I heard here that Apple (Logic) are to stop support for Avid’s Digidesign products (Pro Tools). This is a massive kick in the teeth for Avid who I here are struggling a bit at the moment. Neither rumor surprises me; I cashed in my (digital signal processing) chips a long time ago when Apple brought out the G5. The chips I cashed in were a Digidesign HD 3 (before excel) and a 192 interface. I could see the end for the need of processing power on PCI cards.I thought I should get as much money for my Digidesign Pro Tools HD system as I could, I already liked the sound of Apogee interfaces so I bought a Rosetta 800 and made do with a G5 dual 1.8. It was a bit sluggish but I knew bigger beasts were ‘in the post’. And in the post they were beyond my wildest dreams because I had no idea about the intel chips they were going to load them up with. I have to say also that I thought the Rosetta sounded much better than my 192 I had. Engineers often criticise Apogee stuff saying it sounds a bit sheeny. If they do then I like sheeny!

I hated the way Digidesign’s upgrade systems worked. I spent a fortune upgrading my Mix system to HD and it seemed only months later HD Accel came out. It’s part of the reason I sold my HD system when I did; I wasn’t about to fork out all that money AGAIN! Here is a recent letter they sent out to their customers telling them that they are building a website and dropping the Digidesign name if you’re interested. All those brand names were a bit confusing; Pro Tools made by Digidesign and Digidesign is owned by Avid. I don’t think many users even knew about Avid.

I do feel sorry for all those Logic users now lumbered with a HD rigs but soon will be unable to upgrade Logic. I don’t know why Apple are withdrawing support, I know that Avid and Apple have never been the best of friends but this really feels like kicking them when they are down. I wonder how much my Logic using pals will be able to get for their HD rigs now. I’ve been native for a few years now, I’m running 2 x 2.8 quad intel xeon, a load of ram and I can’t even get the beast to break into a sweat. I use an Apogee Ensemble interface now. I swapped my Rosetta 800 for the Ensemble because I wanted the lightpipe i/o when I ran Gigastudio. The stereo sp/diff i/o still comes in handy.

I can see the Mac Pro doesn’t break into a sweat because I use islayer’s iStat: http://www.islayer.com/ It’s a neat app which lets me know what’s going on in my mac; from the temperature of my processors and disk drives to how much processing power I am using and from which processors, handy when you want to see how your individual plugins use your processors. There’s even a handy ethernet bandwidth counter! All the stats appear at the top of the screen and look great; there are drop down menus of everything for more detailed statistics.

My advise to any Logic users with a Pro Tools rig is to come and do a Pro Tools courses with George or get those cards and interfaces on eBay NOW!

I made a video at my studio about zooming for Logic Pro Training.  I don’t know how I managed to talk about zooming for over 6 1/2 minutes but I love it. The first 4 minutes can get a bit tedious if you’re familiar with all the weird and wonderful ways you can zoom in and out in Logic 9 but I have to say that the way I zoom with the zoom tool assigned to the right mouse button is very quick and I haven’t seen anyone else zoom this way before I’ve showed them. And once they get used to it, they don’t go back to their old way. There is another way of zooming in Logic 9 similar to the way you can zoom in Ableton Live 8 but I was unaware of this when I made the video. My way is still quicker so there’s not much point talking about it here.

If you zip forward to 4 minutes and play from there, I touch on how I use loops and why I don’t use the loop tool and also on my preferred way of using the zoom tool these days. I’ve never seen anyone use loops and stop them with blank regions nor have I ever seen anyone set up the right mouse button to use as the zoom tool before either so it’s well worth watching, and I can’t see how anyone would go back after getting used to doing it my way. I really don’t know why anyone would use the loop tool and it’s starting to show that it’s not people who make music who beta-test Logic these days.

Watch the video HERE

Many people are a bit scared of Logic’s environment and it even puts people off using Logic Pro as a DAW altogether. Logic Pro/Studio’s Environment is the foundation that Logic is built on. It’s been around since the birth of Logic in 1993 and remains pretty much the same to this day. Today we’re going to look at Logic Studio 9′s click and ports layer in the environment window which I think can be the most intimidating. Essentially it takes the midi notes you play on the keyboard and processes them using various objects depending on what you want to do. It does the same thing as the script editor in Native instruments’ Kontakt for all you Kontakt heads out there. Here is a pic of my click and ports page (click on it to make it bigger) It’s a bit more complicated than the Environment click and ports page out of the Logic Studio 9 box but still quite similar.

