Logic Pro Gotchas

Yeah there are a few things I sorted out right away so that I wasn't forced to just click on the playhead in the timeline. That's too much mousing around. One was setting "Marquee tool click zones" so it's more like the PT smart tool and the other was remapping a few shortcut keys for the transport so hitting spacebar resets the playhead to the last position and shift-spacebar plays from the marquee spot. Good tip on backing up those key commands. Will do. Thanks!

One thing that still confuses me is the input monitoring. I have yet to really sort out how to bus all audio to one track as my main mix bus and then send that to a print bus which I can toggle the input monitor on/off to compare my current mix against the last mix I printed. Logic plays both the printed mix and the mix bus together. I think it has to do with whether software monitoring is enabled. Or perhaps I'm thinking too much like PT and not like Logic??

Good call.  I tried Studio One years ago but it didn't stick at the time.  Just took a quick look and it's funny how it looks very much like Logic with the inspector on the side and the mixer on the bottom. 

Yeah the faders in Logic are tiny, but they have a long almost linear sweet spot around unity that makes them really usable at that size so long as your gain staging is right. 

Logic is definitely my second favorite. Here are a few other things I like about Studio One

- Mixer scenes are pretty cool and a unique feature
- I like how they handle the FX chains for presets
- CTC Console emulation sounds great in my opinion and does it a bit differently than others. Maybe similar to Harrison Mixbus in this respect? Not sure how that one works but CTC is smooth. 
- Clip gain editing super easy
- I really like organizing my workflow by color and I also like how fast it is to hide/show what I do and don't want to see (groups, etc)
- I use Faderport16 and it's pretty awesome with S1

Things I still miss about Logic

- Swipe comping is so easy. Just stupid easy. 
- Take layering is fine in S1 but still feels more logical to me in Logic.
- Logic integration on the Mac ecosystem is, of course, great. S1 is probably second best though I think.

I've seen videos of engineers doing this with the print track in PT, but I've never figured out a way to do that smoothly in Logic, other than setting up solo/mute for those faders. If you figure it out, I'd love to know.

My main experience with PT is seeing others use it in tutorials, which I've watched a lot.

I actually love Logic , but PT seems to have:
- more powerful group options. You can do more things with groups, including controlling a plugin across several tracks. 
- playlists that attach to the project in more useful ways.
- Logic's I/O naming labels are global, not attached to a project. So if you are mixing for another band/producer it's much harder to get the bus/aux/routing labels setup the way they have their project created, even if it was also in Logic. Either you spend a ton of time re-typing your list of labels to match theirs (big NO), or you end up looking at a generic 'Aux 241' or whatever number it is, and having no clue what that effects bus is. 

I'm sure there's much more, but those things jump out at me when I see other's tutorials using PT. I find Logic to work pretty fast. The track stacks and comp folders are crazy good. And the stock instruments and tools like Space Designer are really robust. If I had a DAW like this in the early 90s, well, I could have created much more music over my career. LOL

I have friends who only use Digital Performer, which I don't hear as many people talking about on the forums, but it seems unique in some nice ways. And the stock plugins on DP are very nice.

^^This^^

A few things that come to mind for me - either gotchas or aha moments,, depending on my mood .

1) delay compensation has some options than can be confusing. I forget what mistake I made early on, but I think it involved setting delay compensation to “all,” recording some tracks that were routed through busses, then having those tracks out of time due to changes made on those busses. That was over a decade ago so it likely has been modified - or I just got burned and didn’t do it again . Worth reading up on that feature to make sure it is working how you work.

2) pan law. Logic defaults to -3dB compensated. I found regular “-3dB” behaved more how I expected panning to behave.

3) also on panning - know you can change a stereo track to pan in true stereo, where both channels move over (rather than, say, the high keys or the piano go all the way up and the low keys are turned all th way down.

4) lastly, similar to the panning, I really like being able to change the sends to pre and post pan and pre and post fader. That is another one of those right click kind of things. Sometimes the difference is negligible - sometimes it is a big difference.

I feel like I learn something every session and I’ve been using Logic exclusively for fourteen years now.

JMH

Best I've sorted out is like you mentioned and just do the solo thing between two the mix bus and my print track using option-click.  Then I can just stack prints/bounces to alternate tracks on my print track.  I've notice switching between alternate tracks has some lag which is annoying.  

Yeah that is a bit of concern for me as I also have a bunch of hardware inserts going.  So far I haven't notice any issues there but that will certainly suck if it goes sideways.     Thanks!

This is one of those areas where the original DNA of the programs still pokes through: Logic was for composers and writers, people who had a studio set up that didn't change.

Those areas have been closing over the years, but there are definitely still some holdouts like this one.

I really do like Logic a lot, and have been using it for a long time, but Reaper (which I otherwise don't like very much) absolutely beats Logic in CPU efficiency. Like, kills it. To be fair, it kills everything else in that category, too.

You actually used to be able to save your labels with a separate file, like a preset. They dropped that after Logic 9.