In the past I've worked with Ableton Live, Audacity, Cubase, GarageBand, Logic Pro X, Nuendo, Pro Tools, Reaper, and Reason. I'm probably forgetting some programs from a long time ago that are no longer in business. I think that every DAW (digital audio workstation, for folks who don't know) has pros and cons. I liked Cubase because it was easy to use, but fairly buggy on the Mac at the time when I used it. I liked Nuendo a lot. I never liked Pro Tools because it's a pain in the ass on many levels, but you have to have it if you want to do work from other studios. Reason and Ableton are great for EDM. GarageBand is the easiest to use. Audacity is free. Reaper is cheap but not easy to use.
Eventually I settled on Logic Pro and have never looked back. And of everything I've used, Logic is hands down my favorite. Which in a way is unfortunate – lately I've been unhappy with Apple's direction. When Steve Jobs died, something inside of Apple died with him. Common sense. Apple has become a phone company. I was an iOS developer for a while, until I got tired of every iOS update breaking my software and requiring me to make changes. iTunes started life as a great music app and has turned into a nightmare that everyone hates. My iPhone used to 'just work,' but now it does things like change the podcast I'm listening to if I put my phone down too quickly. The free Logic Remote app stopped working on my old iPad 3 because Apple broke it with an update for no reason, other than to encourage me to buy a new iPad. They don't make a low end computer with upgradable RAM any more. The new iPhone can't be used with normal headphones. They did away with the magnetic locking power adaptor on some laptops, they… you get the point.
Logic Pro X has multiple tools for editing MIDI and each one has its own specific strengths. Joe Albano explains when you might want to turn to which one for the best results. Logic has always been well known for its advanced MIDI features, and when it comes to MIDI editing this reputation is well-deserved.
- Please give me the pros and cons of either size SSD being used as my main drive. Logic Pro X 10.4.1 OS 10.8.5 13' MacBook Pro i7 2.9GHz 16GB/256GB SSD Glyph GPT250.
- Apple Logic Pro X 10.5review. And there's certainly plenty of enticing new stuff in Logic Pro X 10.5 (free for existing users) to get excited about, as the fruity tech leviathan makes obvious but positive moves towards bringing its blockbuster DAW in line with more, shall we say, progressive contemporaries such as Ableton Live, Bitwig Studio, FL Studio and even Maschine.
But then there's Logic Pro X. And for $199, it's almost everything I'd ever want and need in a DAW. Have you priced the industry standard Pro Tools? It's $299. PER YEAR. And to do what Logic does, you'll need to drop about another $800 – $1,000 on plugins and instruments. If you care about money, Logic Pro X on a Mac will still save you a crap ton compared to a Pro Tools-based PC rig that can do all the same things. Search for home studio tours on YouTube and you'll see that 9 out fo 10 of the home studios you find are running Logic Pro X, because it's super cost effective and it's easy to use.
Instruments
Logic comes with a very good sampler and several very good synths. Out of the box, it'll have pretty much any keyboard sound you could want. If if doesn't, you can buy a plugin, but in all of the years I've used Logic I've only purchased one plugin instrument.
Audio Plugins
Logic ships with a good collection of reverbs, delays, choruses, eq, etc and so on. It even includes some simulated amps and pedals, though I prefer my own real tube amps. I have purchased two audio plugins – a vocal rider and a de-esser, both from waves.com. But you don't really need any external plugins. In the past I've suggested that the vocal pitch plugin in Logic isn't very good, but that's not true. If you want highly controlled pitch correction, it's in there – you just need to dig a little deeper.
3d structure of house. Performance
On a Mac with an i5 processor and 8 GB of RAM I can still easily handle 75 tracks of audio without breaking a sweat.
Drummers
Logic includes several virtual drummers. They have their own different kits and their own different styles of playing. You can swap out the different kits – put Logan, the old school rock drummer, on a jazz kit! Great fun. There are many approaches to virtual drumming these days, but Logic's is by far the easiest to use and understand. Best of all, at the end of the day, you can still use MIDI to tweak the drum performances. This is maybe my favorite part of Logic – the virtual drummers feel like real people, but they're always on time.
