What was originally planned to be a week’s worth of learning and leaning into Logic X’s Environment has become a day. It’s much simpler and more basic than I imagined, though I now see its utility in some specific use-cases. I’m moving on to GRM Tools (and very much looking forward to it).
Journal
10/1/22
I don’t really know what to expect from the Environment. I imagine it’s like Audiomulch or Reaktor – it’s a space to connect modules and route sound, but I’ve not gone into what its actual purpose is. Even in the documentation, it says you might never need to use it. I’m even more intrigued now.
The relation between what I see in the Environment window and the Main arrangement window is still cloudy to me. Is it that the environment is like the backend – like when you click on the tool button in Kontakt? Do you see behind the curtain?*
Midi thru tool – this assigns any object (in the Environment) to the selected track in the Main window. The Main window track name changes to match the Environment object’s name. Could this be useful? *shrugs*
Being able to delete accidentally created aux/bus channels – that’s useful. Can’t do that in the Mixer or Main windows. A way of keeping things tidier.
*yes! this is what it is, ok this makes sense now, especially with any Mixer/Channel Strip views:
The audio and software instrument tracks you see in the main window are actually routed to channel strip objects on the Environment Mixer layer.
The Mixer channel strips and inspector channel strips are simply remote controls for the underlying channel strip objects in the Environment Mixer layer.
Their inclusion in these other windows makes your workflow faster and easier. The inspector channel strips contain a reduced parameter set of the corresponding channel strip objects in the Environment.
The channel strips shown in the Mixer window are more configurable, but the only place you can access all channel strip options is the Environment Mixer layer.
From Logic Pro X User Guide, p978
The Mixer and Inspector View Channel Strips are just beautified versions of the the ugliness/old-skool design that prevails behind the scenes – much like Kontakt (whose backend is, similarly, fugly).
At this point I’m asking myself what exactly I want to learn from this Environment exploration, and I’m not entirely sure…
I imagined it would be this magical hidden world of routing weird and wonderful modules to make amazing sounds that would have been hard to do from the front end (the Main window etc). I don’t think that’s the case… but I’m still optimistic. A little Youtube search is in order after skimming the manual, I think.
Reference videos and articles:
Environment Wizardry – Creating Constant Random Motion | Logic Pro X
Youtubers really are the most helpful people.
This was a fab video for giving me a number of use-cases. I can’t learn unless I’ve got an example use-case or two, it seems.
- Monitoring – super useful for working out what data (especially continuous controller (CC) data) is being sent and received at any given point in the signal chain.
- Dealing with problems on the front end – there wasn’t an option to modulate (change over time in various kinds of patterns) a certain kind of data, so he went to the back end to put in some transformer modules to turn the data from one module into data another module would understand.
- The youtuber also modulated the modulation, thus creating the contant randomness in the title, but I *think* that’s doable in the frontend only, so it’s not necessarily a task that requires the Environment.
In summary – useful information not available on the frontend, and fixing something that doesn’t work on the frontend. Good to know.
Understanding Logic Pro’s Environment
Nice overview (via an old version of Logic, but the Environment hasn’t changed in the last 4 versions from what I can see) of more Environment utility.
- Routing midi to lots of different places instead of putting multiple alias regions on new tracks in the Main window
- Using the Transformer module to invert a signal
- Saving a project to create a layer template that can be imported and reused in other projects. The example here was a crossfading operation – one audio fader goes up as the other goes down, also probably a useful automation, and maybe quite useful for performance/improv.
Top 5 Reasons NOT to be Afraid of Logic’s Environment
This! This is what would make life hella easier: arranging different channel strips on layers in the orders and arrangements I want them for mixing.
I have a lovely template with all the summing/mixing auxes arranged for different instrument groups routed to audio tracks so outputting stems is super quick and easy.
However, sometimes I want to modify that, and in the Mixer view Logic will add the new channels to the end of the row when sometimes I want them in with relevant mix groups.
Yes, yes, I know that I can create these additional channel strips as tracks in the Main window, then head to the ‘Tracks’ view in the Mixer window… but that’s clunky tbh.
I’ve no idea why channel strips in the ‘All’ view in the Mixer window can’t be moved around. It’s a no-brainer. Just another way that Logic isn’t logical (aw, poor Logic, I’m sorry. Love you really).
But in the Environment, I can create different layers and put channel strips in different groupings and orders manually, drag-and-drop style. This alone might be the most awesome use-case of the Environment that I’d use day-to-day.
The Environment’s Channel Strip design is still so ugly to look at though. The Mixer/Inspector windows’ Channel Strips are so much easier on the eye.
I think I’m done exploring Logic’s Environment. It was so useful to see what it is and how it relates to Logic’s Main and more used windows. I’ve learned what I need to learn about it. Moving on.