Logic has always been an excellent MIDI-programming and editing package, offering several different editors which allow you to create and modify MIDI data. Each offers a view of the data in a different form and some editors offer particular advantages in certain circumstances. Quite often it's useful to work with a combination of editors simultaneously, perhaps using the Piano Roll (formerly known as the Matrix Editor) as a general-purpose MIDI editor, with the Event List for fine-tuning note lengths and the like. But by far the most specialised (and most often ignored) editor in Logic's arsenal is the Hyper Editor.

Basically, it is a display that can show all sorts of MIDI data in separate lanes, called Event Definitions, allowing you to see, create and edit different types of data in one window. It follows the timeline in the same way as the Arrange page does, and displays MIDI events as vertical beams, where the height of the beam represents the value of the event. The special benefit of the Hyper Editor is that each lane can have its own timing or quantisation grid, and this grid can be changed at any time to allow for different quantisation to be applied to new events without affecting the data that is already there.

To make life easier, the lanes can be organised into so-called Hyper Sets, and you can quickly create your own, to display the information the way you'd like. By default, there are two Hyper Sets pre-defined: MIDI Controls (to display parameters such as MIDI CC, Pitch Bend and Aftertouch) and GM Drum Kit, where each lane is mapped to a particular MIDI note, according to the GM standard drum map.

To open a new Hyper Editor, you simply navigate to the Window menu and select Hyper Editor from the list of options. The default keyboard shortcut is Apple+5.

One of the most useful applications of the Hyper Editor is programming drums. But why not use Ultrabeat and its built-in step sequencer? Well, Ultrabeat's step resolution is a global setting,...