Using Logic Pro for Theatrical Sound Design

I was recently hired to do sound work for a play and, of course, they asked if I could provide some sound effects and music playback.  Of course, I agreed to do it, as I have built up a considerable sound effects library over the years.  Not to mention that sound design is one of those things that I do.

I took a look at my available tools.  In the past, I've brought in hardware samplers for playback of music & effects, but setup on my old E5000 is a bit cumbersome.  I started thinking that a software sampler would do better.  This, of course, led me to look at Logic's ESX24.

Laying out samples on the ESX24 is simple.  I really just needed one-shot sample playback for the most part.  It was just a matter of dragging the samples into Logic, opening the samples in the sample editor, and cleaning up the beginnings and ends.

Simple right?

It turned out that the spooky wind sample I used was shorter than what was needed for the particular scene.  I had never actually done any looping in ESX (I had yet to build any sampled instruments) so I was less than thrilled with what I initially saw as the method for setting loops.  In the edit window, it looked like the method was to set sample numbers for the start and end of the loop and gave rudimentary tools for editing crossfades.  I started doing trial and error.  Painful to say the least.

Now Logic has a fine sample editor window.  I thought, wouldn't it be nice if I could open the samples in the sample editor.  Lo and behold, a method was in there and it worked great!

Turns out there's a little drop-down menu for each sample.  It is accessed by the drop-down arrow just to the right of the sample name.  All I had to do was select the Open in Sample Editor menu item and Voila!  There it was, ready for graphic editing!

Tools were in place for setting loops easily.  I easily selected the area I wanted looped, made certain that search zero crossings was ticked in the edit menu to help avoid pops, and selected selection -> sample loop.  After that I selected Write sample loop to audio file.

So I went back to the ESX editor and it didn't work.  Once again a bit of user error.  You have to turn the loop on in the ESX editor to have your new loop take effect.

It worked beautifully.

By the way, I decided to just place the music for playback in the arrange window sequentially.  This way, I could set markers and skip between markers with a self set key command.

Works great!

I'm almost looking forward to trying to loop something musical!