Ease of Use
Logic Pro X borrowed a lot from GarageBand and as a result, it's very easy to use, but also very powerful under the hood when you need it to be. Here's something else – to get Pro Tools working on your Mac, you need a degree. Even the free limited version is a royal pain in the ass to get working. To get Logic working, you install it, and you're done. It's that easy.
Documentation Change my voice to male.
The documentation is not very good. At all. But that's been an issue with Apple forever. The Mac has always been easy to use, as are most applications for it, but if you need help, turn to YouTube. To be fair, this also describes every other DAW out there. Apple should find the best YouTube content creator out there for Logic and just hire them to make videos.
Upgrade Path
Apple's approach of including GarageBand on all Macs was and is genius and should be applauded. GarageBand is basically Logic Lite, and is good enough to handle what most people need. I used GarageBand on some of the tracks on my first album. You can open GarageBand projects in Logic, another brilliant move.
Summary
As long as Apple continues to support and improve Logic Pro X, I will continue to buy expensive Macs to run it on. It really is that good. And while it is possible to build your own Mac clone and save money, I wouldn't. Eventually you'll end up with support issues. People are willing to drop two grand on a guitar but they want to save money on their computer, THE most important piece of studio gear? I don't get it. For under a grand you could get a used two year old Mac and Logic Pro X and have everything you need.
Logic has always been well known for its advanced MIDI features, and when it comes to MIDI editing this reputation is well-deserved. Besides the ability to macro-edit MIDI Regions in the main Tracks area, there are four dedicated editing displays for MIDI events, each offering its own benefits for tweaking MIDI events and performances. Let's take a brief look at them.
Piano Roll Editor
The Piano Roll Editor is undoubtedly the most familiar and popular of Logic's MIDI editing displays. As with all such editors, it shows MIDI events on a grid with pitches displayed vertically and, naturally, time—bars & beats—horizontally. For most typical MIDI editing tasks, the Piano Roll Editor has all the features you'd need to get the job done, along with a few extra niceties.
Typically the Piano Roll Editor would utilize the familiar Logic Link button, which makes it display the contents of any selected region or regions in the Tracks area. Multiple regions on the same track can be selected and viewed/edited, but it's also possible to select and edit MIDI events in multiple regions on different tracks as well. Of course MIDI notes can be dragged around the display for basic pitch and time adjustments (option-dragged to make copies), and the display has its own menu for choosing snapping behavior and resolution. Dragging the starts and ends of notes adjusts duration, and handy help tags show the actual numerical values as any edits are being made.
A comprehensive set of tools is available specifically for the Piano Roll Editor: you can select not only the main Tool but a secondary Command-enabled tool for quick edits—I usually set this to MIDI Velocity. Besides the usual choices, there are also more creative tools, like the Brush tool, which offers a way to quickly add a sequence of notes by dragging in the editing area—the current Quantize value determines the number of steps/notes created as you drag with the Brush, a nice step-editing alternative to dropping in notes one at a time.
Additional new features include Time Handles, a way to easily time-stretch/squeeze notes. When enabled from the Functions submenu, Time Handles let you make a selection of a group of notes, and then compress or expand time by dragging on either handle, with helpful visual feedback—this can be useful in a wide range of scenarios, like tweaking the timing of drum fills (in an un-quantized) drum part. There's also an option to collapse the note grid down to only notes with events—the idea is to more effectively turn the Piano Roll into a drum editor, and with certain Logic Instruments the names of the individual drums are displayed in this mode.
Color-coding is utilized to good effect. By default, color indicates MIDI note Velocity from quiet notes (deep blues and purples) to medium velocities (greens and yellows) to loud hard-played notes (oranges and reds)—this is very helpful, showing the dynamics of the performance at a glance, and Command-dragging on a note or group of selected notes can quickly adjust the Velocities. But there are other color-coding options as well: when notes from multiple regions are displayed, different colors can be shown for each region; notes can be color-coded by MIDI channel; and when using Articulation IDs for more expressive performances notes with different IDs can be shown in different colors, revealing the specifics of the performance variations.
Selected notes can be edited numerically via the options in the Piano Roll's Inspector area. Time Quantization done here works in conjunction with the Region quantize setting in the main Inspector, with both active simultaneously; this can sometimes be a little confusing, but once you get the hang of it the flexibility it offers is very useful.
