Last week, I installed the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) Logic Pro X onto my computer as an upgrade from GarageBand. My music theory teacher has always been telling me how much better Logic is compared to GarageBand and the many features that it has. On Monday, I had a chance to use it a little bit, so here’s what I’ve understood from it so far.
Logic Pro X is very similar to GarageBand, and since they’re both owned by Apple, they look and function similarly except Logic has a lot more things you can do with it. GarageBand is the free DAW from Apple, but you can purchase Logic as a better/improved version of GarageBand. Logic includes more sound samples, and I’ll explain more about the features I’ve learned about.
The first feature that my theory teacher showed me was the Command-Click Tool which is a secondary tool that you can switch between your cursor with by holding the command key. You can change the Command-Click Tool to 13 different tools, not including the pointer tool. The only one I’ve used so far is the scissors tool because it’s the most intuitive tool for me, and it’s really helpful for splitting tracks without using as much effort as you would in GarageBand.
Another thing that my teacher showed me was the difference between the way you EQ tracks in Logic and GarageBand. In GarageBand, you don’t get a lot of numbers to work with and you kind of have to move things around to get the sound you want. However, in Logic, you can see the frequencies and the volume of the different frequencies. You can even copy and paste EQ settings from track to track which is useful if you want to make sure all your tracks are EQ’d exactly the same.
The last thing I learned was using Buses for effects. My teacher showed me by only using reverb, but it should work with all kinds of effects. Buses are used to send audio to different places, so we used the bus to send our track to a reverb setting that we made. Doing this gives the reverb effect to our track without directly applying it. It also means that we can send a different track to the same bus and the exact same reverb will be applied to both the tracks. This saves you the time of giving each track its own effect settings.
Overall, Logic Pro X is pretty similar to GarageBand, but there are also a lot of new things to learn within the program. Even though I’ve only learned how to utilize a few tools it makes mixing and editing a lot easier than in GarageBand. However, I still haven’t learned everything yet, so maybe I’ll update again when I finally finish the song I’ve been working on.