Calculating timings using a DAW

As mentioned earlier, in general, many film composers sketch their ideas on sheet music at a piano before scoring in Logic Pro. The main challenge is to outline the length of music needed that will fit the timing desired. So, before deciding what the music needs to be doing, the goal is to figure out how many bars and what meter the length of the project can fit.

In this section, we will continue working with a 30-second commercial, exploring new ways of calculating timings in Logic Pro. Since we’re dealing with calculating timings, keep in mind that a beat is the steady pulse, a tempo is the rate per second of that pulse, and the time signature is the meter of the pulse.

Suppose you have a cue (music for a scene) that lasts exactly 30 seconds. If you know you want the tempo to be approximately 192 bpm, you could use different methods and formulas to calculate the length of the cue. In the following examples, we will review these different...