The first change in the new Logic Studio bundle will strike you the moment you see the packaging. The box is significantly smaller than before, which raises the question: where did those large printed manuals go? According to Apple, most customers use only the electronic documentation which makes one wonder why there is such a healthy market for third-party books that explain Logic!
One is an installation guide, while the other two are so-called 'exploration' guides for Logic Pro 9 and Main Stage 2. Supplementing these guides, which are also supplied as PDF files, is a collection of reference manuals that make use of an HTML-based help system you can also read them on-line at Apple's web site.
Thankfully, these were also made available as PDF files a month or so after the initial Logic 9 launch. A surprising omission is the lack of a document describing only the new features, as has been supplied with previous versions. For existing users, it's quite handy to read about the new features, especially when investigating smaller changes such as new key commands, and I really hope Apple fill this void at some point. Logic Studio is still supplied on an almost overwhelming number of DVDs — nine in total, one more than before — and accompanying the applications themselves is an abounding quantity of content, including a complete set of Apple's JamPack sound libraries.
In addition to the original five JamPacks, you now also get the latest Voices JamPack as well, and in fact it would cost more to purchase these JamPacks separately than to buy Logic Studio itself! You'll need to put aside an hour if you choose to install everything, depending on the speed of your optical drive, and I find it handy to create disk images of Logic Studio's media with Disk Utility.
While this is also a laborious endeavour, every subsequent installation of Logic is significantly faster, as you can simply mount all of the images, run the installer, and come back in less than 15 minutes with the procedure complete. When Flex View is enabled, the Flex Mode button on track headers enables you to select which Flex Mode should be used for a track.
Perhaps the most significant new feature in Logic Pro 9 is Flex Time. If you're familiar with Cubase's Audio Warp feature, or Elastic Audio in Pro Tools, this is essentially Apple's take on such methods of non-destructive, tempo-oriented audio manipulation. You've been able to set audio regions to 'Follow Tempo' since Logic 7, making it possible for Apple Loops and other audio material recorded in Logic to be automatically time-stretched to play back at the Project's tempo, but Flex Time goes much further.
Rather than simply time-stretching an audio region, Flex Time analyses audio regions and creates a series of markers at transients that identify musical beats in the audio. In order to work with Flex Time, you first need to enable Flex View by clicking the new Flex icon on the toolbar. The Flex Mode button will then appear in the track headers of your audio tracks. As with Elastic Audio in Pro Tools, Flex Time is enabled on a track-by-track basis, though it's possible to set individual audio regions on a track to opt out.
Grouping gracks enables you to set a Flex Mode for all tracks in a group. Once Flex Mode is enabled on a track, Flex Time will automatically — if necessary — conform any audio regions on that track to the current tempo. And with Flex View active, the display of audio regions will change slightly to indicate the effects of Flex Time. Flex Markers are initially shown as light-grey lines behind a waveform, with a green outline where beats have been identified.
They become clearer, with a solid white line in the foreground, if you drag them or add them manually by clicking, making it easy to see where edits have been performed. When editing with Flex Time, Logic colour-codes the waveform to indicate where time has been compressed or expanded, making it keep track of your edits. Notice also that audio regions processed with Flex Time gain certain parameters normally associated with MIDI regions, such as Quantise.
As you drag a Flex Marker, Logic will shade the backgrounds of the adjacent audio sections orange or green, depending on whether the sections get expanded or compressed. And, after an edit, the waveform outline colour will be coloured orange where an expansion occurred, which makes it easy to see what type of changes have been made.
A particularly neat trick when dragging a Flex Marker is that if you hover the mouse cursor over another audio region as you're dragging, the Flex Marker on the region you're editing will snap to the transients in the region you're hovering over. Flex Time offers a choice of several different Flex Modes, each providing a different algorithm for time compression and expansion, optimised for Rhythmic, Monophonic or Polyphonic material. There are also some less typical options, like Tempophone, which emulates the effect of the old tape-based time-stretching machine of the same name, and Speed, where the playback rate of the audio is adjusted, just like a sampler, so the pitch of the audio is also affected.
These latter options are great for creating more interesting time-based effects, where you don't want the pristine, utility approach of the other algorithms. The real ace-in-the-hole Flex Mode, though, is Slice. When this mode is selected, rather than using time-stretching, Flex Time simply moves the positions of the audio slices specified by the Flex Markers, much as a REX ReCycle loop would be handled.
This is absolutely brilliant if you're working with drum and percussion parts and maybe even simple bass lines , because you don't have to apply any processing to the sound that might affect the quality, even subtly. But the reason why I like this mode so much is that this surely has to be the simplest implementation yet for slicing up audio to correct timing. While Pro Tools has Beat Detective, and other applications, like Cubase, have tools to achieve similar results, the ability to slice everything up, have Logic invisibly handle the slices for you, and achieve all of this in essentially a single mouse-click is rather splendid.
A particularly nice touch is that when Flex Mode is enabled, audio regions gain the same quantise parameters usually only available to MIDI regions.
This means that you can now apply that good old 16C swing groove to any rhythmic audio material you like. What's more, this sharing of MIDI functionality to audio works both ways: it's now possible to create a quantise setting from an audio region, which can then be applied to a MIDI region. And although Logic is playing catch-up with these features, I think most Logic users will be glad to have them without the need to resort to murkier areas of the Sample Editor.