Besides MIDI notes, controller data can also be viewed and edited in the Piano Roll. A recent update changed the way this works—there's a unified display option for both MIDI controller data and Logic Automation data, which are shown and tweaked in a separate lane below the note grid—all of Logic's convenient Automation editing options can be utilized.
The MIDI controller/Automation lane in the Piano Roll Editor
But despite the flexibility of the Piano Roll Editor, there are some limitations. One of them is that only one lane of controller/automation data can be shown at a time, a potential inconvenience in some situations. Fortunately, whatever limits there are, Logic's other MIDI editing displays are available to pick up the slack.
Event List
MIDI event lists have the advantage of being able to display more specific (numerical) information about the MIDI notes and events, though the list format itself can make it less intuitive to select and edit them. One very useful option in Logic's Event List is the set of display filters at the top. Here you can choose the types of MIDI data you want to see in the List—you can hide long strings of controller data, or visually 'solo' just one type of data, making selection and editing significantly more convenient in many cases.
The Event List is the place to be when you need to make more precise, numerical edits to MIDI data. But the List doesn't only display MIDI event data; backing up a level with the familiar arrow at the upper left will display a list of regions—including audio regions—and those can be selected and edited here with numerical precision as well.
The Event List: showing Regions (top); showing MIDI notes/events (bottom)
For some kinds of data, the Event list provides more useful information than the Piano Roll—a good example is Articulation IDs, Logic's proprietary tags that attach to MIDI notes and call up various performance articulations in more advanced virtual instruments. Here you can see at a glance which notes are using which performance variations—much less obvious in the Piano Roll.
Though many people don't use the Event List anywhere near as often as the Piano Roll, often when they do it's used in conjunction with the Piano Roll, to facilitate some editing tasks. In fact, Event List data can be shown and edited without having to take up as much onscreen space as needed by the full Event List window—the Event Float is a small floating window that shows one line of Event List data, for the selected note/event in other editors, like the Piano Roll.
Conveniently opened or closed with Option-E, the Event Float can be used for quick precise numerical edits while working more intuitively in other editors, and it can be extremely useful in a host of editing scenarios.
Step Editor
I mentioned before one big limitation of the Piano Roll Editor is the ability to display only one controller/automation lane at a time. While that can often be fine, there are plenty of situations where you may need to view multiple controllers—that's where Logic's Step Editor comes in.
The Step Editor consists of a set of lanes, each one displaying a different type of MIDI data—notes, controllers, pitchbend, etc—and besides the basic layouts provided you can create and save custom Lane Sets. There are plenty of controls for customizing the layout of the lanes and the display of the MIDI data in each lane. Although the data is displayed as discrete events rather than as lines (as in the controller/automation lane in the Piano Roll Editor), there is a selection of tools that make creating and editing strings of data just as convenient—you don't have to step in each MIDI event in a controller string, you can draw it in or drag-edit with the appropriate tool.
The Step Editor offers the ability to not only work with multiple lanes of controller data, but also to function as a grid editor for drums; in the latter scenario each lane corresponds to a different note, making to easy to view and tweak drum patterns—Logic provides a template for the General MIDI drum layout, but, again, you can create a custom Lane Set for your own preferred drum map.
Score Editor
Finally, Logic provides a Score Editor, which displays MIDI notes in standard musical notation. Unlike the scratchpad score editors in some DAWs, Logic's is a full-featured notation tool, with enough graphics tools and options to create, edit, and print out proper scores and parts. While the other editors require no specialized musical knowledge, naturally the Score editor is most useful for people who already read traditional music notation—those users may find that the familiar notes-on-staves display offers a more accessible way of approaching MIDI performance data. Obviously notation is a specialized application, which is well beyond the scope of this piece, so I'll just briefly touch on the Score Editor as an alternative MIDI editing tool.
The Score Editor offers the option to show the MIDI notes on a continuous timeline—as with other editors—or in a Page view, as the notation would appear if printed out. Besides the graphic aspects, the MIDI note data can be fully edited for pitch and duration by the usual methods—like dragging—and text can be included, which can be useful for relating notes to lyrics. One important thing to note is that the notation display can be visually quantized independently of the actual MIDI performance data; that means the score display of an unquantized performance can be cleaned up—necessary to a proper notation display—without having to sacrifice the timing nuances of the musical performance.
