Workflow and the Long Game

Building Your Template (Revisited)

Your template should reflect how you actually work, not how you think you should work. After going through this course, you have a much better sense of what that means. A few things to consider including:

Tracks you always use. If every project starts with a drum bus, a bass track, a vocal track, and a reverb aux, put them in the template. Pre-route the reverb send. Name everything. Color everything. The goal is to open a new project and immediately start making music, not spend fifteen minutes setting up infrastructure.

Your preferred bus structure. If you route drums through a drum bus and vocals through a vocal bus before hitting the stereo output (Chapter 16), wire that up in the template. If you always have a reverb and a delay on aux tracks with sends ready to go, include those. The routing you do in every project should already be done before you start.

Screensets. If you have built screensets (Chapter 10) that work — one for arranging, one for mixing, one for editing — save them in the template. They carry over to every new project.

Smart Controls. If you have customized Smart Controls mappings for your go-to instruments (Chapter 22), save those as patches and load them into the template’s tracks.

What to leave out. Do not overload the template with tracks you might use. A template with 60 pre-built tracks is as wasteful as no template at all — you spend time deleting things instead of building. Start lean. Add tracks as you need them. The template handles the infrastructure; the project handles the specifics.

The Toolbar

While you are building the template, clean up the toolbar. Right-click it and choose Customize Toolbar. Remove buttons you never click — the Stop button, for instance, is redundant if you use the spacebar. Add buttons for things you use often that are not there by default. The toolbar should reflect your workflow, not Apple’s guess about what everyone needs.

Backup Strategy

Three things in Logic are worth backing up to cloud storage or an external drive. All three are hard or impossible to recreate from scratch.

1. Preference File

Your preferences control everything from default song settings to which warnings Logic shows to how the program behaves when you drag regions. They accumulate over months of use as you customize the program to work the way you think.

The preference file lives in ~/Library/Preferences/ and is named com.apple.logic10.plist. Copy it somewhere safe. If you ever need to reinstall Logic or move to a new machine, restoring this file brings back your entire configuration.

2. Key Commands

Your custom key commands are a separate file. If you have spent time assigning and reassigning key commands to match your workflow (and if you have taken Chapter 1 seriously, you have), losing them means rebuilding muscle memory from scratch.

Export your key commands from the Key Commands window: open it with Open Key Commands (default ⌥ + K), then go to Options > Export Key Commands. Save the file alongside your preference backup. Import it the same way on a new machine.

3. Templates

Your templates live in ~/Music/Audio Music Apps/Project Templates/. Copy that folder. If you have built a template that reflects your routing, bus structure, screensets, and instrument choices, it represents hours of accumulated decisions. Treat it like any other important file.

Finding Help

The Key Commands Window

Chapter 1 introduced the Key Commands window as a search engine for Logic’s capabilities. Twenty-three chapters later, this is still the most useful window in the program. When you cannot remember how to do something, open it (⌥ + K) and search. “Join” finds the join command. “Bounce” finds every bounce variant. “Automation” finds every automation-related function, including ones that do not appear in any menu.

The entries marked with an asterisk have no menu equivalent — they are invisible unless you come looking for them. Some of Logic’s most useful functions live in this category.

Apple Documentation

The built-in Help menu links to the Logic Pro User Guide, which stays current with your installed version. It is more reliable than most third-party tutorials because it updates with each Logic release. The search inside the documentation is decent. When you need to know exactly what a checkbox does or what a menu option controls, this is where to go.

Apple also publishes the guide through Apple Books for offline access.

Release Notes

When Logic updates, read the release notes. Apple adds features, renames menus, and moves settings around. A feature you learn about today might relocate or gain new options in the next update. The release notes tell you what changed and where.

When Logic Updates

This guide will evolve with Logic. When Apple adds features, renames interfaces, or changes workflows, chapters will be updated to reflect the current state of the program. If something looks different on your screen than what you see here, check your Logic version and look at the release notes.

Some updates are cosmetic — a button moves, a menu gets reorganized. Others add entirely new capabilities. Session Players (Chapter 18) did not exist a few years ago. Sample Alchemy was a later addition. The Step Sequencer appeared in Logic 10.5. The program keeps growing, and this guide will keep pace.

Logic in the Larger Picture

Logic is probably the most versatile of all the DAWs. It may not excel at every single thing, but it can work at all of those things at a fairly high level. It records audio. It sequences MIDI. It scores to picture. It handles live performance. It synthesizes sound. It samples. It processes. A single program that can serve as a tape recorder, a MIDI sequencer, a film scoring tool, a live performance environment, and a mastering suite.

No one uses all of it. The point of this guide was to show you the parts you need and where to find the rest when you are ready for it. Your workflow will be different from the next person’s. Your key commands will be different. Your template will be different. That is the whole idea.

You do not learn Logic. You make Logic yours.

What to Practice

• Open your current template (or create one if you have not). Add the routing infrastructure you use in every project — a reverb aux, a delay aux, your standard bus structure. Name and color everything. Save it as a template.
• Clean up the toolbar: remove buttons you never use, add ones you do. Save the template again so the toolbar carries forward.
• Back up your three critical files: preference file, key commands (export from the Key Commands window), and template folder. Put them somewhere that is not your internal hard drive.
• Open the Key Commands window and search for three things you learned about in this guide. See if they have bindings assigned. If you have been reassigning key commands as you go, your list will already look different from the defaults.
• Check your Logic version (Logic Pro > About Logic Pro) and glance at the most recent release notes. If a feature changed since this guide was last updated, you will know where to look.

Key Commands from This Chapter