*INTRO MUSIC*
BOOM! What's up gang? Jeff Bastien here, and welcome to another Studio Tuesday. So
keeping your mixed sessions organized is one of the best things you could ever do
for your workflow, and it's also ridiculously simple to do. And if you're
somebody who sends your mixes off to somebody else to be mixed you, definitely
want to be doing this. Because if a mix engineer opens up your session and finds
90 tracks of untitled one, untitled two, untitled three... He's probably gonna come
to your house and beat you with an angry trout. And really, who wants to be beaten
with an angry fish? So as usual what I'm gonna show you today is gonna be
applicable in any DAW. How to do these things might differ a little bit but
either way should be able to do them. So well that said, let's dive in a logic.
Alright so this is gonna be short and sweet because it's that simple.
I'm also prepping the session for an upcoming video on mixing. So that's why
everything zeroed out and there's no plugins or anything on it so just pay no
attention to that. First thing you want to do is group all of your different
instruments together. So if you see here, I've got my drums, and then that comes
down to my basses, and then that comes down to the guitars so then that comes
down to a piano, some synths, and then the rest of it's all vocals. Now you'll need
to come up with a system that works for you but as an example I always organize
my drums in a specific way. So I always start off with a kick, snare top, snare
bottom. Then going from the smallest tom to the largest Tom. The high hats,
overheads, and then the room mikes. This is something I do every time, always, without
fail. So that's the first part of it is just grouping same instruments together
Second part is just naming each track. As I'm sure you've noticed by now
everything in here is named. There's no track 1, track 2, track 3, to get lost in.
It takes half a second, just name your tracks. So on top of naming your tracks
you can actually add little icons to each track that'll also help you further
organize your session. So in logic that would be this little section right here,
the inspector. Now if you don't see this section here all you have to do is click
this little inspector button and that'll hide and reveal the Inspector or you can
just hit I on your keyboard it'll do the same thing. And with that open up just
click the little disclosure triangle for the track and then you can click on the
icon here and this will open up and there's all sorts of icons that you can
pick from. Just pick one and it'll assign it to that track. So if you're starting a
new session the way you would want to do this is to start colouring it the mixer,
so you just hit X on your keyboard and that would pull up the mixer. Select the
tracks that you want to have be a specific colour and then just hit "Option + C"
on your keyboard and that will pull up the colour palette. You can also go to
"View" and it'll say "Show Colours", just click on
that, and then just pick a colour. And you'll see it's changed down on the
mixer. I'm gonna put that back to the colour I like... Another way you can do this
is you can just highlight the specific regions you want to colour. Same thing,
"Option + C" and then you can change the colour that way as well. Next way to
organize your session is by having markers set up for the different
sections of the song. So as you can see here, we got intro, verse, chorus, second
verse, chorus... So on and so forth. So the way to do this is make sure this little
button is lit up blue, and that's going to give you your marker view. Now if you
"right-click" or "control-click" on this, this is going to give you a little
dialog box so you can show different sections if you want. But for this all we
need is the marker view. And then to make a marker we're gonna take our cycle
region... Let's drag this over here. And there's nothing here so I'm gonna drag
this down and it's gonna make a new marker, we're gonna call this "pre-roll". Hit "Enter".
You've got a marker. And just like everything else, we can colour them. So
again just hit "Option + C" on the keyboard, let's make this one purple... If you select
it, you can see it's purple. And if you need to resize the marker, if you hover
over the marker and then you get right to here you'll see that little icon
changes. Just drag around that, you can do that on either side. That way you can
resize the marker if you need to. Now you can see all my chorus markers are red so
if we want to change those all, you can just hold down the "Shift" key and click
on each one, that'll select those three, and again,
"Option + C" again and we can make those a completely different colour. Another cool
thing that we can do with markers is we can add notes to each specific marker. So
the way you would do that is just select a marker and hit "D" on your keyboard and
that's gonna bring up the "List View". If it defaults to "Event" just click the
marker and then you can click down in this area... And you can start adding notes.
*Typing Notes*
And then just click out of there when you're done. And if you want to be able
to see the notes without having to go back into the "List Editor", just come
over here and you can drag this down and you can see your notes. So another area
in Logic where you actually make notes is in the track mixer on the individual
tracks itself. So to do that just hit "X" and then go to "View" here, and then go to
"Channel Strip Components" and there's a whole bunch of stuff that you can turn
on and off and at the bottom you'll see notes. So if you click on notes you see
down here, now notes pop up and I left one earlier that says "your bassist sucks,
feed them to the sharkticons". But to add other notes just double click on
that note area...
*Typing*
Boom! Bob's your uncle. And while
we're here on the mixer view, if you remember earlier I said that I lay my
tracks at a specific order I do drums, and bass, then guitar, and so on and so
forth? Well in your mixer you want to do the same thing with your busses. So if
we scroll over to my busses over here you'll see they're laid out in the exact
same order. Drums, bass, guitar, synths, vocals. Now the last way to help organize
your session is to use "Folder Stacks" or "Summing Stacks" Now the Logic Folder
Stacks and Summing Stacks are basically the same thing, but in some ways not, but
I'll get into that in another video. But all you have to do is select the tracks
that you want to put into a stack, select them all. Hit "Command + Shift + D" on your
keyboard and this little dialogue box will open up and you can just hit "Create",
and it's gonna put them all into a stack here. So now you would name this...
*Typing*
Give it a fun little icon...
*Typing*
And as always, colour it. Match the drums... and there you go.
Now if you want to see the whole drum kit, just open and close this little
disclosure triangle... You can show and hide your drums. Help clean up your
session. And there you go! There's a whole bunch of different ways to help organize
your sessions. I don't even know how many, I think I stopped counting after two. But
add up all those little tips I showed you and it'll make your life a hell of a
lot easier, and you won't have to worry about a mix engineer coming to your
house and beating you with an angry trout. So that's it for today, so don't
forget to "Like", "Subscribe", ninja kick the Bell button. I'll see you