Logic Pro 11 New Features - Mac and iPad Pro

[jejefunkyman]

I'm still on Ventura and I could update with no issue.

 

[J.F.N.]

Went with the 1 month demo on iPad and fiddled around with the players for an hour, always been a big fan of the Drummer in Garageband iPad, and I definitely think the Bass and Keyboard players can be useful once one gets the hang of how to use them in deep, cool stuff!!

[Paul Woodward]

Finally had a play. Definitely had fun with drummers, but bass and keyboards were all over the place. I need to lay down simpler chord based tracks for them to analyse. Chromaglow really brought the drum sounds out, but I found it easier to play bass and keyboards in myself. Old habits and all that...plus I like to think I have my own style so AI keys not really getting used beyond trying them out.

[Docbop]

45 minutes ago, Paul Woodward said:

I found it easier to play bass and keyboards in myself. Old habits and all that...plus I like to think I have my own style so AI keys not really getting used beyond trying them out.

 

As chip tech and AI advances I imagine the session player will be able to be feed your past work and they will learn to be you on bass and keyboards.  Then you would take a song your writing and AI session players will generate a Demo version, as a starting point to build from.   

[J.F.N.]

48 minutes ago, Paul Woodward said:

Finally had a play. Definitely had fun with drummers, but bass and keyboards were all over the place. I need to lay down simpler chord based tracks for them to analyse. Chromaglow really brought the drum sounds out, but I found it easier to play bass and keyboards in myself. Old habits and all that...plus I like to think I have my own style so AI keys not really getting used beyond trying them out.

 

It takes some time to get on hands with them, and making them play well together is my challenge for the next time I'm sitting with it, didn't go so well now the first time but it's an interesting challenge!

[J.F.N.]

1 minute ago, Docbop said:

 

As chip tech and AI advances I imagine the session player will be able to be feed your past work and they will learn to be you on bass and keyboards.  Then you would take a song your writing and AI session players will generate a Demo version, as a starting point to build from.   

 

The moment of truth (for ourselves...) hahaha 😂 

[Stokely]

I went ahead and jumped to LPX 11, as this is a new machine and I can always fall back to my old one if there are any crushing bugs.

I am getting a few weird issues with track stacks (summing)---a track in the stack isn't affected by volume or muting of that stack....wtf?   I made certain sure it was in the stack, not only visually but you can see the destination for it.  I moved the problem track out, then back into the stack, didn't fix it.  Feels like a bug for sure.   I also had weird problems where processing on the summing stack (a compressor) wasn't actually affecting tracks in the stack--I was getting no input regardless of threshold.  Same compressor on any of the tracks in the stack, or on the stereo bus, worked normally.

I suspect that stack was somehow "corrupted" or otherwise fubar.   I'll test by making a brand new stack and adding the same tracks to it.

[Paul Woodward]

How are you finding the new studio sounds? The bass sounds very realistic, and I am quite impressed with the new Studio Piano.

[BenWaB3]

51 minutes ago, Paul Woodward said:

How are you finding the new studio sounds? The bass sounds very realistic, and I am quite impressed with the new Studio Piano.

 I know this question wasn't directed to me, and I'm just in the complete beginner stages of learning this software, but I was pleasantly surprised at its Hammond emulation. A lot of the features on dedicated Hammond apps can be found here. Just at a quick listen the sound was pretty good too, probably not as good as our favorites though. I haven't had time to explore the session players but am disappointed they don't have Jazz or Latin Jazz players, unless they're hidden in there somewhere and I'm just too dumb to find them. It seems more geared to people who want to produce beats and I'm just too old to be a beats guy.

[Paul Woodward]

I’m certainly not a beats guy, but I found the session players to be more trad/rock, I just need to get my head around how to input reference data. With the drummers I can choose one of my ‘played’ tracks such as piano for reference. Tried the same with the keys and bass players and it all sounded terrible. Pretty sure I’m doing it wrong, but I won’t be using the keys players beyond a little dabble to see what it can do. Now, bass I would like to get right.

[Dockeys]

There doesn't seem to be any jazz related drum content in the session player. I could do with that occasionally. 

[J.F.N.]

44 minutes ago, Dockeys said:

There doesn't seem to be any jazz related drum content in the session player. I could do with that occasionally. 

 

Hmm, didn't check that, but for sure in Garageband (iOS) the drummer there always had some jazzy options, will have a look at LP 11 on my iPad this evening.

[UnderGroundGr]

I like the bass plugin very much. I do not use the virtual bassist, i play the lines alone. It is something like IK multimedia's modo bass, very nice!

[Tusker]

Yes bass player sounds good. I won't be using the keyboard player much as I have my own flawed ideas about what to play. I agree that the drummer styles appear to have concentrated around a few idioms, but since those idioms are sounding more authentic, maybe that's a good thing?

 

As the technology develops, it would be good to see some cellular improvisation in addition to pattern composition. In the (current) pattern based approach, one instructs drummer (or bass player or keyboard player) using a pattern and of course you can switch patterns. It's directive. The goal is to arrive at a nice piece of music.

