My Impressions Of Logic Pro And What I'm Not Seeing Talked About

[Dave Leo Baker]

So I just got my new mac Studio to replace my old mac mini 2018. I found I did need to disable and reenable script support from within VoiceOver utility, that’s nothing to do with Logic Magician or Logic but certainly for us.

However, Alchemy seems a bit improved in the controls view. Especially if you’re new, or if you’re me and get sometimes frustrated finding things when manufacturers use nonstandard naming — nmVoices to mean poliphony, for example, the vo shift h works in Alchemy now. 

Also I’ve been through the pads, keyboards, bells and strings. Not deeply yet, just poking around. It looks like they’ve made some very nice changes, either to the parameters of some of the patches, or to the engine itself. Alchemy is just sounding that much better to my ears, especially patches that use a lot of spatial and multitimbral components. I do believe the old gods are having fun at my expense, however, because I just bought Omnisphere last Christmas, it’s kind of a toolkit in the wellness spaces although I’ve comfortably used Alchemy for years. And certainly my Omnisphere has a lot of stuff Alchemy doesn’t, including some voices and strings I’ve already used on projects, for the most part the difference between Omnisphere and Alchemy is getting more blurred. 

So if you don’t have to have Omnisphere, don’t sweat the inaccessibility of getting set up, Alchemy will more than do. 

I wish people would have auditioned more of these sounds on Youtube but I think everybody’s wowed by the AI and other things right now. That session instruments / chord track could certainly be used to teach many a wee student theory in a far more engaging, far less dry way than we learned it, but I’ll leave that to the educators among us to figure that out. 

My advice to anyone contemplating, definitely audition some of the sounds / patches in your wheelhouse, you might be surprised about some of the subtle changes they’ve made. I’ve mainly just played around a bit, I haven’t delved and gone real deep into the engines yet. But even just a look and I can see Alchemy is at least providing more vo shift h help. Descriptive enough that if you’ve learned synthesis / sound design on some of the smaller stock synths, alchemy might not be as challenging anymore, besides that fact it’s 4 synths in 1 with tons of effects etc. 

All this setup and my mac studio isn’t even warm, which is nice.

I’ve only played around in strings, pads, keyboards, and brass, a bit of the out stuff like soundscapes just to see.

You may find some of your old favorites gone, I have, but they’re in our projects we’ve been making over the years so time to save some of those patches. I don’t know for sure, but my intuition tells me the Alchemy engine at least, perhaps others, have gotten some improvements. I’d say it’s a little more crisp and some of the beloved analog sounds do sound a bit more authentic. Bear in mind I just came over from intel to silicon, some of you programmers might know if that makes part of the difference. 

Also, that Alchemy bug where switching presets caused it to throw an error is now gone. I saw that on my Intel mac after it updated to Logic 12, even though of course that machine was very slow with it.

Anyway this is all looking really good.

Thanks for putting up with a bit of a scattered post.

Cheers / slán go foille,

Dave Leo Baker,

Your Spa Productions
Gentle rain for thirsty souls
https:artist.link/daveleobaker

[Kevin Gibbs]

Will Logic 12 run under Sequoya, or will I have to upgrade to Tahoe? I really don’t want to.

Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 2, 2026, at 6:08 PM, Dave Leo Baker <davele...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Dave Leo Baker]

Very slowly and very painfully can it run under Sequoia if you’re on Intel. 

I had a mac mini 2018 which I bought brand new with 32 GB of ram and 6 cores I think it was. Sequoia was the latest os I could run on. Anyway Logic will definitely run but a lot of things get slow quickly, especially depending on the plugins you have. I do get the sticker shock of updating the computer though, it was nearly 6 years for me so I guess it was time. 

If you have Silicon though I bet it will work better but can’t vouch for that. Don’t they have some way of acting like an Amiga where they use different processors to do different things now? Some of that stuff flies over my head but that’s what I know. I did get Logic to open, including with Magician on the aforementioned mac mini, but it was slow. Then again a great many things had become slow by then.

HTH,

Dave 

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[Kevin Gibbs]

I have an M1. So, this is a silicone machine. My resistance to upgrading operating systems has to do with logistics, not money.

Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 2, 2026, at 6:28 PM, Dave Leo Baker <davele...@gmail.com> wrote:

Very slowly and very painfully can it run under Sequoia if you’re on Intel. 

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[Dave Leo Baker]

You should be able to upgrade it to Logic Pro 12 if you want. I guess if you back up your old logic, then after the update, have it install all the new souynds, see if the old logic will run the new patches and if they’re as good. Would be intersting to see. 

Dave

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[John Isige]

Can you pick the different synth engines now? We were talking about granular and I think I sent a video along, and we weren't sure if you could pick the engine. The first thing the guy does in the video before loading a sample is pick the engine, I think. So it sort of implied, to me anyway, that there's some way to choose between the four synths available. I'm still back on Es One but obviously I'd be curious to know what we can do with something like Alchemy beyond presets. If it's four synths in one I assume there's a way to pick which synthesis method you want it to use.

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[Dave Leo Baker]

What I do is raise or lower the volume of the synths so if there's one I don't want for a particular track, I dial that back to infinite. This is how I've done it for years in Controls view. You have the 1 to 4 volumes at the top which are the synths in the order of that preset with their effects on. But then you can move down to the levels for granular, formant, etc. which is how I've done my work in Alchemy for years at this point. Maybe it isn't in practice turning something off like they do in the editor, but mixing it out of the mix within Alchemy works. This is of course most ofen helpful when making far more subtle changes to a particular preset where you change the volume by smaller increments of each synth and of course also change any characteristics you want. 

On Feb 2, 2026, at 6:32 PM, John Isige <gw...@tds.net> wrote:

Can you pick the different synth engines now? We were talking about granular and I think I sent a video along, and we weren't sure if you could pick the engine. The first thing the guy does in the video before loading a sample is pick the engine, I think. So it sort of implied, to me anyway, that there's some way to choose between the four synths available. I'm still back on Es One but obviously I'd be curious to know what we can do with something like Alchemy beyond presets. If it's four synths in one I assume there's a way to pick which synthesis method you want it to use.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/logic-accessibility/76F68604-4A50-4ADD-B1A1-A6F3D8454FD3%40tds.net.