The new Marquee Stripe is an overlooked powerful new tool in Logic 8. I am only beginning to explore it in depth, and it is capable of a variety of useful functions. Today, I’ll talk briefly about two of them.

 

By enabling the Marquee Stripe feature from the drop down menu in the upper right of the Arrange Window, a small section at the top of the bar ruler opens up. When you click and drag across this area; you will create a marquee selection across all the tracks in the Arrange Window. Shift clicking on individual tracks once this selection is made, toggles their inclusion/exclusion from the selection.

 

One of the many cool features of working with this Marquee Stripe feature is that when you go into record mode, all the tracks included in the selection will immediately become record armed. And the selected area will be treated as an Autopunch zone.

 

This is a great feature. I often use the Group function in Logic as a means of being able to quickly record arm/disarm multiple tracks easily, and am always toggling the Group Clutch after this is set up. This new auto record enabling of multiple Audio Tracks when the Marque Stripe s active is a great way of achieving this without having to deal with setting up a Group and then toggling it on/off afterwards. And this also makes the Autopunch mode more accessible. Simply dragging in the Marquee Stripe portion of the Bar Ruler is all you have to do to be ready for punch in recording.

 

One of the other many useful functions of the Marquee Stripe is it’s ability, when the Arrange Window is in automation mode, to instantly create automation “handles” (four nodes) at the boundaries of the marque selection area (two nodes at each end). This was previously (and still is) available by holding down option, control, shift, and dragging in an automation lane. But this new Marquee Stripe functionality allows for creating this across multiple tracks in one shot. Incredible!!

 

In future Tips, I’ll look at more useful functions of the new Marquee Stripe. But these two alone are worth the price of admission!