I wanted to get into was some of the training stuff I’ve been looking into around Logic Pro 10.5 that has just come out recently. But, first, I thought to overview some of the new features that you can do with a digital audio workstation.
Logic Pro is the program produced by Apple as their professional digital audio workstation.
There’s GarageBand, which a lot of people have some experience with at home. GarageBand is sort of the trimmed down simplified home user version of a program, like Logic Pro.
Suppose you’ve used something like GarageBand in the past for home projects. In that case, you won’t have as big of difficulty moving into a more professional digital audio workstation environment, like Logic Pro 10.
Now is the first time they’ve removed and updated some of those legacy items in there since 2003. some of these legacy products were initially put in there as a 2002 interface. These old synthesizer interfaces have weird knobs, and you have these odd rotating features of the interface. It looks ridiculous. For 10.5 to try to go through an update, a lot of that stuff. There’s a lot of cool new features in logic 10.5.
there’s a whole class of music producers that are logic-based
Logic Pro 10.5 introduces live loops. 10.5 is one of the more significant feature updates seen in Logic or integrated digital audio workstation years, probably 20 years.
It all seems to be about the same: you have a multitrack environment, a linear start from zero time, and then ends at the end of your project, infinity. So you have that multitrack view where you’re just kind of layering and stacking these different sections so that they’re coming together. you can visualize how those sounds are coming together in the mix.
In opposition to that, there were programs like Ableton, which had non-linear audio product development. It was a different way of visualizing the interface so that you could trigger loops in time in a measure or a bar. Then when you had a couple of loops that would cycle through, you could trigger those on and off. You can create changes to that sound. Then you could record that or send that out. It is an incomplete way of explaining Ableton.
The idea in Logic Pro 10 is they’re merging those two environments. So you had them both available to you in your digital audio workstation.
The live loops, representation in Logic, pro 10 is this grid of chiclet-style buttons that you’ve become accustomed to seeing on an iPhone or something like that via this grid of buttons. You can drop in loops that you have. These real instrument loops can be dragged and dropped, and set up. You can grab a different loop or a similar loop and then drag that into the second block. Then if you were to trigger that stem of loops vertically, it would play all of the loops that you would set up in that vertical column simultaneously to play it in time with each other. So you would create a new creative mix of music. It’s pretty cool.
It’s an excellent and fast way to demo our ideas. all this time, you’re not recording these ideas necessarily. You’re just playing them live, starting and stopping them live, and then trying to develop what sort of mix performance you want. You can have a couple of different variations of a drum track if you’re going to go between an extra beat or a different velocity. Rhythm from the chorus section to the verse section to the bridge, you can kind of break those pieces up.
You can have whatever textures you want to add to your audio tracking. These are laid out in this square pad, like a drum pad. As you trigger those sounds, you can start on the horizontal samples if you want the ideas or organize stems of sound samples vertically to begin so that you can go to those live. If you’re going to mix that up, you can shut everything off and play those loops individually. you can be creative and do a lot of exciting things
The Logic Pro 10.5 systems, or the software, is $199 to purchase. If you buy Logic Pro 10, you get this update included at no cost, which is fantastic. But if you have yet to purchase Logic, and you’re interested in trying to learn some stuff about this digital audio workstation versus others, they’ve got a 90-day free trial going on right now. You can try it for the next 90 days in full service and see if you like it.
What’s also cool is there are 70 gigabytes of sounds that you can get in a sound library to attach to your Logic Pro 10.5 software. They’re all royalty-free, all available to use loops and MIDI instruments and sampled instruments that you have access to to create music. It’s so much music and sound and audio and loops that you have a ton of creative options available to you.
Once you get this audio software, it comes with 70 gigabytes of instruments of everything. Bass, electric drums, organic drums, any percussive interest instrument, any synthetic, or any synthesizer sound you want to try, you can. You can do this 70-gigabyte download of data and throw that onto an external hard drive now,
They just had this integrated database for a long time where everything had to sit on your main drive. I think that drove many music producers crazy as they tried to have more extensive libraries of loops. In part because hard drives weren’t fast enough back in the day for that sort of stuff. In the last many years since Final Cut has had video libraries on external drives, it seems like they should have made the capacity for Logic to have your loop library on an external drive a little easier. It’s kind of cool. I’ve been trying that out a bit too. And then once you do have an idea, it’s accessible to just kind of lay that down into a track and create a demo out of it. So it’s enjoyable. Logic Pro 10.5, you guys go check it out.
Logic Pro 10.5 blog write-up.