The phrase conjures up images of childhood games, or maybe of management team leadership training exercises. It could be construed as sound political advice in totalitarian regimes. And in Logic, it can be a recipe for successful and productive editing, liberating regions from the tyranny of an absolute time line.

 

I have recently been editing some ESL (English as a Second Language) narration material, not linked to visuals, destined for delivery in audio CD format. So that means, no worries about syncing sound to images. That means, unlike working with music or video, no marriage of audio to the timeline and bars and beats. Spacing between the dialogue reigns supreme as the arbiter of placement and positioning. Regions need to get moved around, often well after successive regions later in the timeline have already been edited and placed; and often across several different tracks.

 

I have found the command “Select All Following” to be invaluable in quickly and efficiently being able to select all successive regions for nudging along the timeline. It’s great because it will select across all tracks and ignore longer regions that begin earlier. Perfect for this type of editing. Select the closest region that needs to be moved, followed by Select All Following, and then the necessary Nudge commands.

 

But what if there are some successive regions that you want to remain in place; despite wanting others to move together? I found a great little hidden feature for just this situation.

 

When tracks in the Arrange Window are hidden – via the Hide button, they will not be included in selection commands. This is a great little bit of programming. I was easily able to hide tracks that contained material I didn’t want shifted, while easily selecting and nudging all the remaining material with a couple of simple key commands.

 

This has allowed me a great deal of flexibility and control while editing. It’s important to note that this can be used in contexts other than editing “wild” dialogue – not recorded to an absolute position in the timeline. It could be very useful when, for example, editing voice overs in radio jingles.

 

Often there are “donuts” or holes in the middle where spoken dialogue needs to be placed and fitted – between musical sections. With music tracks hidden, selection techniques like Select All Following followed by various Nudge commands can easily be executed without any worries of the music tracks being shifted out of sync. Alternatively, voice over tracks can be hidden while the music bed tracks are shifted – whatever suits your workflow or the situation best.

 

So, Select All Following is your friend. And by selectively excluding tracks by hiding them, you can customize selection commands to follow your own custom criteria of what needs to get grouped together for shifting.

 

Free yourself up from the tyranny of the bar ruler and start shifting things – or not shifting them by hiding them before executing selection commands – and edit some audio! Confident and secure in the knowledge that all the regions – lined up like little soldiers attired in their black state of readiness – will follow each others movements in perfect symmetry.