Repeating Audio Regions

At the moment, the Arrange window has three Regions in it: a kick and a snare hit, and a hihat loop. Many songs begin from such humble beginningslet's take these three Regions and turn them into a beat!

All audio programs have some sort of repeat feature that lets you quickly make multiple copies of MIDI Regions and Audio Regions. However, Logic has a few tricks to add to this process. For example, you can repeat Objects one right after the other, which is great for making multiple copies of a perfectly trimmed audio loop, such as a one-bar beat loop. Regions of a duration that is not exactly a bar (or a beat) benefit from Logic's ability to repeat Regions so that the Anchor point always falls on a bar, a beat, or even the seconds and frames from the SMPTE time code ruler. As always, practice makes perfect, so let's try repeating some Objects.

1.	In the Arrange window, select the Kick Region.
2.	From the Arrange window's local menus, choose Region > Repeat Regions. TIP You will repeat Regions a lot. Consequently, you should assign this function to a key command. (See Lesson 3 for more information about key commands.) OptionShiftR is a good choice. The Repeat Regions/Events dialog opens.
3.	In the Number of Copies text box type 3, choose Auto from the Adjust ment menu and make sure the Copies button is selected, then click OK. Logic creates three copies of the Kick Region, back to back. This isn't the most "rhythmic" of repeats. Because the Kick Region is less than a full beat in duration, the repeated Kick Regions fall off beat and the timing of these repeated Objects is strange, to say the least. Let's undo that repeat and try again, using a different setting in the Repeat dialog's Adjustment menu.
4.	Press Cmd-Z to undo the last edit.
5.	Once again, open the Repeat Regions/Events dialog. The Repeat Regions/Events dialog opens. The Number of Copies text box should still read 3, so there's no need to change that. Instead, focus on the Adjustment menuthat's where the magic takes place.
6.	From the Adjustment menu, choose Beat and click OK. Logic creates three copies of the Kick Region and places each copy on the next beat of the bar.
7.	Position the Arrow tool over the bottom right corner of any Kick Region and drag left to shorten its duration. All of the copied Kicks change duration. This demonstrates an important point: When you copy an Audio Region using the Repeat Regions/Events dialog, all copies are treated like aliases that refer back to the original Region. (In fact, the Repeat Regions/Events dialog's Copies and Aliases radio buttons do exactly the same thing when you repeat an Audio Region.) If you look at the Audio window, you'll see there is still just one Kick Region in this song, but that Region has been used multiple times. Thus it makes sense that editing this one Audio Region would cause all instances of the Region to change as well. Interestingly, the Repeat Regions/Events dialog functions differently depending on the position of the Region's Anchor. Let's repeat the Snare Region once to see how.
8.	In the Arrange window, select the Snare Region.
9.	From the Arrange window's local menu bar, choose Region > Repeat Regions. The Repeat Regions/Events dialog opens.
10.	In the Number of Copies text box, type 1, leave the Adjustment menu set to Beat, and click OK. The Snare Region skips a beat. As it turns out, if the Anchor is not at the exact start of the Region, Logic always skips a beat when it repeats! Keep this in mind so that your heart doesn't skip a beat when this happens as you edit your own songs.