Coursera

Berklee College of Music

Introduction to Music Production
Week 3

Eduardo Alejandro Motta Porras

The Channel Strip in Logic Pro X

Hi! I am Eduardo Motta from Antigua, Guatemala, a small country in Central
America. Im an electrical engineer and studying music production has always been
my passion. This lesson is for week 3 of Introduction To Music Production at
Coursera.org. I will be teaching about the signal flow through a channel strip in Logic
Pro X
As we learned this week mixing is one of the most crucial tasks that youre going to
be performing in your DAW. So its imperative to know where everything goes and
how to understand the signal flow.

Heres how the main mixer window will look in Logic Pro X. You can open this by
going to the menu window and clicking on Open Mixer, you can also use the
short cut Command 2.


If you want to use your mixer without opening and independent mixer window, you
can do it by clicking on the mixer icon on the left corner of your main window. Doing
this will open the mixer in the bottom side of your screen.

Now cutting to the chase on the channel strip, Logic Pro X, is very simple, it has a
really clear view that allows you to see your channel strip as if it was an analog
mixing board.

Input

In the input line, you can choose what you want to use as your input, it can be an
input on our audio interface it can be a bus or it can also be a software instrument.

Audio FX

Here you can choose, the three kinds of effects that wee learned in class: dynamic,
filter and delay effects. Every time one of these is in blue its because its active. You
can always select what you desire if you want to turn it off easily or move the order,
the order will be important in your signal flow, going from the top to the bottom.

This is how it looks when you locate your pointer on top of each plug-in. There is an
option for turn it on or off. Then it comes the editing area, when you click on that
your plug-in will show up and you can edit all the detail there. The last option (the
up and down arrow) allows you to change it for a different effect.

Sends

With the sends you can also turn it on and off. Then you select where you want to
send it, and if you want it to be post pan, post fader or pre fader.

Output

When selecting the output, you can select by a variety of option including a bus, no
out put and stereo out (depending on your audio interface, will be the amount of
physical outputs you can use).

Automation

Then you can fiind the automation option we learned this week, by clicking you will
find four options; Read, Touch, Latch and Write.

Pan, Fader, Mute and Solo

On the last part of our signal flow, there is the panning, the fader, mute and solo
button. As we can see in the image we can ad an icon so its easier to recognize it,
then comes the panning, which will allow you to increase or decrease the amount
you have and your left and right outputs. After that we see a dB option this will tell
us how much have we augmented or decrease for this track with the fader, on the
right side of it (numbers in green, yellow and red) we have the maximum amount of
dB that the track has achieved. At the end we have the classic mute and solo button
and the name of the track with its respective color.



Thank you for reviewing my homework for this week. Im really sorry about it
being delivered late, but I hope its useful for anyone interested in using Logic Pro X.
The channel strip in Logic is great and easy to use, but its important to understand
how the signal flows, and the importance of the sends by being post or pre fader.