From the course: Logic Pro X Essential Training

Working with cycle - Logic Pro Tutorial

From the course: Logic Pro X Essential Training

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Working with cycle

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- [Instructor] In this movie, I want to explore the cycle mode. How to set a range and some of the options available for cycle. So when you're working in logic, establishing a cycle or a loop for which logic to play through is a super important task and you'll use it a lot as you work through your projects. So at its basic level, a cycle can first be turned on by typing C key or by clicking on the loop to loop icon up in the control bar of the main window. And once you have a cycle range established like we do here between bars five and nine, when we hit play logic will loop through that section again and again, (upbeat music) until we hit stop. So once it hits the end it just loops back to the beginning. Now to change the range of your cycle you can grab either end of the little yellow strip up in the timeline and you can make it longer on the front half or trim the end half to be longer or shorter. You can also click right in the middle of the yellow strip and move this range to a different location. So we've got a nice four bar range established. We're hearing now between bars five and bars nine as I can see up in the LCD, but I can just grab hold of this and move it to bar 13 and here the same four bar range in this area of the song. (upbeat music) And notice what happened when I was here. Let's see my play head was here. I moved the cycle over to bar 13 and as soon as I hit play your play head will always begin from the beginning of your cycle. So you don't have to move your play head. I can just hit the space bar (upbeat music) and the cycle or the play head will move to the beginning of the cycle. So that's the basic functionality of your cycle range. Now I want to show you a few nuances that are available. First of all you can trim any region based on your cycle range. So for example, if I bring this over to bar 21 and say I want to trim aliens rhythm nine according to this four bar selection in my cycle range, I can select aliens rhythm nine and here in the edit menu I have a split regions at locators. It's also control command + T and once I click on this we'll get a region split according to the length of my cycle range. So that's a good editing tool. If you have a cycle that you like and you want to cut or split one or more regions, according you can select them and then type control command + T or go up in the edit window and make that selection. Next, I want to show you that if you right click or click and hold on the little down arrow in the cycle icon up in your control bar, there's actually some options in here. And one of them is called, auto set locators. So right now, by default, it's checked by marquee selection but you have to turn on auto set locators to make it work. So when you do that you'll see a little icon in the loop to loop and that means you're on auto set locators. And basically what that means is that now we can use our marquee selection. So holding down command to get our alternate tool that gives me my marquee selection. I can establish a marquee selection and it'll automatically create the cycle range according to what I select and my marquee selection. So that can be a nice way to just be able to click and drag out in any track and the cycle range will follow your marquee selection. You can also do this by region selection. So if I have that checked if I select a region, for example, bubble synth my cycle range will now follow that selection. So a lot of people like to work that way with their cycle range depending on what region you select or like I did before with the marquee selection. For now, I can turn off auto set locators to get back to my normal state. Now there's one more way we can use cycle mode that's kind of interesting when you're composing or arranging your logic piece and that is called skip cycle. So to get into skip cycle, you can turn on any cycle range. Say again, I'm just going to rearrange this from bars five to nine. So we've got a four beat cycle range, but if I right click on the yellow cycle range, I get a pull down menu here. And there's some options here that we've talked about already, like split regions at play head or split regions at locators. We've done that already. There's also one that's new here. It's called, swap left and right locators. It's also the equal key. Now, when I do this, something funny happens to the cycle range. It actually turns a different color. Now this is called skip cycle. When it looks like this, what this means is that if you're playing from before the cycle range and you're in skip cycle mode where your cycle range looks like this. Logic will actually lead up to bar five and skip right over bar five and go straight to bar nine. So this is a good way to audition a change. If you want to maybe cut a section out of your song but you're not sure how it's going to sound, you can use skip cycle mode. And when I hit play, (upbeat music) you see it just skips right over. Seamlessly it's just able to just pop right to bar nine from bar five. So again, to get back to normal mode we can type the equal key or we can right-click and say swap left and right locators. So as you see a very innocuous looking tool the cycle mode here has some really interesting nuances beyond just the basic loop functionality. And in this movie we've explored a few of those techniques that you can now use as you're working on your project.

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