This is important to ensure proper readability if the Score Editor is used to print out parts for vocalists or musicians. In some sessions a vocalist who reads music may be provided a lead sheet with melody and lyrics; or a MIDI track may be standing in for a future live performance on an acoustic instrument, with the player provided with a musical chart courtesy of the Score Editor's notation display.
Final Word
The Piano Roll Editor is undoubtedly the most familiar and popular of Logic's MIDI editing displays. As with all such editors, it shows MIDI events on a grid with pitches displayed vertically and, naturally, time—bars & beats—horizontally. For most typical MIDI editing tasks, the Piano Roll Editor has all the features you'd need to get the job done, along with a few extra niceties.
Typically the Piano Roll Editor would utilize the familiar Logic Link button, which makes it display the contents of any selected region or regions in the Tracks area. Multiple regions on the same track can be selected and viewed/edited, but it's also possible to select and edit MIDI events in multiple regions on different tracks as well. Of course MIDI notes can be dragged around the display for basic pitch and time adjustments (option-dragged to make copies), and the display has its own menu for choosing snapping behavior and resolution. Dragging the starts and ends of notes adjusts duration, and handy help tags show the actual numerical values as any edits are being made.
A comprehensive set of tools is available specifically for the Piano Roll Editor: you can select not only the main Tool but a secondary Command-enabled tool for quick edits—I usually set this to MIDI Velocity. Besides the usual choices, there are also more creative tools, like the Brush tool, which offers a way to quickly add a sequence of notes by dragging in the editing area—the current Quantize value determines the number of steps/notes created as you drag with the Brush, a nice step-editing alternative to dropping in notes one at a time.
Additional new features include Time Handles, a way to easily time-stretch/squeeze notes. When enabled from the Functions submenu, Time Handles let you make a selection of a group of notes, and then compress or expand time by dragging on either handle, with helpful visual feedback—this can be useful in a wide range of scenarios, like tweaking the timing of drum fills (in an un-quantized) drum part. There's also an option to collapse the note grid down to only notes with events—the idea is to more effectively turn the Piano Roll into a drum editor, and with certain Logic Instruments the names of the individual drums are displayed in this mode.
Color-coding is utilized to good effect. By default, color indicates MIDI note Velocity from quiet notes (deep blues and purples) to medium velocities (greens and yellows) to loud hard-played notes (oranges and reds)—this is very helpful, showing the dynamics of the performance at a glance, and Command-dragging on a note or group of selected notes can quickly adjust the Velocities. But there are other color-coding options as well: when notes from multiple regions are displayed, different colors can be shown for each region; notes can be color-coded by MIDI channel; and when using Articulation IDs for more expressive performances notes with different IDs can be shown in different colors, revealing the specifics of the performance variations.
Selected notes can be edited numerically via the options in the Piano Roll's Inspector area. Time Quantization done here works in conjunction with the Region quantize setting in the main Inspector, with both active simultaneously; this can sometimes be a little confusing, but once you get the hang of it the flexibility it offers is very useful.
Besides MIDI notes, controller data can also be viewed and edited in the Piano Roll. A recent update changed the way this works—there's a unified display option for both MIDI controller data and Logic Automation data, which are shown and tweaked in a separate lane below the note grid—all of Logic's convenient Automation editing options can be utilized.
The MIDI controller/Automation lane in the Piano Roll Editor
But despite the flexibility of the Piano Roll Editor, there are some limitations. One of them is that only one lane of controller/automation data can be shown at a time, a potential inconvenience in some situations. Fortunately, whatever limits there are, Logic's other MIDI editing displays are available to pick up the slack.
Event List
MIDI event lists have the advantage of being able to display more specific (numerical) information about the MIDI notes and events, though the list format itself can make it less intuitive to select and edit them. One very useful option in Logic's Event List is the set of display filters at the top. Here you can choose the types of MIDI data you want to see in the List—you can hide long strings of controller data, or visually 'solo' just one type of data, making selection and editing significantly more convenient in many cases.
