Before watching the video, I was skeptical of how they had dealt with the user interface on a small screen, but it looks like they did a brilliant job. There are different layers of specificity (sequences, beats, notes, and so on) that you can switch between when editing, as well as a live playing mode. All in all, it looks like tons of fun, and makes me wish I had an iPhone so I could play with it.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work as nicely for drum programming as I’d like. Part of what makes a key know how hard you’ve hit it is how far it travels, and in how much time it does so. The half-inch or so of travel the key goes through is just too much for my purposes — the technique is totally different. (Makes sense, considering a keyboard is not a drum.) But the upshot is that playing percussively on the MIDI controller yields all loud notes (or all mostly loud notes) all the time, regardless of velocity curve setting. With a more expensive keyboard, I might have more control over this, but with the MK-225C, that’s what happens.

I was wondering if I could get Logic to always subtract 20 (or some other number) from the incoming note velocity, or even just fix the velocity to a value that I could control easily. Ideally, I’d like to be able to control this number using the mod wheel on my keyboard, so then I could move the wheel just like a volume control. Then I’d have some additional control over the volume of the notes, but still be able to play them without necessarily having to tweak everything with the mouse. This turns out to be not very difficult to set up, but you have to know what to do.

Meantime, boring business.

My site is getting slammed by spammers right now for some reason, and Movable Type’s spam filters are just not doing the trick. Along with countless hundreds of spam comments that get automatically junked every hour, dozens have been getting through, at least for moderation if not actually getting published. It’s really irritating, and Movable Type’s templates have changed so much since they started that there’s no easy way to just flick a switch to add a CAPTCHA challenge. So… for now, I’m turning off comments. If you’d like to contact me, please use the link in the sidebar.

UPDATE — Comments are back. We’ll see how it goes now that I’ve added a little something.

As of version 2.0.1 of the utility, though, I recommend not using it to edit your green Apple Loops. I tried doing this tonight while trying to sort out how portable green loops are to other setups (more on that in a few days, I expect), and after I had saved the changes, I found that the loops no longer were usable on audio instrument tracks. The MIDI portion of the file was wiped out.

The loops are still usable as the regular, blue, audio kind, but they can no longer be used on audio instrument tracks. I’ve seen no mention of this limitation online so far, but I’ll keep looking and see if there’s something I’m missing, or any kind of workaround available. Meantime, I’ve sent feedback to Apple.

Update 4/23/2008: It turns out that Loop Editor from Audiofile Engineering can safely edit green apple loops. You can edit the metadata, and presumably do other edits to the rendered audio portion of the file, and the MIDI and channel strip data will be left alone. To make sure these edits are safe, confirm that “Retain unrecognized data” is checked in the preferences. I’m pretty sure this is checked by default, but you’ll want to confirm that. Loop Editor has free and paid features — the metadata editing features are in the paid feature set, running $50.

The procedure is really simple:

1. Create an audio instrument track and load it up with your favorite virtual instrument. I’m pretty sure Logic likes to have audio with the loop — in other words, don’t use a MIDI track that drives outboard gear. You can make Apple Loops that way, but you won’t get a sound preview for them in the loop browser, and you won’t be able to use them on audio tracks.
2. Make sure your time signature and key signature are setup correctly in the Logic song for the material you’re performing. This isn’t strictly necessary (especially for drums), but it does help make sure your loops preview as expected in future Logic songs. I forgot to mention this in the video. What can I say, I play drums primarily.
3. Record a performance. In the video, I use the canonical four-bar drum loop, but it can be whatever you want.
4. Choose Region > Add To Apple Loops Library….
5. Choose the relevant metadata (name, type of loop, and so on), and click Create.

That’s it. After that, you’ll have a new loop filed under My Loops in your Apple Loop Browser. The video shows this procedure for the visual learners in the audience.

Further Notes

• After you’ve created a green Apple Loop, do not edit it in the Apple Loops Utility if you want it to stay a green loop. The Apple Loops Utility seems to strip out the MIDI data. You’ll have to recreate it from the source MIDI region.
• This procedure works great with stereo virtual instruments. If you’re using an instance of, say, the EXS24 in its multi-out configuration, you might have to put in some more work. Or maybe it just won’t work at all. I haven’t delved deep enough into this to sort those issues out, but I know that the first time I tried this, it was with a multi-out EXSP24, and no audio was in the loop file.
• If you want effects to be included in the channel strip with the audio instrument/MIDI version of the loop, only use inserts. Any send effects you use will not be included in the channel strip. The rendered audio will include your sends and inserted effects, which is nice, but can cause confusion with your users (yes, I’m looking at you, Apple).
• The drums in the video are the beautiful and talented ns_kit 7, the now discontinued free version. The full version is available from a different company who has recently taken it on.

Update 4/17/08: There’s another video tutorial that shows the same information (and more) in Logic 8. One thing that I missed here that is covered in that video is what happens when you share a green loop with someone who doesn’t have the plugin you used — in short, the loop loads with the plugin name crossed out. In the case of drum loops, there’s the simple fix of swapping in your favorite sampler or drums plugin, and off you go. For synths, it could be more complicated. Deepswing Productions, the maker of this other video, has many other Logic 8 video tutorials available as well.

