Read our exclusive Logic 9 review by Pete Morris - Apple Certified Trainer (Logic Levels 1 and 2), and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Surrey University - scroll to the bottom of this page.

Apple Logic Studio 9

A studio as big as your ambitions! With over 200 new features and enhancements, the new Logic Studio delivers everything musicians need to write, record, produce, and perform on a Mac.

Click here for Logic Studio Education pricing

The center of Logic Studio is Logic Pro 9, which makes it easier than ever to create your own compositions.

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A studio on your Mac as big as your ambitions.

Produce and play nearly any sound imaginable with a huge collection of effects, instruments, and loops, including the new Amp Designer and Pedalboard plug-ins.

Use MainStage 2 to perform live with the instruments, amps, effects, and sounds you used to make your tracks.

Logic Studio also comes with applications and utilities that expand your creative options into audio post-production and mastering, including Soundtrack Pro 3, WaveBurner 1.6, and more.
 
Features

• Everything musicians need to write, record, produce, and perform on a Mac
• Logic Pro 9 for do-it-yourself musicians to write, edit, record, and mix their own compositions
• More than 80 studio-quality effect plug-ins, including vintage and modern compressors, delays, reverbs, and more
• New Amp Designer to help you re-create the sound of 25 legendary amps and 25 speaker cabinets
• New Pedalboard with an assortment of 30 virtual stompbox pedals inspired by the classics
• 20,000 royalty-free Apple Loops from all the Jam Pack collections
• MainStage 2 for performing live with the instruments, amps, effects, and sounds from Logic Pro 9
• Soundtrack Pro 3, a streamlined audio post-production application for film and video

New Logic 9 Features

Flex Time Tool

The new Flex Tool lets you push audio around with your mouse by clicking and dragging anywhere on the waveform - forget all that tedious splicing and editing.

Audio Quantize

It’s not just for MIDI anymore. Now you can conform the timing of an audio region to a musical grid, or to the feel of another track, instantly correcting a performance.

Editing drum tracks

Use Slicing Mode with drums and you won’t compromise a single attack. Edit across a set of grouped multitrack drums and everything stays locked perfectly in phase.

Varispeed

Slow down or speed up an entire multitrack project effortlessly, whether you want to try out different tempos or take it slow while you play a difficult solo.

Flex Modes

Whether you’re editing a solo vocal, a rhythm guitar, or multitrack drums, Flex Time has a mode designed to give you the best results.

Speed Fades

Get creative by adding turntable-style starts or stops with the kind of precision that would impress even the best DJs.

Tempo Import/Export

Now the audio you import can automatically conform to the tempo of a project you’re working on. (And the other way around.)

Selective Track Import

To transfer setups and track content between projects, simply select the individual components you want to import on a track-by-track basis.

Expanded take folder editing

Logic Pro 9 gives you access to your important edit tools and Flex Time features - right alongside Quick Swipe comping.

Drum Replacer

Now you can replace or double less-than-perfect drum tracks with triggered samples in just a few clicks. No more headaches. No more hassles.

Convert to Sampler Track

In one step, turn an audio region into a sampler instrument with a MIDI track to trigger it. Then you can modify and resequence the part.

Bounce-in-Place

The new Bounce-in-Place feature makes effects rendering much quicker and easier, whether you’re bouncing a single region or an entire track.

Notation and chord grids

Create guitar tablature or detailed scores using a library of more than 4000 chord grids (or your own custom grids) and new ornaments for hammer-ons, bends, and more.

Jam Pack: Voices

Build your song with a lead vocal, rappers, backup singers, an entire choir, or even software instruments based on the human voice and body.

Warped Effects for Space Designer

More than 450 warped impulse responses radically transform what Space Designer can do, allowing you to give ordinary sounds a bizarre, other-worldly quality.

Amp Designer

Build your dream rig by mixing and matching 25 amps, 25 speaker cabinets, and 3 mics you can position freely around the speaker cone.

Pedalboard

Fire up 30 stompboxes that deliver lush effects like Overdrive, Distortion, Fuzz, Delay, Chorus, Flanger, Phaser, Tremolo, Treble Boost, and Wah.

Classic tones

Hundreds of presets give you Amp Designer and Pedalboard sounds that are ready to go. Start exploring with classic tones, genres, or characteristics like clean, crunch, and distorted.

Apogee GiO support

This new USB audio interface and control device lets you operate Pedalboard hands-free and works with Logic Pro 9 and MainStage 2 right out of the box.
Playback

With this new plug-in, your Mac becomes a flexible, reliable backing track player. Fill out your sound with a simple stereo track or a set of separate, mixable stems.

Loopback

This live loop recorder lets you create spontaneous arrangements onstage. And it’s instantly familiar, since it’s modeled after the tape-based devices you know and love.

Multimapping of controls

Set things up so that one knob controls multiple plug-in parameters. Then you can dramatically change your sound with the turn of a single knob.

Grouped controls

Drag and drop entire sets of knobs, dials, faders, meters, and more into your layout. From there, you can easily customize the type, size, and color.

Full ReWire support

Run MainStage with applications like Reason and Live. Trigger and sequence your instruments from MainStage, and route your signals straight into the mixer.

Record performances

Route your audio to a designated stereo output and choose from all the standard file formats, including Apple CAF for concerts of almost any length.

