Zoom-in Online

Audio Scrubbing is one of those functions that has either a "need it to live" or "never use it" kind of status among users of Logic. I've found it indispensable in those moments where I need to know exactly where I am and what I'm looking at - especially when I am zoomed way in on something. Scrubbing is where you manually drag the playhead from left to right across the media in your timeline, and you can hear (or in the case of video scrubbing, see), the audio that is passing under your playhead. You can scrub the audio quickly or slowly, depending on how fast you sweep the mouse left and right.

This is a tip for making sure you can scrub ALL of your audio tracks simultaneously in Logic. It's a default function to "hear" the audio scrubbing beneath your scissors tool when you click and drag it. Just select the scissors tool, and click and drag on the audio region you want to scrub and ultimately divide. When you drag left and right and you will here the super-slow-motion (or fast depending on your scrubbing movement) audio playing so you can choose the exact moment that you want to divide the region. Release the mouse click and the waveform will divide.

When I first considered this function, it seemed to me that someone at Apple must have decided that the only time we need to scrub audio is when dividing a waveform using the scissors tool. I find that with the way that I work, I need to scrub regions more often than that just to get bearings. I always find myself asking the question, "what is this waveform that's in front of me" and I want to make a simple analysis and have my answer. Click, Scrub, Listen, Unclick, Done. That's the formula I wanted - but with one more detail as well: I wanted to be able to scrub in my main timeline ruler and hear the whole mix - anything that was not muted. If I wanted to get specific about the scrub audio, I would have been happy soloing a few tracks if need be. I couldn't find it anywhere, until I emailed a few Logic guru friends, and once Matthew Hendershot's "people" got back to him, he shared a nice, easy function for achieving just what I needed.

If you click the PLAY and PAUSE buttons together in the transport control, then you can click and drag left and right in the ruler of the timeline to scrub your entire mix. See the first screenshot above for illustration. Problem solved!! Scrubbing is great for making precise edits using the scissors tool, and for figuring out where you are, what you're looking at, where you need to go, where some audio effect should start and stop (i.e., creating your automation nodes for effects bypasses), and potentially dozens of other powerful tasks. Play with scrubbing if it's not something you've ever used before, I bet you will find at least a half dozen uses without even looking too hard.

The other lesson here is: "Run into a roadblock? Email someone who knows more than you and pester them to help you find an answer!" No one likes to "not know!" Thanks for the tip Matt.