The Logic of Sound: Part II
Here we go with part two of our series on using Logic Pro X for sound design with Final Cut Pro X. There are a million tutorials out there to choose from. Here are the ones I went with (if you have no idea where to get started):
https://www.macprovideo.com/tutorials/logic-application
There’s a lot of them there (many of which can be found on the Mac App Store)… but if you want to know what some essentials to get you started, I’d go in this order:
- Logic Pro X 101: Core Training
- Logic Pro X 102: Signal Flow
- Logic Pro X 103: Audio Recording and Editing
- Logic Pro X 105: Mixing and Automation
Start with those and broaden out based on your interests from there. These particular four are all on the App Store at about 20 dollars each. Core Training gives a nice basic overview of what what the basic Logic process is.
The Signal Flow course is a bit dry but completely essential to understanding the methodology behind everything else you do in Logic and how it all works. Audio Recording and Editing is probably most important as it goes through how to get around in the timeline and approach actual sound editing in Logic.
Mixing is pretty self explanatory but probably won’t make much sense to you without having a solid foundation in the other topics. Don’t start with this one unless you’re sure you know what you’re doing.
One thing to keep in mind as you go through these tutorials… you might be a bit put off by the fact that all of these tutorials are about Music creation and not sound design for picture. This is all true. Logic is designed to be the go-to app for musicians, and that makes up a MUCH larger segment of the sound world.
The good news is that everything you’ll see on the music creation side is largely applicable to the sound design side as well, and if you put enough time in, you might actually figure out how to score your movie too (or at least point your composer in the right direction).
It’s a time commitment but one that is very much worth the hassle. And as far as how you should go about mixing and get your projects to and from FCPX… well, that’s what the rest of this series is going to be about. Stay tuned.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sam Mestman, FCPWORKS.
This blog post contains the personal musings of FCPWORKS’ Workflow Architect, Sam Mestman. Sam’s also a regular writer for fcp.co and MovieMaker Magazine, teaches post workflow at RED’s REDucation classes, and is the founder and CEO of We Make Movies, a film collective in Los Angeles and Toronto which is dedicated to making the movie industry not suck. If you’ve got any FCP X questions or need some help putting together a system, drop him an email at workflow@fcpworks.com and you can follow him on Facebook or Twitter at @FCPWORKS.
