Logic Pro for iPad 2 has landed. In this video I'm going to give you an overview of how all the exciting new features that Apple have jammed into this massive update work. Logic Pro for iPad 2 introduces two new AI powered session players and revamps the pre-existing drama.
You access these new session players the same way you add any new track, but where before there was just the option to load up a drummer track here, you can now tap on this menu and select from the three session players available. I have a really simple MIDI instrument progression already loaded up here. When I add a new session player track, in this case the bass player, it will create a new region with a bass pattern ready to go.
This works the same way when you add a keyboard player as well. The chord track has also been added automatically. More on that a wee bit later on.
The editors area is where you can dive in and tweak pretty much every aspect of the session player's performance. As it stands right now, the Bass Session Player offers 8 different bass options that play over 4 genres. There are five different playing styles for the keyboard player.
20 different acoustic drummers, 10 electronic drummers, and three percussionists. All of these have their own preset banks by the way, if you just want to jump in, slap different presets on and hear how they sound. Now this editor's area looks quite similar across all three session players. They all have complexity and intensity sliders and fill controls. but each also has their own specific controls available too.
For example in the bass player you can adjust whether the pattern's melody sticks to root notes, whether it has more variation, or you can have it sit somewhere in between. You can adjust how many octaves a player will play over, plus adjust the phrasing of the notes they play. In the Patterns menu, you can select from five different patterns for the bass player to stick to. Or by jumping over to the Manual tab up here, you can input your own pattern and have them play that. In the details tab you can add things like pickup hits, dynamic BAM muting and use the humanized control to make the performance sound a bit more natural and less robotic.
This level of fine control is present in the keyboard and drummer session players too. The keyboard player allows you to adjust the movement, voicing and playing style of each hand, In the details tab you can adjust how often the keyboard player will add in grace notes. The three different drummer options give you control over the pattern played by every section of the kit, with the acoustic drummer having options to adjust how certain bits of the kit sounds and whether to add ghost notes, and the electronic and percussion drummers give users control over the complexity range of different rhythm elements. Just like drummer regions previously, you can convert bass and keyboard session player regions to MIDI, or pattern regions, meaning these are ideal to use as a starting point that you can then finalise yourself.
Plus you can use any of Logic's instrument patches or any third-party instrument apps with them too. Having said that, you might not want to as Logic Pro for iPad 2 adds two new excellent Studio Instrument plugins. Apple's instrument sounds are genuinely top notch and these new studio instruments are no exception. Offering really cleanly sampled bass and piano sounds, you can dive into these instruments controls and fine tune them to your liking. The session bass and session keyboard tracks default to these instruments when you load them up, but you can use these standalone too, either by playing them with Logic's play surfaces or with an attached controller.
The Studio Piano offers four different piano sounds and it keeps things fairly straightforward control wise. There's volume controls for different microphones and the ability to increase or decrease pedal and key noise, as well as release and sympathetic resonance controls. The Bass Studio instrument has six different bass profiles to choose from, each with its own individual set of controls. In the Rock Bass for example, you can change the fingerstyle from finger to pick.
and adjust things like string noise and hum. Whereas in the excellent American upright bass instrument You can increase or decrease rattles and handling noise and adjust grill volume and attack. More instruments are always a good thing, especially when they sound this good. In a nutshell, the chord track allows you to add and edit a chord progression in a project and then have session players follow along with it.
While the drummer only has to follow the tempo of your project, the bass and keyboard players need to know what notes to play, what key to play them in and when chord, note and key changes occur. Now a chord track will be added automatically when you load up a session player but in my experience that rarely sounded that good out of the box. Jumping in and editing these chords manually will provide better results. In this project for example there is no chord track present but I want to add a session keyboard track. To add the chord track I need to open the global tracks by tapping here then selecting chords from the menu.
When I tap the plus icon here a chord will be added and I can resize and move the chord around just like a region. If I check the chord progression of this MIDI track in the editor the root note goes C then E then F. The first chord I've made is already set to C and then if I copy it twice I can move these other chords into place.
