The Drummer Session Player has had a major overhaul, including a streamlined Session Player window and a number of new drum sounds.
Logic’s virtual drummer now has a full band to play with! We find out what it can do...
Logic 11 introduced a few major new features, including Stem Splitter (Apple Silicon only) and an enhanced Session Player section. Most Logic users will be familiar with the Drummer Session Player track, which offers a range of styles, sounds and user input options enabling it to create drum parts that fit most kinds of contemporary music, from hip‑hop to ballads. In Logic 11, Drummer has been improved with new sounds (the updated SoCal kit sounds great) and seemingly better constructed patterns, but the really big news is that it has been joined by Bass and Keyboard Session Players, all of which share the same style of user interface.
Session Drummer
Drummer now has a different look, with all the available acoustic kits now listed in the Browser — and all those cheesy names for the different drummers have gone. If you go to create a new Drummer track as before, you’ll now see that the Session Player menu shows the new Keyboard and Bass options.
Once you’ve created a Drummer track, you’ll see a default drum pattern created as a region, and the Session Player panel opens automatically. If you close it, you can open it again by double‑clicking in the region. As before, Drummer regions (and now also Keyboard or Bass regions) can be copied and stretched, and new ones can be added using the plus symbol at the end of the region. Click on the style shown above the circular graphic of a drum kit (the default is Pop Rock) and you’ll see a menu listing types of drum kit at the top, which can be Acoustic, Electronic or Percussion. Below this is a list of styles: for acoustic kits, these are Rock, Songwriter, Alternative or R&B, with a few variations listed below each heading. Once you’ve picked your style, the Preset window in the upper left of the Session Player window provides a choice of rhythmic variations on that style. The trick is to pick the style that comes closest to what you need, then use the controls in the Session Player window to reshape it to your track — for example, by making the part less busy or simplifying the fills. The controls for Complexity and Intensity are now simple sliders, and there are icons to switch on or off the various kit elements and to choose separately from rhythmic variations for the kick/snare and the rest of the kit. Fill amount and Complexity are adjusted with knobs as before, as is the degree of swing added to the beat.
Click on Details and the main panel is replaced by controls accessing deeper options such as the type of snare hit, the strength of ghost notes, the method by which the different tom hits are chosen, whether or not you want to use added percussion (shakers, claps, tambourine), set double‑ or half‑time tempo, set playing dynamics, Humanize, and adjust Feel, the latter enabling you to pull or push the beat. A third tab named Manual lets you input your own rhythms for the kick and snare using a drum‑machine‑style grid. That’s a lot of scope for getting the right groove for your song, but if you still feel that tweaks are necessary, you can convert the track to MIDI by right‑clicking on the Drummer region and selecting the Convert to MIDI Region option. This feature is also available for the Bass Player and Keyboard Player tracks. I often convert my drum parts to MIDI so I can fine‑tune the drum fills or remove unnecessary hits.
If you change to an electronic kit or to percussion, the main view is similar except that it breaks the kit into three sections rather than two, and the Details section has separate complexity sliders for the various kit elements. A further slider adds phrase variations. Drum Machine Designer is where you’ll find all the electronic kit sounds. The Manual page works here as before, but now you get three grids for setting your own rhythms for the kick, snare and claps.
Home On The Arrange
Before I move on to the Bass and Keyboard Session Players, it is worth mentioning Logic’s Arrangement track, which you’ll find under the Global Tracks section. This allows the user to mark out sections of a song, and by default creates Intro, Verse, Chorus, Bridge and End sections, though you can also create your own custom‑named sections. These markers are not just there for navigation: when you create Session Player tracks, the parts adapt according to the section of the song mapped out in the Arrangement track, so the pattern will be slightly different for the verse and chorus, for example. This can be turned off if you don’t want Logic making those decisions for you, but the automatic choices often provide a good starting point from which to work.
If you want your Session Players to follow what’s going on in your song, you’ll want to use the Arrangement and Chord tracks (highlighted here in the red rectangle box at the top), to tell them what section of the song you’re in and what notes to play.
The Chord Track
The newly added Bass and Keyboard Session Players both benefit from new and improved additions to the instrument library (specifically Session Piano and Session Bass), and both work by following the chords in your project. There are a few standard chord progressions that can be loaded into the Chord tracks (which are again part of the Global Tracks), but in the main, you’ll probably want to enter your own chords directly at the cursor position using the Add Chord (plus symbol) button or by right‑clicking. These actions bring up a chord selector window where you can enter the root note and the type of chord. Chords in the Chord track can be handled much like conventional regions as regards moving, cutting, length changes, copying and pasting, and you can group a number of chords together so that they can be copied as a single block. Chords from a Chord track can also be embedded in regions by Control‑clicking on the Session Player region header and then selecting the Chords sub‑menu, which includes the options to paste chords to or from the global track. Where Follow Region Chords is selected, those regions will play from their embedded chords rather than from the master Chord track, and when the region is copied, its chords go with it.
The new Keyboard Session Player in action.
A chord can also be entered from your MIDI keyboard by clicking the MIDI Input box in the Chord dialogue box, but this still only allows one chord to be entered at a time. You can’t input a performance and then have the chords extracted automatically — which brings us to the biggest user gripe concerning the new Session features, which s that there’s no automatic way to extract chords from a live input or MIDI track that you’ve already played in. Given the number of comments on this subject, I suspect Apple will add an automatic extraction feature at some point, but in the meantime there is a workaround, albeit a rather clunky one...