The EXS24 sampler has long been a jewel in the crown for Logic users, and its integration with Logic has benefits that are largely transparent to end users: for instance, EXS24 can handle memory and disk scheduling in conjunction with Logic far better than a third-party plug-in sampler would be able to. But musically speaking, the integration of EXS24 hasn't previously made any tasks much easier to perform than they would be with another sampler hosted by Logic, such as Native Instruments' Kontakt.
The Flex Time feature offers one new method for manipulating loops, but what if you prefer to work with them in a sampler, or want to add a little extra something to that weak snare-drum sound? In Logic 9 you can do just that, thanks to two new features that allow you to perform certain tasks with audio regions more easily than you could ever have imagined.
Here you can see the audio region on the upper track has been converted so that it can be triggered by the MIDI region on the lower track. First, you can create an EXS24 instrument that maps an audio region so that it can be triggered from one MIDI note, making it easy to recreate '80s-style st-st-stuttering effects.
Or — very neatly — you can ask Logic to create a new EXS24 instrument based on the transients detected in the audio region. In this way, rather like ReCycle and similar loop-based tools, Logic will slice up the audio region and assign each slice to be triggered by a different note. You can specify the range of notes that will be used, which is handy if you want to turn a drum loop into a playable kit on your MIDI keyboard, for example. Perhaps the best thing about the Convert Regions command is the seamlessness of the process.
After you click OK to convert one or more regions into a Sampler track, Logic automatically creates a new Software Instrument track containing an EXS loaded with the newly created instrument. It also creates the appropriate MIDI region on the newly created track, so that your starting point is exactly as the original audio region. It even goes to the trouble of muting these original regions as well. The only thing it doesn't do for you is fetch the next cup of Earl Grey.
Well, that, and it doesn't transfer any insert effects or bus settings you might have been using on the audio track containing the original regions; but it would be churlish to complain. There are, of course, many tools that turn loops into slices that can be triggered by MIDI, but this is probably the simplest, most immediate approach I've seen, and is a great way of creating new EXS24 content. Before we discuss the second new EXSrelated feature, I should mention another great addition to Logic 9 which in some ways does the opposite of the Convert Regions function.
Bounce Regions In Place enables you to quickly bounce one or more regions into a new audio file. This means that if you have a MIDI region on a Software Instrument track, for example, and you want to turn it into an audio file for audio-based manipulation, you no longer have to perform this bounce manually.
Fast and intuitive region looping. Global chord track with automatic chord recognition. Complete music notation: Real-time transcription Instrument transposition Guitar tablature Drum notation Chord symbols Adaptive lyric input Automatic multibar rests Comprehensive palette of slurs, crescendis, and other ornaments Staff Styles for easy recall of multiple stave attributes Score Sets allow instruments to be combined for editing and print Layout and printing of complete professional scores Caps Lock Keyboard for real-time note entry using computer keyboard.
MIDI step entry. Transform window for advanced editing of MIDI events. Editing Intuitive region-based editing. Powerful folders facilitate organization and streamline arranging tasks. Comprehensive set of editing tools assignable to left, right, and key-modified mouse buttons. Easy take management: Colorize takes automatically or manually Single-click take selection Cut, trim, move, or rearrange takes Move and edit entire take folders as you would any other region Quick Swipe Comping for audio: Build a comp of parts from multiple takes Create comps on the fly Automatic, customizable crossfades between phrases Flatten function replaces take folder with regions representing the current comp Flatten and Merge function replaces take folder with newly created audio file Nondestructive MIDI and audio quantization: Groove templates definable from MIDI or audio regions 34 basic quantization settings Six advanced quantization parameters Drum replacement or doubling to enhance recorded drum tracks with sampled drum sounds.
Convert audio regions to a sampler instrument MIDI track. MIDI note extraction from audio for melodic transcription. Graphic beat mapping for creating tempo maps from existing audio or MIDI. Snap-to-transient selection. Definable relative or absolute snap grid.
Auto-crossfade mode inserts crossfades between regions automatically. Destructive sample editing using built-in or external sample editor. Mixer Up to audio channel strips. Up to software instrument channel strips. Up to auxiliary channel strips.
Each of the above in mono, stereo, or surround with audio channels. Dynamic channel strip creation simplifies and accelerates mixer setup and configuration.
In-Place-Solo system with solo safe mode for any channel strip. Direct insert patching of external hardware instruments and effects with latency compensation.
Busses as sources for recording. Inline input monitoring for audio channel strips. Click one of the small triangles to the left and right of the keys. Clicking the left triangle lowers the range by an octave, and clicking the right triangle raises the range by an octave.
To adjust the size of the Touch Bar keyboard, tap one of the Keyboard Size buttons to the left of the Touch Bar keyboard. To limit notes to a musical scale: Tap the Scale button, then tap to select the root note and the mode. Select the software instrument track you want to play. Use the other keys shown in the window to perform the following actions: Press Z or X to move down or up by octaves.
Press C or V to lower or raise the velocity. Press 4 through 8 to change the modulation mod wheel value, or 3 to turn off modulation. Press 1 or 2 to bend the pitch down or up.
0コメント