The strip on the far left is your controller keyboard. The pre process box tells you what you’re physically hitting on your keyboard. The post process box is a display of the notes after they have been processed. In this case, the keyboard is just a graphical display of the notes you’re playing on the keyboard but you can have it post processing or even have another post processing – you can set it up how you like. This is one of the reasons I encourage teaching on students’ personal workstations wherever possible on my music production courses

The Midi Click is your metronome so keep that lurking somewhere. The Octavizer just plays the octave up as well as the note you’re playing and comes set up in Logic Studio 9 (not Logic Pro 8) as standard. I deleted it because I know I’ll never use it nor is it interesting enough to include in any course. I have replaced it with the Delay line which is much more useful. The Chord Memorizer is used to trigger chords you set up to be triggered from one key on the keyboard. You can find and add objects by clicking the ‘new’ drop down menu.

You can access Logic’s environment from the ‘windows’ drop down or hit ‘Command 8′ Sometimes when you’re working on it, it slips behind your main window so I sometimes hit ‘alt’ then select it from the drop down and it becomes a floating window which won’t disappear. Try it.

You will see that they’re all cabled together. Nothing would work if there were no cables involved! All you do to cable things together is grap the ‘nipple’ usually to the right of the device, drag the cable to which ever device or object you choose. The key to my useful set up are the cable switchers, they are not the easiest to find so follow this path: new – fader – specials – cable switcher. I think you can guess the function of a cable switcher. To switch from one cable to the other, just click on the cable switcher itself. You will notice that I have a second cable switcher post the Chord Memorizer; one output feeds the sequencer directly and one makes a stop at the arpeggiator so all those lovely chords you are (not) playing get arpeggiated too. You’re a musical genius!

You can watch the video HERE

Before the turn of this decade and I got my hands on a Magic Mouse, I used the Mighty Mouse and I got used to and enjoyed the scroll ball/sphere/nipple on the front. It was wonderful to be able to scroll up and down in the the arrangement and Piano Roll windows. About time too given how long scroll wheels had been available on other mice at the time. With the Mighty Mouse, not only could you scroll up and down but with the ball you could from side to side or even 360 degrees – again very useful in Logic’s windows when you want to quickly scroll from one section of a song to another without having to mess around zooming or fiddling with the bars at the bottom of the window. IT WAS JUST SUCH A SHAME THAT THE THING ONLY LASTED 6 MONTHS BEFORE THE BALL BROKE OR GOT CLOGGED UP AND YOU NEEDED TO BUY A NEW ONE OR FIGURE OUT A WAY OF GETTING THE GUNK OUT!!!

Apple haven’t exactly had a great record with mice. Remember that awful circular thing that came out with the first generation imacs? You never knew where you were about to track before you moved the mouse! Then the buttonless generation, buttonless because Steve Jobs doesn’t like the look of buttons! We coped at the time but now I can’t imagine life now without a right click!

Now we have the Magic Mouse. I had one popped into my Xmas stocking so I’ve had it a while now and between you and I, it was the toy I was most excited to get out and play with.

It doesn’t fill the hand like a Mighty Mouse; I know this is an issue for some but after a few hours, I got used to it. Tracking is supposed to be more accurate; it probably is but I never had a problem with the Mighty Mouse for tracking. Scrolling is much the same except you don’t have the much troubled physical ball anymore which can only be good. It’s nice the way you can pretty much scroll from anywhere in the top half of the area of the mouse as opposed to having to place your finger in exactly the same spot like before. Two finger swiping in Safari is great; no more tracking back up to that back button to view the main page after you read an article. Scrolling in Snow Leopard is joyful; I think they call it momentum. In a nutshell, the mouse knows how fast your finger moves and when you take it off, the page keeps scrolling and comes to a gradual stop depending on how fast your finger moved. SLICK! Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen in Leopard unless I’ve missed something.

Just a quick note about MagicPrefs: it’s where you can set up all sorts of deeper functions for your Magic Mouse. For example, I set up two finger CLICK to get me straight to spaces, three finger TAP to expose all windows etc etc. Unfortunately when I’m zipping around my mac and my applications at the pace it do, I tend to put fingers on the mouse without noticing so I’m going into spaces, exposing desktop, viewing all app windows etc when I don’t want to and THAT is very annoying. Perhaps I could train myself to use the Magic Mouse more delicately. For now I have to turn all these funky functions off as it’s more important it works as a useful mouse than do tricks I can live without for now.

So the question is will the Magic Mouse make life easier for you in Logic Studio. And the answer is that it will do what the Mighty Mouse did and a load of extra funky stuff outside of Logic Studio but it should last a lot longer than 6 months!