How to Use Logic Pro Real-Time Analyzer

Logic Pro has many real-time analyzers, which display an audio track’s frequency content in a graph. The graph shows the track’s amplitude in the vertical axis and the frequency spectrum, spanning the human hearing range, in the horizontal axis. This information can be used to find where unwanted noises reside or in the mixing stage of music production.

Open a new or existing project in Logic Pro. and import an audio file by going to "File" and selecting "Import Audio File" from the drop-down menu. Select an audio file from your computer with the file browser that appears. Once you have chosen a file and clicked "Open," the audio file will load into a track in the track list.

Find the track’s channel strip, which is a column located on the lower-left side of the "Arrange" window. The channel strip has controls for inserting effects into the audio signal path and for routing the signal through the mixer.

Click on one of the "Inserts" drop-down menus in the channel strip and go to "EQ," "Channel EQ," and finally to "Mono" or "Stereo." This initializes the "Channel EQ" plugin, inserts it into the audio path, and opens the plugin’s window.

Press the space bar or the right-facing triangle button in the Transport section to start playing the track. On the left side of the plugin’s window, click the "Analyzer" button to turn on the real-time analyzer. Frequency information is now being displayed on the analyzer’s graph.

Adjust the graph’s resolution by selecting either "Resolution Low (1024 points)," "Resolution Medium (2048 points)," or "Resolution High (4096 points)" from the drop-down menu, two buttons below the "Analyzer" button mentioned in Step 4. This increases or decreases the accuracy of the graph. This feature is very useful when finer detail is needed during your audio inspection.

Click and drag up or down the column of numbers that line the right side of the graph. This moves the graph up or down, revealing amplitude information that was too low or too high for the analyzer to display initially. These numbers are measured in units of decibels. The decibel is a commonly used scale for measuring sound because it is logarithmic, and humans hear logarithmically as opposed to linearly.