Of Logic and Ninjas

My very first post of this blog was about Logic 8. In summary, I started using Logic 4, moved up to Logic 5, Apple bought the company that originally made Logic, Emagic, Logic 6 was Mac-only and I didn't have a Mac at that time, then I got a G4 12" Powerbook when Logic 7 came out. I bought two ~$25 books put out by Apple's training series on how to use Logic 7, and I got pretty fucking good at it. At that point, Logic 7's interface was pretty much the same as Logic 4 and 5's interface.

Then came Logic 8. This is the point at which Apple decided to give the interface the Apple touch. Don't get me wrong, Emagic's Logic was always, always notorious for its "steep learning curve" due to its interface. Some people just "got it," some people never did. I was one of the people that "got" the old Logic interface. I had tried Cubase and Digital Performer, including 4 separate semester-long college courses on the latter, and neither clicked with me the way that Logic did. However, I must concede, Apple's new direction with the Logic interface is probably for the best. The problem is, I have 6 years of Logic and its key commands stuck in my head.

So I have two books, really good books, that I spent about $50 on that are now, for all intents and purposes, completely outdated, and I don't really feel like spending the money on the new Logic 8 books from the same series.

Well just last week, I was fucking around in Logic 8 and found that I couldn't step sequence the way I used to be able to in Logic's Matrix editor. Step sequencing is the most simple, most retarded way of programming a sequence in the world, so it was really fucking frustrating.

Fortunately, I found a series of YouTube videos by a guy calling himself SFLogicNinja that are actually really, really good. SFLogicNinja is apparently a guy named Dave who teaches Logic for some weirdo "music academy" called Pyramind. Whatever. His videos have been great. They're really good for showing the bare bones basics of what Logic 8 can do, which is great for me because I've pretty much found myself re-learning everything I used to know how to do. He teaches the new key commands as they come up in his videos, which helps, plus he goes over some of the old Logic stuff that many found so esoteric, like the infamous Environment, the Transformer Window and Logic's weird ass Touch Tracks. (On the subject of Logic's Environment, I only wish they would go whole hog and incorporate Miller Puckette's Pure Data into it somehow - that would be awesome.)

Browse all of his videos.

It didn't take me long to find the help that I needed with my step sequencing problem - namely that in old Logic, each different editor window "reinvented the wheel," meaning that a lot of the major parameters were on each new window. I needed to change the step sequence resolution from 1/16th notes to 1/32nd notes, something which used to be accessible from the left hand side of the matrix editor.

Apple is going for a more all-encompassing approach with their new UI, so they had stuck my precious note resolution on the bottom - in the transport bar (where you hit start and stop). It seemed fucked up at first, but then I realized, Apple's way has it so that I have the arrange window still in the top half of the screen, the Matrix editor on the bottom half of the screen *when I want it* and the transport bar always, always, always along the very bottom of the screen - therefore the note resolution parameter is always, always, always handy. (Side note: having the transport bar at the bottom is funny because that is Apple's default location for the Dock, but I had already gotten use to moving the Dock to the left hand side of the screen in Logic 7 so that it didn't get in my fucking way...) So in the end, I can kind of see the new way as better, but it all takes getting used to. Fortunately the SFLogicNinja videos are there to get me reacquainted with the new shit.