Automatic Region Gain for the People!
As is typical with many of Logic’s updates, most of it seems to be bug-fixes and some minor aesthetic tweaks, along with a small handful of cool new glamorous items and enhancements.
One of the coolest updates in this release was actually buried towards the end of the list of new features. It’s these humble (and not at all obvious) new key commands:
“There are two new region normalize key commands that allow region gain to be used to non-destructively normalize the selected audio regions. Non-destructive Normalize (All) normalizes all selected regions relative to each other. Non-destructive Normalize (Individually) normalizes each selected region independently.”
Translation: You can use these key commands to change the region gain of a selection of audio regions, and you can either max out each selected region (Normalize Individually), or average out the gains between those regions that are selected (Normalize All).
Despite the eye-glazing name, this is pretty big!
A handy trick when working with audio takes, especially vocals, is to go through and tweak the gain of vocal phrases using the Region Gain so they are more consistent throughout the track in regards to each other and also to hit compressors in the channel strip a bit more consistently.
I normally cut up the vocal track into phrases (usually with Strip Silence to start with) and then quickly go through each region one-by-one manually tweaking the region gain in the Region Inspector for each phrase (and tidying up breaths etc at the same time). It’s not as bad as it sounds – might be 5-10 mins to do an entire vocal track.
But now you can simply select your vocal track, cut the phrases out with “Strip Silence”, select them all, then use the key command “Non-destructive Region Normalize” to level-out the whole batch at once. You’ll still need to tweak a couple of regions – start and ends can be a bit rough using “Strip Silence” – and any breaths that were selected by themselves will be really loud.
By the way – the key commands are currently unnasugned to anything – I used Ctrl-Option N and Ctrl-Option-Command N for mine.
Check it out.