Post
by luddy » Thu Sep 30, 2010 8:00 am
I used Logic for years and still use it for tracking and comping vocals and live instruments, and for preparing sheet music.
The weakest points of Logic? For me the weakest point is simply that it's unnecessarily complicated. I end up thinking about the DAW too much and the music not enough when I use it. A simple case in point: the piano roll in Logic has lots of great features, commands and options. But the bread and butter of being in a piano roll, to me, is to create notes, change their velocity and duration, copy them from place to place. In logic, there is one tool to create them, another to change their velocity, and the most natural way to change their duration is to use the basic pointer tool (i.e., a third tool). When copying notes in Logic, it is very fiddly to copy a span of time (say 2 1/2 bars starting on a bar boundary) to another span of time if the notes are not perfectly aligned with the beginning of the time span. (The insertion command wants to align the first note copied with the insertion point rather than aligning the time span with the insertion point.) Live does all those things with no tool at all, just the mouse, and it's easy as pie. Same for copying a span of time in the timeline, same with editing automation, same with folders, etc. Live's way is simpler, sometimes even a few more steps, but it's so much less burdensome to think about and use, at least for me.
The routing in Logic is another good example. You can do most anything, using busses and auxes etc., but it's such a mess to come back to a project months later and try to figure out what all the busses mean and what's routed where.
EXS24 is yet another example. It's a great little sampler, very very efficient and pretty expressive. But my goodness what a senselessly complicated interface, full of text boxes and complex options for groups etc. Very nasty to try to figure out how a complicated sampler instrument works. When you read a Sampler patch in Live, together with say instrument racks for layering, it's so obvious on the face of it what is going on.
I prefer the instruments and effects in Live suite to Logic's instruments in terms of sound and as building blocks for sound design, but I think I'm in the minority there, many people seem to think that Logic's instruments and fx are better than Live's.
Logic is amazingly efficient in terms of CPU. Comping (quickswipe) in Logic and take folders are really well done, one of the few parts of the interface that's really lean and intuitive.
At the end of the day they're both good DAWs to work in for arranging, mixing, etc. Both have strong points, there are good arguments for liking either one.
-Luddy
