If you're a guitar or bass player, Logic Pro X goes out of its way to make you feel appreciated and inspired to jam. Logic Pro has a customized workflow made especially for guitar players. Plus, you'll find dozens of stellar-sounding special effects plug-ins that can feed even the most tone-starved guitarist.
Logic Pro X is set up great for guitarists
Adding a guitar or bass track to an open project is a simple process. Logic Pro gives you an option to create a new track optimized for guitar or bass. Follow these steps:
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Choose Track→New Tracks, or press Option-Command-N.
The new tracks dialog opens, as shown in the figure.
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Click the Guitar or Bass button.
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Click Create.
A new audio track is added to the tracks area and several effects that are ideal for guitar and bass are added to the channel strip.
Amp modeling is good, true, and beautiful
Why reach back to Plato's ancient Greek philosophy to build an argument in support of amp modeling? Because digital technology gets a lot of flack for being less pure than analog technology, and you should guard against thinking that the grass is greener on the other side.
Digital audio is here to stay. Don't let the analog purists get to you. It's illogical to compare "pure sound" to "impure sound" because there can't be a clear winner. Who gets to decide what sounds better and what gets to be labeled pure? The listener doesn't care if the guitar they're hearing was manufactured in the summer of 1957. And they really don't care if your guitar tone comes from hardware or software.
Tone is a deeply personal thing. In addition, as you're being uncompromising in the pursuit of great tone, don't forget that there's no such thing as perfection. Even if you have the magical guitar rig from the land of mojo, you'll want it to sound better. Bring some flexibility to your pursuit and you'll enjoy the journey.
Speaking of being flexible, the Amp Designer plug-in, which comes with Logic Pro X, is capable of sounding like most of the go-to amps heard in every genre of music. Aside from Amp Designer's great tone and supreme flexibility, it also looks gorgeous. You can open the Amp Designer interface, shown in the figure, by clicking the effects slot on the track's channel strip. To display the track's channel strip, do one of the following:
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Choose View→Show Inspector or press I. The inspector opens, displaying the track's channel strip.
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Choose View→Show Mixer or press X. The mixer opens, displaying the channel strips of all your tracks.
At the top of every plug-in interface is a preset menu. The Logic Pro team worked hard to give you a starting point for almost any sound imaginable. Use the presets to get your sound 80 percent of the way to guitar-tone greatness, and then tweak the amp controls to dial it in the rest of the way.
Guitarists with pedal-deficit disorder can find lots of stompbox effects
When you create a new guitar or bass track, the Pedalboard plug-in is added to the track's channel strip in addition to the Amp Designer plug-in. As you can see in the figure, Pedalboard looks so cool that you might find yourself wanting to put your laptop on the ground to stomp on all the pedals. Please don't.
To build your effects chain, you drag effects pedals from the collection on the right to the pedalboard on the left. You can rearrange the pedals by dragging them, and you can remove them by dragging them off the pedalboard.
Guitarists are known to have extreme cases of GAS (gear acquisition syndrome). With Amp Designer, Bass Amp Designer, and Pedalboard, you should be able to ease your condition and get back to making music. You have enough tone to relieve a GAS epidemic.