Twice a month we revisit some of our reader favorite posts from throughout the history of Audiotuts+. This tutorial was first published in December 2009.
Imagine the precious seconds you lose every time you take a simple action via a menu option or clicking a button on the screen. Once you memorize a set of keyboard shortcuts and make new shortcuts for tasks you find yourself doing frequently, you begin to save a lot of time. You’d be surprised how quickly those seconds add up into minutes and hours. Here’s a cheat sheet of common keyboard shortcuts you should memorize, along with a quick primer on using the Keyboard Commands manager.
This is the third tutorial in a short series on helping you save time in Logic Pro 9. We’ll be covering:
- Screensets — arrange Logic’s windows to suit your way of working, and reuse those settings for improved workflow.
- Templates — you can create template sessions based on various needs for various situations — this helps you get into the creative action with a minimum of fuss. We’ll cover this topic in the next tutorial.
- Keyboard shortcuts — the focus of this tutorial!
Essential Keyboard Shortcuts
You can see all of Logic’s keyboard shortcuts in the Keyboard Manager. I’m listing them here because there are so many, you many have trouble figuring out which ones to memorize. The follow shortcuts are the ones that will really make working with your projects much quicker. Secondly, you can print this reference out and look at it as you use Logic — as far as I’m aware there’s no keyboard shortcut cheat sheet that comes with Logic.
We won’t cover the standard File menu shortcuts that you should know from using computers in general, though I will reiterate that Cmd+S is the shortcut to save your project and you should make it a goal to get this shortcut to become a subconscious habit so you’re saving your work all the time and don’t need to think about doing it.
- Record Enable Track: Ctrl+R
- Record: R
- Toggle Mute Track: Ctrl+M
- Toggle Solo Track: Ctrl+S
- Play/Stop: Space
- Rewind: ,
- Fast Rewind: Shift+,
- Forward: .
- Fast Forward: Shift+.
- Create Marker: Ctrl+K
- Rename: Cmd+Return
- Toggle Cycle Mode: C
- Open Mixer: Cmd+2
- Open Arrange: Cmd+1
- Close Window: Cmd+W
- Toggle Bin: B
- Bounce: Cmd+B
- Zoom Window: Shift+Cmd+M
- Import Audio: Shift+Cmd+I
- Learn New: Cmd+L (for learning hardware controller signals)
- Toggle Zoom: Z
- Quantize Selected Events: Q
- Select Previous Region: Left Arrow
- Select Next Region: Right Arrow
- Select Previous Track: Up Arrow
- Select Next Track: Down Arrow
- New Track: Option+Cmd+N
- New Track with Duplicate Settings: Cmd+D
- Hide/Show Track Automation: A
This is by no means a comprehensive listing of shortcuts. It’s not meant to be — these are the ones that are actually useful in a day-to-day project setting, with none of the more obscure and less useful shortcuts in the way.
Apple Remote
One of the reasons that set of keyboard shortcuts is so useful is because it allows you to record-arm a track, start recording, stop recording and playback, and navigate. In other words, there’s no reason to reach for your mouse when you are tracking.
Logic’s designers realized that the most useful shortcuts are the ones that enable the user to do things easily reaching over for the keyboard while standing at a MIDI controller or microphone, so they made the Apple Remote work with Logic. If you managed to get in on Macs while they were still shipping with the machines themselves, or have bought one separately, here’s what you need to know, in the format of Button: Function:
- Rewind: Rewind
- Forward: Forward
- Play/Pause: Play or Stop
- +: Previous Track
- -: Next Track
- Menu: Record
- Rewind long-hold: Fast Rewind
- Forward long-hold: Fast Forward
Keyboard Stickies
With hundreds of preset key commands and hundreds more unassigned commands, you can’t be blamed if you feel you need an aid to remember what everything does. Fortunately, you can get overlays for your keyboard that help you remember keyboard commands.
You can get these in varieties for most Apple keyboards and Apple laptop keyboards here. There isn’t much support out there for non-Apple keyboards, which is unfortunate as their keyboards and mice are utterly horrendous from an ergonomic perspective, but you might get lucky with some research.
The Keyboard Commands Manager
Many of the commands that can have keyboard shortcuts assigned to them do not, by default, have any shortcut bindings. For any of the more advanced commands, you’ll need to assign your preferred key combo. Let’s take a quick look at how the manager works.
The Options menu provides you with the ability to select preset key command lists based on your keyboard type, or import someone else’s set. You can also export yours. Once you’ve got a custom setup perfected, I recommend you export your key commands and back them up — you won’t know until you lose them how important they can become to your workflow.
The list box shows you all possible commands, grouped into areas of relevancy. This is where you select the commands you wish to create or replace shortcuts for.
Once the desired command is selected, any keystrokes you make will be interpreted as the new shortcut. Be careful about overwriting shortcuts by accident! Unless I have missed something, there’s no Undo option.
