Logic Pro X for Guitar Players

It has been over 12 months since Apple announced the release of a brand new version of Logic Pro. It was certainly a welcome upgrade for Logic users, sporting a brand new look and feel, with some great new features and an extremely attractive price point. At the time of release we took an extensive look at some of these new features and how they specifically relate to those of us who are guitar players. In this article we round up some of these new inclusions within Logic Pro X and discuss their usefulness for tracking, editing and mixing guitars.

Amp Designer

When looking at Logic Pro X for guitar players, perhaps the most obvious place to start is with its options for amp simulation. While Amp Designer may not be the most versatile or authentic sounding alternative in the sphere of amp modelling, it is certainly a helpful inclusion for getting your ideas down quickly and easily. With 25 different amp heads and cabinets, there are still plenty of options here for finding a suitable tone. While it’s worth noting that Logic Pro X does see the addition of Bass Amp Designer, users of Logic Pro 9 will not notice any overly significant upgrades to what they may already be used to. The exception here is the additional options that are available in Amp Designer’s mic locker. There are now 7 virtual microphones in total, obviously intended to resemble some classic go-to mic’s popularised in many famous recordings over the last number of decades. 

Check out the video tutorial below:

Pedalboard

In a similar way to Amp Designer, the Pedalboard plugin within Logic Pro X will again seem extremely familiar in look and feel for users upgrading from Logic Pro 9. There are however, some interesting new faces in the lineup. Pedalboard now includes 35 stompboxes in total, seven of which are new to Logic Pro X. Notably, the new ‘Tie Dye Delay’ and ‘Wham’ effects will provide seemingly endless fun in creating interesting textures and bizarre lead tones. This collection of stompboxes includes every type of effect you might expect from a virtual pedalboard and every option you would probably like to have in your real one (just without all that excess cable!). It is also worth mentioning, as Pedalboard is a separate plugin, this does not necessarily have to be used in conjunction with Amp Designer if this is not your preferred amp simulator of choice. 

Check out the video tutorial below:


​Track Stacks

Workflow is not necessarily the sexiest of topics when it comes to recording your guitars but that does not diminish its importance. The addition of Track Stacks to Logic Pro X allows us to keep our sessions better organised by seamlessly consolidating multiple tracks down to a single submix. This is an extremely beneficial feature, not only for cleaning up the look of a project but also for being able to use multiple effects globally across specific sections of a mix at once. Although the use of submixes or ‘stems’ is not a new concept to mixing, Track Stacks provide a quick, easy and useful way of implementing these into your sessions. 

Check out the video tutorial below:

Smart Controls

One of the really innovative new additions to Logic Pro X is the inclusion of Smart Controls. Smart Controls can be seen as the perfect compliment to Track Stacks because they allow us to manipulate multiple parameters within a particular submit all from a single set of controls. Using a guitar submix as an example, we can have control over things like levels, panning, effects and even Amp Designer settings all from the simple little Smart Controls interface (which can also be mapped to an external midi controller). Not only does this offer up numerous practical implications but some powerful creative ones also. Being able to utilize up to 12 controls (which can be simultaneously mapped to different parameters) from a single interface, gives the user permission to imagine all manner of possibilities for almost endless ‘tweakability’.

Check out the video tutorial below: ​

​New & Improved Guitar Tuner

A guitar tuner is arguably not the most exciting plugin we could think of when talking about recording guitars. Depending on your set up however, this plugin could potentially be the one you use on your guitar tracks more than any other. After all, there’s no point spending a bunch of time getting the tone you’re looking for if the track is out of tune in the first place! The new tuner in Logic Pro X is clean, simple, easy to read and seems to perform well on both guitar and bass. Conveniently, it can also be called up using its own dedicated button via the Control Bar. While it doesn’t boast the precision or advanced features of other notable tuning software, it is certainly a very handy upgrade to the latest version of Logic Pro. 

Check out the video:

​Flex Pitch

Lastly, Flex Pitch is undoubtedly a fantastic new inclusion into Logic Pro X. Having a good quality, versatile pitch editor built into your DAW is almost worth the price of admission alone. While tuning a guitar ‘post’ performance is not necessarily the first thing one might think of when using this type of tool, Flex Pitch does provide some very interesting editing options for guitar players. From surgically adjusting the timing, pitch, volume or vibrato of a specific notes in a phrase, to intentionally messing up a track beyond the point of recognition, this tool offers some powerful and exciting editing capabilities. When working with guitars, a tool of this nature does have some limitations however. Namely, it can only be used with monophonic sources (i.e. lead/melodic lines and single note textures, not chords or finger picking) and extreme tuning can often result in the addition of some strange sonic artifacts. With these limitations in mind, a tasteful use of Flex Pitch may just be the perfect remedy for removing distracting elements from an otherwise great performance.

Check out the video tutorial below:

​That concludes our look at some of the significant additions to the latest release of Logic Pro X for guitar players. Keep in mind there are some notable exclusions not covered here, namely the new synthesisers, sound libraries and (perhaps most importantly for guitar players) Logic’s incredibly versatile Drummer. So, with all of these new features, is Logic Pro X the best DAW currently available for guitar players? While this is indeed an interesting question, it is not a debate that is intended to be answered in this article. Ultimately, given that the content of a recording is infinitely more important than the tools being used, one might conclude that perhaps the best tool for the job is simply whatever you have available. At its extremely affordable price point however, this powerful, feature rich software certainly seems to have made itself more available than ever before.