If you go to the track inspector and set Internal MIDI In to the track you’d like to follow, the name of the chord will show up in the Bar and Beats display as the track plays. You can either make a note of these and then enter them manually, or select MIDI Input in the Chord selector window and then press Play — but you need to press Stop again before the chord changes. The last chord that plays is the one captured, so you could be in for a lot of starting and stopping when working this way, but it does get the job done. If you you need to grab a very short chord, you can set a loop to keep going over it so the song doesn’t get to the next chord before you can press Stop.
It is worth noting that Apple Loops accompanied by a small music symbol contain chord data that gets loaded into the Chord track automatically when the loop is dragged into the song. Furthermore, if you create a region using Keyboard Player (or Bass Player) with your own chord sequence embedded, you can drag it into the Apple Loops library for reuse at some future time. When you come to reuse it, you can change the Keyboard Player settings so all that’s really important is the chord sequence, not what the Keyboard or Bass Session Player is doing.
Session Player can be set to follow the Chord track or chords embedded in the region (from the Chord menu at the top left of the Session Window), and it is possible to edit chords that have been copied into the region from within the Session Player window. Double‑click on the chord shown alongside the region pattern and the Chord Edit window opens up, enabling you to select a new chord. If the song plays past the point where chords have been created, either for the Chord track or in a region, the Session Player instrument will keep playing around the last chord indefinitely.
Consistency
Looking at the new Session Players reveals that they have much in common with Drummer when it comes to how the GUI is set out. The Keyboard Session Player offers a choice of five basic playing styles, Freely being the one that sounds most like a good accompanist and the others providing various ways of dealing with chords (Broken, Block, Arpeggiated or Pad). The default instrument is the new Studio Piano (other than for Pad, where you get a patch from our old friend RetroSyn), but you can switch to any instrument of your choice if you prefer. There’s a lovely new vintage upright piano amongst the four piano types found in Studio Piano, along with three new grand piano options.
The Session Player controls are largely consistent across all three instruments.
Each style has a number of preset variations, and for the Keyboard Session Player, you can switch off the left‑ or right‑hand parts, adjust the complexity and intensity, and designate a rhythm track for the part to be guided by — this would usually be the Drummer track, if used. This can be switched on in the panel where you usually select alternative playing patterns for both the Keyboard and Bass, near the top centre of the main Session Player view. The default is Follow Chord Rhythm, but you can always click the Manual tab for any of the Session Players if you need to create your own patterns using the drum‑machine‑type grids.
With the Keyboard Session Player, you can select the type of right‑hand chord voicing and select the amount of movement in the performance. The Fill Amount, Fill Complexity and Swing controls are the same as for Drummer, the first two dealing with how the player fills in between chords. Details deals with grace notes, Feel, Dynamics and Humanize, again much as with Drummer. The tempo can also be halved, doubled, or set to Auto in any of the Session Player windows.
Bass In The Place
Bass Session Player adopts a very similar paradigm, with basic style types comprising Rock, Songwriter, Alternative or R&B, with a number of sub‑styles and preset variations available. There’s a wide choice of bass sounds, with the new Studio Bass instrument offering a choice of basses along with finger, pick or slap playing styles. Studio Bass’s Detail section lets you control string noise, hiss and hum, string release noise and whether or not to use open strings. These options are somewhat reminiscent of IK Multimedia’s excellent MODO Bass, though I couldn’t find a fretless option in Logic’s Studio Bass repertoire. Articulations are normally chosen automatically by the Bass Session Player, but there’s a huge list to choose from (harmonics, damped notes, slides and so on) if you want to control this yourself.
How well do all these parts fit together? Usually they work well, but if you pick a drum rhythm that has some unusual timing variations in it, you might find that that Bass, Keyboard and maybe other MIDI tracks don’t lock in as tightly as they should. The fix for this is Logic’s Groove Track feature. Make sure that Groove Track is checked where you configure track headers, then tick on the track number of the part that you want the other to follow. A star appears to the right in the newly created Groove view, with tick boxes for the remaining MIDI tracks. Tick the boxes and those parts will lock in to the drum track. The Session Player instruments also have the option to follow the rhythm of another MIDI track, which can often improve the feel of the end result.
The way the Bass Session Player incorporates articulations such as slides and damped notes when using the new Studio Bass instrument is very convincing.
Impressions
The Drummer Session Player sounds have definitely been improved, with better kits and the newly introduced Studio Pianos and Bass, while the new‑look Session Player window is consistent across the Drummer, Bass and Keyboard. The way the Bass Session Player incorporates articulations such as slides and damped notes when using the new Studio Bass instrument is very convincing. While you won’t get virtuoso performances or killer riffs out of the Session Players, you can expect some very capable backing parts, which is what they were designed for, and with just a little adjustment, you can make them fit most styles. The only areas that seem underserved are the slower chillout and perhaps world music genres, which would make useful additions to the electronic drum and percussion repertoires in future, though you can still conjure up your own chilled beats by using the half‑tempo function and/or some creative control tweaking.
I still like to convert the final versions to MIDI just so that I can fix any minor issues that don’t agree with my vision of how the part should go, as just occasionally some odd note choices or timings sneak in that I might want to fix, but in the main the results are musically solid. I’m sure that users’ comments regarding the need to be able to extract chords from an existing MIDI part or live input have already been noted by Apple so I’ll be very surprised if we don’t see an eventual update that makes that possible. And remember that Logic Pro 11 is a free update, so for the time being, let’s make the best use of the features we’ve been given rather than complaining about those we haven’t!