To change the chords I just need to tap on them then select edit chord from the menu. I can then change the root note and then do the same for the third chord. Now when I add my keyboard player they'll play along with the notes I've set out in the chord track. Really straightforward once you get your head around it and really quite powerful too, particularly if you want to make full use of those new session players.
Apple has brought some of Logic Pro's existing algorithmic and AI-powered features like Mastering Assistant, Pitch Correction and Smart Tempo together and rebranded them as Studio Assistants. Two of Logic Pro for iPad's new features are also classed as Studio Assistants, Stem Splitter and Chroma Glow. Right, this is in my opinion hands down the best new feature in Logic Pro for iPad. It's just brilliant. It's also really simple to use.
Just bring in an audio file, tap on its region, select Stem Splitter from the menu, then select what parts you want to separate out from vocals, drums, Bass and Other. Then hit Split. In a couple of seconds Logic will split up your track into the track types you selected.
Your original files region will be muted automatically though. Note you can undo this by tapping on it, selecting Edit from the menu and toggling Mute On or Off if you want to A-B test the results. Uh, your energy, I feel the warmth in And it works really well.
In the Stemsplitter lesson, Apple have provided a very cleanly recorded file to demo the feature with and it unsurprisingly does a great job separating it out into clearly defined parts. I'm right in the middle of putting a video together where I challenge Stemsplitter with tracks of varying genres and quality. Like this for example.
This is a quick voice memo I recorded on my iPhone 13. It's just me and an acoustic guitar. If I bring it into Logic and then run Stem Splitter on it, I end up with this. Da which is actually really quite impressive.
And then you can do stuff like add drum and bass tracks using the session players and suddenly I've got a cool wee demo song going on. It's obviously targeting certain frequency ranges and separating tracks out based on that, but I think why Stemsplitter works so much better than other similar options is due to whatever AI slash machine learning stuff is going on under the hood. Said I'll love you forever, or until they pave this over Whatever, it works really well and I've spent hours chopping up loads of different songs, pulling out drum beats and adding new instruments to solo vocals.
It's ridiculously good fun, and if you're into remixes, crate digging and beat making, it'll prove to be a really powerful tool for you. Right, so Apple say that ChromaGlow is an advanced plugin designed to recreate the sound and texture of tubes, tape and other coveted analog hardware, leveraging AI and the performance of M-series Apple Silicon. It is, in essence, a saturation plugin, albeit a very, very good one. Just like the excellent ChromaVerb before it, ChromaGlow is designed to be an all-in-one solution, this time for adding saturation to your tracks. If you dive into its presets, and there are a lot of presets, it's clear that it's designed to be used on a wide variety of different track types.
From vocals... Turn the same old into new You need a change A different view Turn the same old into new Change Turn To drums, there are even master buss presets here as well. Chromaglow has five different saturation models built in. Retro Tube, Modern Tube, Magnetic, Squeeze and Analog Preamp.
And they all have their own unique flavour. You know, this might just be the new feature in this update that you end up using the most. As just like ChromaVerb makes a lot of third-party reverb apps kind of pointless, this does the same for third-party saturation apps. I mentioned in my previous video that some of the icons in Logic's UI had changed in this new update and wondered whether it meant that any new functionality had been added. It doesn't.
These new buttons do exactly the same things as the old buttons. Logic Pro's built-in lessons are a great way to get to grips with the app and some new ones have been added in this version 2 update. They take you through all of these new features and serve as a good intro to how all of these shiny new toys work. Logic Pro for iPad launched with Take a Day Trip's Manzana project and it served as a great way to dive into the app and see what exactly it was capable of. Apple have added another artist song, this time from UK musician Ellie Dixon.
Swing is a big old project and worth taking a closer look at to see how something like this is put together. It also has an active global chord track if you want to see how that works in a larger project too. I'll be taking a closer look at all of these features in more detail in the coming days. and weeks so make sure you're subscribed to the channel so you don't miss that.
And did you know that you've probably been already using an AI-powered feature in Logic Pro for iPad without even knowing it?