Click Track in Logic Pro: Metronome, Count-In, Klopfgeist on a Track and the Split File for the Stage

· 7 min read

Logic Pro ships with a metronome that counts you in before recording and a second, less obvious thing: the instrument that makes the click, which you can put on a track of your own and bounce. The two are not the same, and the difference decides whether your click ever reaches a file. If the term itself is new, what a click track is is the short version. This page walks the route from the Logic Pro for Mac User Guide (version 12.3) and names the point where a song not recorded to a click turns into an afternoon of work.

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The metronome, and what it is for

Turn it on with the Metronome button in the control bar, or press K. Control-click the same button and the shortcut menu has the conditions:

The count-in has its own button next to the metronome, or Shift-K. Its length is set in Record > Count-in, or in File > Project Settings > Recording, from the Count-in pop-up menu: None, 1 to 6 bars, or a number of beats written as a fraction, 2/4 for two beats. The Recording settings also have Pre-roll, a slider up to 60 seconds; when Pre-roll is selected, it replaces the count-in.

The rest lives in File > Project Settings > Metronome. The click comes from a software instrument called Klopfgeist, which the guide places in the Utility subfolder of the Instrument plug-in menu. Each new project gets a channel strip named Click with Klopfgeist loaded on it, set to solo safe, so the click stays audible when you solo anything else. The settings page has a Tone slider, from a short click to a pitched sound "similar to a wood block or claves", a Volume slider, Note and Velocity fields for bar, beat and division, and an Output pop-up menu that sends the click to a different pair of hardware outputs if your interface has more than two. If your headphones hang on outputs 3-4, send it there and the click stays out of the main mix.

Now the detail that matters. The guide says the Click channel strip "isn't assigned to a track and is therefore only visible when you select the All button in the Mixer menu bar". A bounce renders the unmuted tracks in the project. The metronome is not a track. For a stage file you need the second thing.

The click you can bounce: Klopfgeist on a track

  1. Create a new software instrument track.
  2. In its Instrument plug-in slot, choose Utility > Klopfgeist. This is the same instrument the metronome uses, so the click sounds the same.
  3. Draw a MIDI region on the track and put a note on every beat, with a higher velocity on beat one. One bar is enough: select the region and turn on Loop in the Region inspector, then drag the loop out to the end of the song. The region follows the project tempo, so the loop stays in time.
  4. If you want the count-in in the file, start the click region one or two bars before the song and move the song's region so that its first beat lands exactly on a click. At 120 BPM in 4/4 one bar is two seconds, so a two-bar count puts the song at four seconds. Zoom in on the first downbeat and check it against the click; a count-in that leads the band into the wrong place is worse than none. If you do not know the tempo, the free BPM finder reads it from the file.

This track is audio to Logic like any other instrument track: it has a fader, a pan knob and a place in the bounce.

Click left, music right

A click through the whole song only works where the audience cannot hear it, so the file bands use has the click on the left channel and the song in mono on the right. In Logic:

  1. On the song's track, Control-click the Pan knob and choose Stereo Pan. The guide describes it as placing "the position of the left and right signals individually in the stereo field, as if you had two separate pan knobs". Drag both handles to the right. The default Balance mode would only turn the left channel down, which is not the same thing.
  2. On the Klopfgeist track, set the Pan knob hard left.
  3. Choose File > Bounce > Project or Section. Pick PCM for a WAV or MP3 as the destination, leave the output at Output 1-2 so the file is stereo, and choose Offline in the Mode pop-up; software instruments bounce offline. If Cycle mode is on, only the cycle area is bounced, so turn it off or set the cycle to the whole song. The file comes out with the click on the left and the song on the right.

Left goes to the in-ears, right goes to the PA. How the split file works and how to wire it has the diagram.

A song that was not recorded to a click

Here Logic has more to offer than most DAWs, and it still costs time. The guide's answer is Smart Tempo. In File > Project Settings > Smart Tempo, set the Project Tempo mode to Adapt Project Tempo and set imported audio files to On. Import the song. Logic analyses it and, in the guide's words, "places beat markers based on the musical tempo detection of an audio file", then writes a tempo map into the Tempo track. From that moment the metronome follows the map, because "the metronome always plays at the project tempo", and so does the Klopfgeist track you built above.

The analysis is good on clean, steady material. On a live recording, a song with a rubato intro, or a band that leans into the chorus, it misses bars, and the fix is manual: double-click the region, open the Smart Tempo Editor, click in the upper part of the display to add a downbeat hint or in the lower part for a beat hint, drag hints into place, then click Apply Changes. Every hint is one bar you listened to and placed by ear. For a four-minute song with a few wrong stretches that is a quarter of an hour; for a song the analysis never understood, it is the whole map, bar by bar, the same job REAPER and Pro Tools give you under other names.

The click track maker does that measuring for you: it reads the beats from the recording, places a click on every one with beat one tuned higher, adds the count-in and exports click left, music right, in about a minute. Step by step: how to make a click track from your own backing track. Logic stays the right tool for everything you record to its metronome in the first place, and for the editing around it.

Frequently asked questions

Does Logic bounce the metronome into the file?

The metronome plays from the Click channel strip, which the guide says is not assigned to a track. The bounce renders tracks. To get a click into a bounce, put Klopfgeist on a software instrument track with a MIDI region of notes on the beats, and that track bounces like any other.

How do I get a count-in in Logic?

For recording, turn on the Count-in button (Shift-K) and choose the length in Record > Count-in: 1 to 6 bars or a number of beats. For a count-in inside the bounced file, start the Klopfgeist region one or two bars before the song and line the song's first beat up with a click.

Can Logic make a click follow a song that was not recorded to one?

Yes, with Smart Tempo in Adapt Project Tempo mode: the analysis writes a tempo map and the metronome and your click track follow it. Where the analysis goes wrong, you add downbeat and beat hints in the Smart Tempo Editor, one bar at a time.

How do I put the click on one channel only?

Set the song's stereo track to Stereo Pan and drag both handles to the right, pan the click track hard left, then bounce to a stereo file from Output 1-2.

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