Learning How to Use Logic Pro

Last Edited: July 13, 2025

Now that I have Logic Pro (for 90 days), I’ll try to teach myself how to produce music starting from this week. This post is going to be a lot less polished than my previous posts on music, since I’ll be using it to document my learning and practicing. Do follow along with Logic Pro (they offer free trials) if you are interested, but otherwise, you can just read this to see how hard of a time I have in producing music!

Apple has a list of tutorials for Logic Pro. I decided to follow this video, which reproduces Shaboozey’s A Bar Song (Tipsy). It seemed like a relatively easy song to replicate, but I was wrong. The video made me realize how much effort it takes to produce one 3-minute song. Shaboozey’s song, for example, layers piano chords, the main guitar, acoustic bass, clapping, whistles, more guitar, and a ton of drums, and that’s just the beginning. Logic Pro is an incredibly intricate piece of technology, considering how many instruments you can play and how real they all sound; I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between recorded instrumental music and whatever’s been programmed through Logic Pro. The only problem is that it takes a lot of time to get fluent at Logic Pro, because finding the perfect instrument and setting the chords correctly can be a pain.

To solve some of these issues, you can use plugins with Logic Pro, which I haven’t tried yet. Trying to set a strumming pattern for a guitar requires too much manual labor, even when it’s not a pattern that’s unique to your song. There are plugins that support these kinds of strumming patterns, audio effects, and MIDI (a standard used to store digital music) effects. They let you generate notes and pitches based on existing ones, add arpeggiation, and simplify the music production workflow.

Some thoughts: I think trying your hand at music production is worth it, because you start to truly appreciate modern music. The description of ‘having a good ear for music’ is beginning to make sense to me now. If you break down the production elements of a song, you start paying attention to the arrangements that go underneath and break down the music. It’s quite similar to one of the earlier scenes in the movie Begin Again, where Mark Ruffalo starts imagining and constructing the instrumentals to make Keira Knightley’s music come alive.

So far I’ve been able to play around with the virtual instruments and MIDI on Logic Pro. I’ll update this post as I continue learning music production and Logic Pro, so stay tuned!

Thanks for reading! I would love any feedback or recommendations as I continue the series of posts!