Please note that Logic Studio 9 is made to run on Apple Mac computers, it will not work on PCs.

Apple Logic Studio 9 Review - written by Peter Morris
Apple Certified Trainer (Logic Levels 1 and 2)

It’s been nearly 2 years since Apple’s Logic Studio was announced.  Many of you will know that Logic Studio is the bundle name for the set of audio products Logic Pro, MainStage, Soundtrack Pro and WaveBurner.  On July 23rd 2009, Apple announced Logic Studio 2, which upgraded Logic Pro to version 9, Soundtrack Pro to version 3 and MainStage to Version 2.  This note will look primarily at Logic Pro 9 and what it offers to its different users.

The fundamental purpose of Logic has not changed.  Like all Digital Audio Workstations, it’s four tools in one: composing, recording, editing and mixing.  This upgrade doesn’t do much for the composers (and by that I also include those who score to film).  However, for those using it for recording and editing, there are some great new tools.  As with the last release, you get huge libraries of loops, royalty free music and sound effects but, in Logic Studio 2, you also get the Voices Jam Pack, which you previously had to buy separately at £68.

Let me start, like most recording sessions, with the drum tracks.  Logic has always been a bit behind ProTools in sorting out kit problems and many Logic users might have previously turned to other tools for slicing and fixing drum timing tracks.  However, a combination of Audio Quantisation and the Flex tool make tidying up drum parts a breeze. 

Audio Quantize can do two quite different things.  It can either fit a drum part to an exact grid, giving the kind of precision you might want in a dance track or you can use it to sync it up to another track, perhaps a human groove that you really like.  Get something with the right kind of feel, make a template of it and then quantise to that template.  You can turn an ordinary track into the driving precision of Keith Moon if that’s what presses your buttons.

Flex Time takes a leaf from Melodyne and makes moving individual hits backwards and forwards in time.  Flex Time is just a new tool in the tool menu and using it is pretty much automatic – Logic leads you through the process.

One more trick for drums is replacing or layering drum sounds.  This has been a little messy in the past but manageable.  Knowing that this is a common thing in the editing stage however, the Logic developers have made it just about as easy as it can be.  Select the original audio track, set the drum type, pick a sound from the library and click OK.  Neat…

For those of you who use a lot of software instruments, you might find Bounce in Place of real use.  To get an audio version of a MIDI track, you can now just bounce and import it in a single hit.  Not only will having an audio version of a track mean less CPU overhead, it also means that a bunch of new tools are available to you for editing and mixing.

While we’re on software instruments, sadly, Apple has not given us the long needed upgrade to EXS24 (so you’ll still need tools from Redmatica if you’re a heavy duty sampler technician).  However, you do have a neat new tool, Convert to Sampler Track, which takes an audio track and automatically creates a sampler instrument from it.  That way, you can take individual audio sections, whether they are vocals, drum hits or any other type of material, and create an instrument.  You can then play individual beats from the original, just to morph your sound or create something new.  Having converted audio to an instrument, not only do you have all the controls on the EXS parameters page but you can use Transform and other MIDI tools to completely rework your material.

If you’re a guitarist, Logic 9 has some great new tools mainly for you.  Catching up with Native Instrument’s Guitar Rig Pro, you can now use virtual versions of classic amps, cabs and mics to turn your licks into grunge, muscle or vintage sounds.  Also, you can create your own stomp box with dozens of built-in pedals and, as always, you can automate any part of these using Track Automation.  Added to the hundreds of Amp Designer presets and improved support for tab and chord grids, guitarists may well be the happiest set of users in this upgrade.  If you’re looking for a real stomp board to work with your virtual one, Apogee have announced he GiO, which connects via USB to your computer and works seamlessly with Logic Pro 9.  Keyboard players might also find this of great use, since it’s also a remote transport controller.

Alongside some of these headline features, the developers have taken some time to simplify and rationalise parts of the system.  Despite the huge amount of new code, I’ve been working with Logic Pro 9 pretty solidly for 2 days and haven’t had a single crash.  It’s even more stable with the Vienna Symphony Library, an area where Logic could crash several times a day.  It looks like a very solid release with few comments on the forums about problems.  I wouldn’t normally recommend taking a new version straight out of the box but I’m going to stick with this one for some time.

Although Apple say this is a release for Intel machines only, it seems to run pretty well on G5 boxes.  It’s likely to be the case that Apple won’t support Power PC chips any more, especially as the new operating system, Snow Leopard (to be released this Autumn), will be Intel only. If you’re considering upgrading and use MainStage, please bear in mind that MainStage requires OS X 10.5.7 so you won’t be able to use the new facilities unless you are on the latest version of Leopard.

So, a really good upgrade and one that drummers, guitarists, editors and producers will enjoy.  There’s always something left on the shopping list in every release but, for its main user base, this upgrade is a must have.  The upgrade from Logic Studio is £159 and a new license is £399.  If you don’t need Soundtrack Pro, MainStage or the Jam Packs, Logic Express 9 offers most of what Logic Pro 9 offers but at a cost of £159 (or upgrade from Logic Express 8 for £79).

Further information (including videos): http://www.apple.com/logicstudio/
MacProVideo.com 30 minute video overview: http://www.macprovideo.com/news/1130

Review written by Peter Morris
Apple Certified Trainer (Logic Levels 1 and 2)

The new Apogee Gio - amazing new foot controller for guitarists using Logic