 

In a cellular approach, some kind of cell, or motif or riff is given to the electronic player and we begin to improvise. It's co-evolving. The goal is to have a nice jam.

 

 

[Stokely]

Edit:  turns out my summing stack issues were related to one project that I got from my collaborator....new projects are fine. 

Other than the low latency thing...I simply can't record anything without switching to it, which turns off effects and maybe some other things.  Even at 64 samples there's a very noticeable (even audible) lag.  Not real happy about this considering I never had this issue with my much older Intel MBP.  In all other regards, this M1 runs circles around it.

[Paul Woodward]

My plan was to make a track using all of the new AI features, but the bass and keyboards were all over the place so I played them in myself. Drummer did very well, as did the Chromaglow on the drums and the mastering mix.

Might try something a little ‘simpler’ in terms of chords played in to see what they can do later. Early days for the AI and it’s free so nothing lost by playing around with it.

[jejefunkyman]

There are a lot of possibilities to tweak the playing style by using the complexity and intensity faders, as well as the dead notes and the notes used in the scale. Also the number of fills and fills complexity. Lastly, if you’re not still fully happy, you can then just convert the session player region to a MIDI region and delete or add some notes as you see fit. 

[Docbop]

5 hours ago, jejefunkyman said:

There are a lot of possibilities to tweak the playing style by using the complexity and intensity faders, as well as the dead notes and the notes used in the scale. Also the number of fills and fills complexity. Lastly, if you’re not still fully happy, you can then just convert the session player region to a MIDI region and delete or add some notes as you see fit. 

 

I've checked out a couple videos of people who've spend some time learning to tweak the session musicians and they get so nice parts to create usable demo or the starting point of building up a tune.   I like that it can be converted to MIDI to massage the part into what you want.  I think will be a really valuable tool for songwriters who need a real basic version of a song they wrote to send out and pitch to an artist. 

[Stokely]

So...how many others are having issues with latency?   As I mentioned, I didn't have any if I set the samples low enough on my 2016 laptop.   With this newer M1 laptop, it doesn't matter how low I set them, I'll have enough to make playing unbearable.

I'm seeing a fair number of posts on reddit suggesting this is a thing.

I suspect there could be other settings in play, or at least I hope there are.   Changing to low latency every time I record a track sucks, the obvious impact is that it disables various plugins/auxes.   Even if that weren't the case, it's super annoying.

I've always used my interface through a hub, I'm going to experiment using it directly from a port.  Rule that out if nothing else.

My buddy also has an M1 laptop and says its fine for him, but he's not a keys player and he's coming from an extremely ancient laptop, so it may be that his idea of "latency" differs from mine    I'll go through his settings and compare later when we get together.

[Docbop]

Dot-zero software does tend to be buggy, but especially Apple Dot-Zero releases.   I'm reading way more tech complains about 11 than people saying they like it.    

[analogika]

That’s because people who have issues tend to disproportionately post on tech sites. 

[HammondDave]

18 hours ago, Stokely said:

So...how many others are having issues with latency?   As I mentioned, I didn't have any if I set the samples low enough on my 2016 laptop.   With this newer M1 laptop, it doesn't matter how low I set them, I'll have enough to make playing unbearable.

I'm seeing a fair number of posts on reddit suggesting this is a thing.

I suspect there could be other settings in play, or at least I hope there are.   Changing to low latency every time I record a track sucks, the obvious impact is that it disables various plugins/auxes.   Even if that weren't the case, it's super annoying.

I've always used my interface through a hub, I'm going to experiment using it directly from a port.  Rule that out if nothing else.

My buddy also has an M1 laptop and says its fine for him, but he's not a keys player and he's coming from an extremely ancient laptop, so it may be that his idea of "latency" differs from mine    I'll go through his settings and compare later when we get together.

Get used to it. With technology and AI moving at lightning speed, we are going to have to upgrade our machines with new processors much faster than before. M1’s are nearing obsolescence.  

[Stokely]

Well, in all other aspects the thing is blazing fast, and has no issues running a few newer libraries that my 2016 machine has cpu issues with (namely, Lores and Fables which I picked up in a Native Instruments sale last year.)

And, in an odd turn, now the latency is gone, in both an existing large project sent to me by a friend and a very small new one.   In both cases, samples were set to 64 (giving a reported latency of less than 4ms iirc) and low latency mode was off.   The day before, same thing but the lag was quite noticeable with any instrument plugin and required low latency mode to be turned on.   I didn't restart the machine though Logic was opened back up....not sure what kicked it into joint but not complaining!

 

I did make sure the Mastering Assistant was not only turned off but "removed" (it turns gray and remains but is not really on the stereo bus) after reading some posts that this was causing latency.  I'm positive I did this before, but perhaps I didn't restart Logic after trying that (?)   Not sure.

Long story short, things are running swell now even though I'm not sure what happened to make it so