About Logic Express

Logic express is music production software it allows you to record and edit both MIDI add
high quality effects and mix your music. Your music can be exported to many audio files or
burned to a CD or DVD that can be played anywhere e.g. computer, home stereo or
imported to other applications and devices.
You can send MIDI messages to logic, these messages could be pitch, notation, velocity and
you can create, add, edit and arrange these sounds even while it is playing this allows you to
hear the changes and you can also record MIDI information and edit them. You can use the
logic express software instruments such as keyboards, synthesizers and drum kits to create
a project. Then change the sounds using ultra beat.
You can digitally record acoustic, electric and vocals on to logic and mix your MIDI and audio
tracks and edit and change them using a huge array of high quality built in effects that you
can use in your projects.
At the end of making your project you can mix down all you audio data including
instruments, effects, recordings.

How to use logic express step by step guide:

To begin working on logic express you can open a new project or open an existing one.
If your opening a new one all files e.g. audio, video, samples can be saved in a project file.

This is where you can pick how many tracks you want, you can always add some later. But
this is where we put 16 tracks to show how many characters we had in our audiobook or in
other cases this can be how many layers of instruments you want.
You can also pick what type you want software instrument is where you can create your
own music either through a MIDI keyboard or to draw it in yourself and audio is where
you can import existing audio recordings by dragging them from the media or you can
record sounds in and this is what we used as we were recording in our voices.

when you have chosen your number of tracks and type press create, it will come up with a
empty page with all your tracks on it. This is the arrange area.

You can zoom in and out of the page using the arrows you drag them forward or back to
zoom it in and out.

R means record so when thats on you can record using the MIDI keyboard or a
microphone which is what we have been using to record our voices for the audiobook M
means mute so you can mute a certain track and still have the others playing, S is sound if
its pressed it will come up yellow and it will only play that track.

You can also add tracks using the plus sign.

Or you can duplicate a track using the button next to the plus sign.

If you have opened these tracks on software instrument to create music you can change the
sound on the tracks by using media and then looking through the library and double click on
the sounds and you can hear these sound by playing with the MIDI keyboard or by drawing
the notes in.

Musical material appears as rectangular green blocks theses are regions. These regions run
from left to right across the Arrange area, and are on vertically stacked lanes, known
as tracks. You may freely copy, repeat, loop, move, shorten, lengthen, or delete
This layout using the building blocks makes it easy to see, and create, the overall song
structure.
You can draw in a couple of regions using the pencil tool and clicking on the arrange area. To
bring up this menu bar press Esc on your key board.

They will look a box you can glue theses boxes together using the glue tool by highlighting
the boxes and pressing on them.

you can also crop these bars by using the scissor tool and pressing on the bar on where you
want to crop it. On the audio booklet we had recorded a line then stopped it and recorded
another line but this came with many problems such as taking up time which meant we had
to do it over a couple of days which meant background sounds where different I wouldnt
suggest doing this but Logic Express has a number of editing windows that allow you to
modify your musical material at a variety of levels but I would record every line of one
character then crop it up using this tool. We also came across a problem of a line we have
recorded had a beep in it so we cropped the word out of another line and glued it in to that
line.

You can use loop to make it easier to write music because you dont have to keep playing it
from the start you can also put this loop anywhere and you can loop a single bar or a few.
To do this there is a faded box at the top if you press on it it will go green then pull it from
right to either extend it or shorten it and press it from the middle to move it about

if you want to skip a part of the track you use the same faded box from the loop but pull it
from left and it will go a stripy green and press it from the middle to move it around. The
same problem of the recording that had a beep in it we used this to skip out the beep so we
knew what to crop or you can Simply edit the recording by inserting silence during the thud,
or perhaps cut that portion out of the recording entirely, which is what we did.

if you double click of the box if will bring up to the piano roll this is where you can in put
music by using the pencil tool, using the pencil tool you can draw in a piece of music.
When you have drawn e.g a melody you can change the sizing of the notes by just hovering
over a note and dragging it over.

You also can change the velocity using the velocity tool, you press on the note and either
drag it up or down. To lower or higher the velocity. You tell what the velocity is by the
colour of the notes

Once you have e.g a melody you can listen to it using this bar where you can rewind, stop,
and play.

The second way of imputing music is to record it in which can be made by playing an
instrument or singing into a microphone or you can pick a sound from the sound library
press the record button and play it in using the MIDI keyboard. We used this with inputting
the piano to our Christmas song.

To do this you can use the metronome to play in the backing ground when recording but it
wont actually record in.

And to change the tempo press this and drag it up or down

When you have recorded your piece you can quantize it afterwards so its all in time do this
by going on your piano roll highlighting your notes then pressing the Q

When you have written some music in you can fade the music in using the fade tool and use
the tool and drag it from the outside of the box to however far you want the fade in. the
fade tool was a big part in our audiobook as we used it to fade in and out lines and music .

The Overdrive is used to emulate the distortion used in amplifiers to create a warmer
sounding distortion. You can use the overdrive to simulate playing a musical instrument
through a highly overdriven amplifier, or to create unique distorted sounds.

Ultrabeat is like a drum kit with 24 pads, it incorporates a step sequencer and will create a
drum sequence you can use when making music.

The channel eq It provides frequency bands, including lowpass and highpass filters, low and
high shelving filters. You can reduce or eliminate unwanted frequencies and this is what we
used in our audio booklet to get rid of unwanted sounds and you can raise quieter
frequencies to make them more pronounced

The vocal transformer can change a voice to and sound and it is well suited to extreme vocal
effects you can change a voice by making it low or high pitched.

You can find all of these editing tools in the bar in the left.

to normalize a piece of audio you click on a recording and it comes up in the sample editor,
click on the functions button and simple click normalize. This means that Logic will raise
the volume of a recorded audio file to the maximum digital level, without altering
the dynamic content.

Exporting and bouncing is the final step of Logic, Logic Express allows you to produce a
stereo file of your completed mix in a variety of audio file formats. simply choose the
desired outcome by using the loop and click the onscreen Bounce button. You can even
burn a stereo mix directly to a CD or DVD, or create an MP3, with one simple step.

This is my final audio booklet.