Recording - November 2013 - 22

&
the 4-way XY pad—the heart of Drummer. The 4 options are
Loud <-> Soft and Simple <-> Complex, and as you mouse
around, you’ll hear the performance adjust. You can cut up
Drummer regions as you like, and fine-tune a number of other
parameters that affect each region’s performance, like emphasis
(kicks/snares/hihats), fills, feel, etc. When you settle on a performance you like, you then move on to another region.
I’m a control freak who’s used to creating/playing his own
drum parts, but I was pleasantly surprised at how much I could
do with Drummer without feeling that I lacked control. For musicians who can’t program drums to the standard they’d like, but
nonetheless know what they want in terms of a drum part,
Drummer should be a fantastic tool for assembling a highly natural-sounding musical performance. The built-in patterns were
apparently generated by a variety of real session drummers,
and sound great—easily up to the standard of any of the various plug-in offerings—and, once you get used to it, the interface
is quick and efficient.

And if you need more specific control over what Drummer
plays, you can convert any
Drummer region to a MIDI
region, and then get in and
tweak the details to your heart’s
content—told you, despite the
audio graphic in the Drummer
regions, it was really MIDI under the hood all along! You can
even use Drummer with other drum engines like BFD, though you
shouldn’t feel the need to.
Bang a can
The other half of this is Drum Kit Designer, the sound engine,
which can be used with or without Drummer. If you load it into
a regular Instrument track, you can then play or program your
own patterns just as with any drum instrument. When you open
up DKD, you get a nice image of a studio drum kit—clicking on
any drum or cymbal allows you to make adjustments to that
drum, which include alternate drums (kicks, snares, etc), tuning,
damping, and level.
The drum and cymbal recordings sound excellent (thanks to
Bob Clearmountain and other well-known engineers, according
22

RECORDING November 2013

to Apple), and you can customize your own kits. And for real
drum fanatics, there are Producer kits. These are the same kits
but in multitrack form, where all the drums and cymbals are
broken out into separate Channel Strips for full mixing control.
Producer Kits allow more adjustments, as well as the options to
add your own eq, compressors, reverbs, etc., to the individual
Channel Strips, saving your customized version as a Patch. (If
you don’t need this much control and want to save on RAM
usage, all kits are available as simple stereo recordings as well.)
Rack ‘em, stack ‘em, save ‘em—Track Stacks
Talking about saving custom kits as Patches brings us to our
next topic: Track Stacks and the new Patch format. A Track
Stack lets you take a number of Channel Strips and group them
together as a unit, which can then be saved and used independently of the Project in which it was created. There are two
types, Folder Stacks and Summing Stacks. Folder Stacks are
pretty much the same thing as Folder Tracks, an existing feature—several tracks can be “packed” into a folder within a
Project, and then viewed or hidden as a unit—a convenience for
large arrangements.
But the real news is Summing Stacks. A Summing Stack is also
a collection of Channel Strips, but when one is made from a
group of selected tracks, a new Aux strip is created, and the outputs of all the selected tracks are routed through this Aux, which
functions as the Stack Master. Summing Stack component tracks
can include any type (Audio, Instrument, Auxes)—for me,
Instrument track collections are the raison d’être for this feature.
Many producers love to create big, layered instrument sounds,
combining multiple virtual instrument plug-ins. This has always
been possible in Logic, but certainly not as straightforward as it
could have been, and not so easily exported to other Projects.
When such a layered Instrument is created as a Summing
Stack, the Stack Master Aux serves not only as an audio master
output, but also as a global MIDI input, feeding all the enclosed
Instrument tracks. The whole assemblage can then be saved as a
Patch, and will be re-created intact in any other Project it’s loaded
into—much easier then copy-pasting or importing the elements
from Project to Project, as previously required. In fact, this is how
the new Drum Kit Designer instrument is organized! Under the
hood, the Producer kits consist of
a multi-output EXS instrument,
with the separate kit pieces routed to individual Auxes within a
multi-track Summing Track Stack.
Patches
And that brings us to the new
Patch format. A Patch is like an
enhanced Channel Strip Setting.
It contains the settings for the
Instrument and all audio plugins, just like a Channel Strip
Setting, but additionally holds MIDI plug-ins, and Aux levels and
routings. Plus, a Patch can contain a Track Stack with multiple
Channel Strips, including Auxes, and if there are Aux routings
these will be maintained and re-created when the Patch is
loaded into a different Project. One really nice aspect of this is
the ability to Merge only some elements of a Patch into an existing Channel Strip—for instance, loading only the Instrument and
Auxes, but not the plug-ins.
This all works great—in my opinion, both Track Stacks and
the Patch file format are fantastic additions. Like a lot of new features in Logic Pro X, they take things that were technically possible in previous versions, but were so convoluted as to be
unavailable to anyone but the most hard-core power users and
Environment gurus, and make them so simple and quick that you
won’t know how you got along without them.

Recording - November 2013

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