Logic Pro: Session Players

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.

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