The Event List is the place to be when you need to make more precise, numerical edits to MIDI data. But the List doesn't only display MIDI event data; backing up a level with the familiar arrow at the upper left will display a list of regions—including audio regions—and those can be selected and edited here with numerical precision as well.
The Event List: showing Regions (top); showing MIDI notes/events (bottom)
For some kinds of data, the Event list provides more useful information than the Piano Roll—a good example is Articulation IDs, Logic's proprietary tags that attach to MIDI notes and call up various performance articulations in more advanced virtual instruments. Here you can see at a glance which notes are using which performance variations—much less obvious in the Piano Roll.
Though many people don't use the Event List anywhere near as often as the Piano Roll, often when they do it's used in conjunction with the Piano Roll, to facilitate some editing tasks. In fact, Event List data can be shown and edited without having to take up as much onscreen space as needed by the full Event List window—the Event Float is a small floating window that shows one line of Event List data, for the selected note/event in other editors, like the Piano Roll.
Conveniently opened or closed with Option-E, the Event Float can be used for quick precise numerical edits while working more intuitively in other editors, and it can be extremely useful in a host of editing scenarios.
Step Editor
I mentioned before one big limitation of the Piano Roll Editor is the ability to display only one controller/automation lane at a time. While that can often be fine, there are plenty of situations where you may need to view multiple controllers—that's where Logic's Step Editor comes in.
The Step Editor consists of a set of lanes, each one displaying a different type of MIDI data—notes, controllers, pitchbend, etc—and besides the basic layouts provided you can create and save custom Lane Sets. There are plenty of controls for customizing the layout of the lanes and the display of the MIDI data in each lane. Although the data is displayed as discrete events rather than as lines (as in the controller/automation lane in the Piano Roll Editor), there is a selection of tools that make creating and editing strings of data just as convenient—you don't have to step in each MIDI event in a controller string, you can draw it in or drag-edit with the appropriate tool.
The Step Editor offers the ability to not only work with multiple lanes of controller data, but also to function as a grid editor for drums; in the latter scenario each lane corresponds to a different note, making to easy to view and tweak drum patterns—Logic provides a template for the General MIDI drum layout, but, again, you can create a custom Lane Set for your own preferred drum map.
Score Editor
Finally, Logic provides a Score Editor, which displays MIDI notes in standard musical notation. Unlike the scratchpad score editors in some DAWs, Logic's is a full-featured notation tool, with enough graphics tools and options to create, edit, and print out proper scores and parts. While the other editors require no specialized musical knowledge, naturally the Score editor is most useful for people who already read traditional music notation—those users may find that the familiar notes-on-staves display offers a more accessible way of approaching MIDI performance data. Obviously notation is a specialized application, which is well beyond the scope of this piece, so I'll just briefly touch on the Score Editor as an alternative MIDI editing tool.
The Score Editor offers the option to show the MIDI notes on a continuous timeline—as with other editors—or in a Page view, as the notation would appear if printed out. Besides the graphic aspects, the MIDI note data can be fully edited for pitch and duration by the usual methods—like dragging—and text can be included, which can be useful for relating notes to lyrics. One important thing to note is that the notation display can be visually quantized independently of the actual MIDI performance data; that means the score display of an unquantized performance can be cleaned up—necessary to a proper notation display—without having to sacrifice the timing nuances of the musical performance.
This is important to ensure proper readability if the Score Editor is used to print out parts for vocalists or musicians. In some sessions a vocalist who reads music may be provided a lead sheet with melody and lyrics; or a MIDI track may be standing in for a future live performance on an acoustic instrument, with the player provided with a musical chart courtesy of the Score Editor's notation display.
Final Word
What Are Pros And Cons
So each of Logic's MIDI Editors have something unique to offer when tweaking MIDI data. While the Piano Roll Editor is undoubtedly the go-to editor for most users, there's always a particular situation or scenario where one of the other editors will be needed, either as a convenient adjunct or to perform a particular type of editing it's uniquely capable of. I still keep dedicated screensets in my Template, each optimized for a particular editing display, to make switching between them even more efficient. Taken together, Logic's editors have all the bases covered when it comes to MIDI tweakery.
Define Pro And Con
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