There are three buttons on the right:
- Learn by Key Label setting tells Logic to ignore the placement of the key on your keyboard, and just pay attention to the label. This means if you have one key on your keyboard in two different places — the numbers, for instance, on a keyboard with a numpad — the shortcut will work using both keys.
- Learn by Key Position is the opposite — if there’s a duplicate button, Logic will remember which one you used and will only work with that particular key.
- Delete does what it says — deletes the existing shortcut!
Beneath those buttons is the Learn Assignment section which is for setting commands from a controller. You can read more about this process here.
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here’s a logic keyboard skin
http://store.apple.com/nl/product/TV479B/A
once you have the skin do you have to do anything to set it up???
excellent excellent tut.
seems like it may be getting overlooked, strictly in terms of comments, but this is something every logic user ought to have down. knowing all of those key commands will increase working efficiency a ridiculous amount. and you will probably then have lots of other easily accessible tools at your disposal that you probably didnt use often without knowing the shortcut for it.
not mentioned hard enough in this article is the power of the “option” key, i would say. opt-clicking any fader or pot will set the level back to 0 instantly. option-click+drag is quick copying. almost every clickable action in logic has an option second function.
STUDY THIS TUT!
Glad you liked it, Chris, and good points about option-clicking!
THIS IS AWESOME, THANK YOU!
I am a fast producer in Pro Tools so when I tried Logic in the studio for the first time I WAS LOST AND FELT POWERLESS! THIS IS GOOD! IN FACT THIS IS EXCELLENT! I love quick-keys!
Thanx lots! I’ve been through hundreds of Logic tutorials etc that seem to speak in industry code. This one is like a like minded buddy teaching you tips and tricks. Way easy to follow!
Awesome, thanks. This is exactly what I needed
Great job. Thanks for the info.
came across your site, love it! Keep up the good work!!!
Zoom Controls:
Hold down the ctrl+alt key and select the area you want to zoom in on using the mouse.
Select a small area to zoom in all the way.
To zoom out: ctrl+alt+click on an empty area.
You know what I’d love to have is a preference to turn OFF about 90% of the key commands.
There are too damn many of them, and I simply cannot COUNT the number of times something has fallen across my keyboard or I fat-fingered something, and my logic session has gone literally insane.
It triggered god-knows what … and what’s worse is that every key command is not reflected in the undo-history. So at that point you literally have no other options than to go spelunking and try to figure out what happened, or revert to whatever it is you had previously saved on disk and start over.
I’m Still using old Logic’s 5 shortcuts… gee, most of it was changed :)
This really helpful. Thanks!
Is there anyway you can create you’re own key commands (that are not already in the shortcut menu?
For example, I would like to be able to work in the score editor a have a short cut for a whole note, half note, pause, create a new empty bar, a shortcut for making triplets.
Until now I’m always usign the midi editor and I have to go down to the transport bar to change the division button. Is there a shortcut to set the division button?
When there is a short cut for ^+…= what is the ^ button? I’ve tried pushing ^(6+shift) but it doesn’t work.
Also is there a shortcut to cycle through the time division grid in piano roll view? eg 16/32/64
Hi Dz. The caret symbol (^) doesn’t appear in this tutorial, but it is often used to represent the CTRL button on Windows computers.
Don’t forget the keyboard shortcut for the Key Command Manager – Ctrl+K! I use that to check shortcuts all the time.
Question. Does anyone know a key command for closing an effect? Every time I adjust EQ or add compression etc I have to click on that little X in the corner to close it. It would be so nice to just hit a hotkey and make it go away.
Hi Corky. Try command-W, Apple’s standard shortcut for closing a window.
Thanks Adrian but that closes the whole session. I just want to close the EQ or the compressor or the limiter etc.
No worries, Corky. It does close some pop-up windows (I’m not sure about the ones you are using), but there is always a danger of closing the main window! Sorry it didn’t work.
As long as the plugin window is in the foreground, I usually just hit the escape to close them. Although I’ve never read anywhere whether or not this is the official behavior, it always does seem to save my settings (as opposed to canceling). But I suggest experimenting with it first to make sure it behaves the way you’d expect.
With the esc-key you can close plugin windows.
Ah, is was already answeard. Sorry for that.
cheers!
hey does anyone know the command for next setting in a specific plugin? Like to cycle through the presets of a plugin without having to click the arrow?
Also, is there anyway to bring up the undo window for say, an ES2 instance? I swear one time I accidentally brought it up and don’t know how to get it back!
Thanks a lot
I acidentially closed the plugin window that I was using and I cannot get it back without dragging another instance of it overtop of the track. I then lose my plugin that I just tinkered around. Does anyone know how to get it back?
My bad wrong article. Im using Ableton 8. If anyone knows in Ableton anyway the answer would be appreciated.