First, a small matter related to using the marquee tool (the one that looks like a plus sign or cross). I was trying to make a copy of part of an audio region with the marquee tool, following something I saw in an Apple video for Logic 7. What I had read was that you can option-drag a selection to copy that section as a new region, but it wasn’t working. To make this work, you have to switch back to the Pointer tool before option-dragging. This is true for any operation on a selection — the marquee tool will only change the area of selection, not the contents thereof. This makes sense given the way other applications work, but it wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the video I watched, or in the manual.

Second, a bug (known issue, I suppose, more accurately) related to recording using the autopunch feature and cycle mode. Autopunch is Logic’s way of predefining where you want to do a “punch-in” or overdub, a section you want to re-record in a larger performance. The manual states that you can enabled autopunch and cycle mode at the same time to let Logic loop over, say, bars 4 through 10, but only record during bars 5 through 8. This is what that setup looks like in Logic’s time ruler:

To enable Autopunch, you can option-click the time ruler, click its button in the Transport. Either way, you’ll see the red region appear. If you only want to re-record a section of audio once, it works fine. The problem is this: it only works once. If you want to use cycle recording in combination with autopunch, you’re out of luck after the first pass. When the cycle ends, playback will continue from the start of the cycle region, but recording will be disabled. You just have to do it again manually. This is a known issue documented on Apple’s website, but I still filed feedback.

By the way, cycle recording with autopunch works fine for MIDI recording, it just doesn’t work for audio.

The workaround for this issue is just to use regular cycle recording, which does work as advertised. You’ll potentially end up with extra audio at the beginning and end of the region, which is a bummer, but if you need to redo a section over and over, it’s the way that will work.

I’ve also been checking out some of the tutorial videos at MacProVideo, trying to decide if I want to invest in them. The videos look really good, and would probably be inspiring, but then I look at the massive manual and think “I’d probably learn a lot just by reading this manual I already own”. We’ll see. If I do buy a set of videos, it will probably be the TNT series, which is on sale through a special link that includes an amusing “preview” of the as-yet-unannounced Logic 8.2.

I did all my recording in Logic Pro 8, which I acquired late in 2007. Having worked with it for a few months now, I really like the user interface changes and polish; they’ve done a nice job making it look hot and work well. I haven’t had any stability problems, either. Logic 8 feels a bit less snappy than 7 did, but I can’t be sure if that’s due to the version change, or the upgrade from Express to Pro and just having more features available. I can track with Pro 8 on my G5 iMac just fine, and the iBook G4, while slightly out of spec, is able to do it too. I’ll be tracking with the iBook in the coming weeks a little bit, so we’ll see how that goes.

I want to write a bit more about some things I learned or played with during RPM later, but for now I just want to note that this happened. If I’m feeling particularly brave or disrespectful of your ears, I might post a track or two. One thing I can say: at least I didn’t sing on anything.

Here are a couple more mentions of Logic GUI customization: on Logic Pro Help and Apple Discussions.

I’m largely pleased with what I’m seeing so far, having picked up a couple of small demo projects that I hadn’t finished yet in 7 and worked with them in 8. It is, however, very overwhelming coming from the older versions of Express. Every menu is a lot longer, there are a lot more plugins and instruments, nearly every plugin’s user interface has more buttons and knobs to sort out and learn. For now, I say thank goodness for presets.

The one thing that has stuck out to me and is driving me bananas: local menus can’t be scrubbed anymore. This was the case in version 6, was fixed in version 7, and is now back to the old behavior in 8. By not scrubbable, I mean that I can’t click one local menu and zip across to another one. I have to click the new menu, so an extra click is required. This isn’t how real menus work, and I’m submitting feedback to Apple about it.

I haven’t even touched MainStage or Soundtrack Pro yet. As I say, it’s overwhelming, almost like starting over from scratch. I also can’t wait to use Ultrabeat some more.

I would love to try this new version out, but alas, along with the many new features, they increased the system requirements beyond my iBook G4. I have an iMac G5 that would work, but I want to be able to share projects between the two machines, so until I decide to upgrade my laptop to a MacBook, I’ll hold on this.

Answer: In order to appear in the Arrange window, your environment object needs to have its Icon checkbox checked. You might think this checkbox just indicates that the object will have a cute icon, but it seems to mean that the object can be chosen in the Arrange window. And have a cute icon.

Two specific things I’ve learned so far that are immediately useful (and probably in the manual, which I’ve looked at several times, but never read fully):

1. You can time-stretch or compress any MIDI region in Logic 7 by option-dragging its right border. Without a modifier key, you just make the region longer without changing the content. Time-stretching means the content of the region will be stretched to fit the time you choose. Try it! (In Logic 8, this also works on audio regions.)

2. The Hyper Editor can be used to edit beat sequences in a fun way, but it takes a little bit of preparation. Choose your existing sequence in the Arrange window, which you’ve programmed in the Matrix Editor if you’re me, and open the Hyper Editor. In the Hyper menu, choose Clear Hyper Set. Then choose Multi Create Event Definition, and click All in the dialog that appears. At this point, you’ll have one line for each of your instruments in the beat sequence (kick, snare, hand clap, and so on), and you can edit them as you would in a conventional drum machine. This is slick for at least two reasons. One, it’s really easy to edit velocities of your notes in the Hyper Editor, especially if you want to do sweeps up and down in volume. Two, you can set independent grids for each of the instruments. You can program your bass drum on a quarter note grid and your snare on a sixteenth note grid, for a simple example.