply an LFO across a bunch of parameters. For something straightforward like volume or panning, you may have luck with a plugin like the Tremolo or the Modulator. But there’s nothing quite so tactile and immediate as getting your mitts into the automation engine, where you can create a script that the track will follow, and you can record various moves and assign them to pretty much anything.
The problem lies when you want to create something that repeats. For this, region automation is one viable solution. This trick also employs a couple obscure logic quirks.
The first being this one, create new track with same channel. Make note that this is not a duplicate, it is another instance of the same track. And we’re going to use it to host a dummy region, where we’re now going to employ region-based automation.
Enabling region automation will divorce any of the automation data here from the larger scope of the track automation. It bakes it into this region, where we can manipulate it as if it was a loop. And to facilitate that, we’re also going to use this other little logic gem.
By holding down option, we can stretch the region and resize the automation as needed. Now from here, you can loop or repeat it just like anything else. Keep this handy little lane underneath the track you want to apply it, and you can start it and stop it at will.
And if you really wanted to, you could create a handful of these shapes in your favorite template and assign them later, which is as simple as holding down option while you change the automation type. Knowing your way around any DAW involves knowing how to solve for a problem from a few different angles. Do you have a favorite workaround?
Share it with us. And then, with someone who belongs in a big kitchen class.
