Hey John,
T.O.M is spot on here in both counts. Alchemy has always had submenus, I have also never owned or used Keyboard Maestro or Logic Magician, so the problem is not with any of those. It happens whenever you switch presets, whether going into the submenus at the top and selecting from a category and then loading it. It doesn’t throw the error if you load something you saved locally or do it direct from the patch library.
Second thing T.O.M. is right about — synthesis. I’ve been a synth guy since late 80s / my first board was an Akai AX60 — sort of Akai’s answer to the Juno 106 with some odd quirks.
I would never recommend learning synthesis by starting in alchemy, like he said, Alchemy is basically 4 synths in one with a host of effects. I would start with ES1 / ESP, work up to ES2 / EFM! and so forth, here is why. has a ton of first principles that really need to be understood at least in general, starting with subtractive, what used to be called analog, into Addative, what was called FM or Digital, then on to linear and wavetable sampling and ultimately granular and beyond. Each type includes all the previous types, so subtractive is also included in addative which is also included in wavetable which got reinvented into granular synthesis — tiny “grains” or baby samples that are embedded into a preset. Modelling is a whole different thing, if you take a look at Sculpture. It’s different enough from regular synthesis that it doesn’t matter when you learn it, once you have learned subtractive synthesis.
So sorry for the gobbledeegook long description, I’m not the trainer T.O.M. is, But what most people like T.O.M. won’t tell you, and didn’t even acknowledge when I was a kid, is all of them as producers and trainers are actually showing you some very amazing first principles of analog synthesis when they teach you how to manage EQ, filters, etc., even in something as straightforward as the little reverb tutorial on his channel, I forget the name of the plug-in. The reason is, when you first start, you are learning to manage the sound source in many ways like an EQ, you are not just reshaping the wave forms as your books tell you, but you’re doing the Michelangelo — cutting the sculpture out of the marble. A straight wave is just not very pleasant, listen to your test oscillator plug-in and you will find out. Everything you do with an EQ or the EQ section of a reverb or any other pedal / plugin you are scaulpting the resulting sound wave by smoothing the rough edges or roughing the smooth parts. Everything you learn about filters, EQ and envelopes from all of Tom’s plugins tutorials is everything you will use inside the synthesizer, either directly when shaping, or indirectly through the LFO, If you listen to Tom’s tutorial on the Echo and Delay plug-ins you get some direct experience on what high and low filters are doing to your sound. Even though that is prerecorded sound and not from the keyboard, sound is sound and the principles are spot on.
For each synth you learn, you will need to learn how to tell the instrument what controls what. That will mean automatic control via envelopes and the LFO, or manual where you set it when editing, and use one of your controllers — I am a big mod wheel user from the 80s — to control one or more parameters in perform mode, meaning when you’re recording or playing your parts, so you play the controller like the mod wheel as much as you do the notes and your pitch bends.
There is a book on Bard by Rob Zantay, it’s an old cassette series on synthesis. e was a session guy and producer in the 70s and 80s out of New York and did work with film and Broadway. It’s not like a modern tutorial but more of a book on the principles of synthesis from start to end, at least start through the 1980s. His book is really good because it’s as much about your performance as the production side. And as keyboardists, we’re responsible for not only designing the presets, but also performing them correctly to the instruments’ voicings, and humanizing via controller / pitch bend / expression pedals etc.
So as an example, I sometimes use a cello patch I’ve modified. So the keyboard is set to portamento instead of polyphonic. Polyphonic just means you can play multiple notes at once, monophonic is one note at a time, and portamento means that when you play the notes beamed together (articulated so the key goes down before the last one goes up), the patch doesn’t start at the beginning. So the initial bow sound of a cello doesn’t play when I’m playing a run like a cellist going down the fingerboard on the same string. My mod wheel I’ve set to vibrato, and my pich bend at a single half step.
But for practice, I have to bear in mind when a cellist is going to switch strings / start the bow again, which is going to change how I articulate on the keyboard. Add to that the natural swell curve you do with your foot pedal, and this is a lot for one part. But this is what synthesis expects when we take these instruments and make them sound humanized.
But I’ve probably drifted a bit too far, this being about Logic Pro. Every stock synth plug-in except Alchemy has a built-in cheat sheet for you to learn what controls do. When in ES1 or ESP, go to the table like T.O.M showed you in the plug-in window. In the table, the left column usually has a VoiceOver hint. So press VO Shift H to hear the hint. In true Apple fashion, they’ve written the hints in very layman’s language. Alchemy doesn’t have this, though.
When you’ve crossed the threshold and want to add a grain into an Alchemy patch, check out the several tutorials about sampler instruments on T.O.M’s channel and instead of picking sampler, pick Alchemy from there. I have not created grains in Alchemy, because unlike the 80s, there are so many wonderful presets we now have, which I merely need to work on to create my own. And that leads me to my final point: As you learn, look at presets that closely match what you’re doing, and figure out how to modify that preset to your liking.
Synthesis is just too vast a topic to really write up, at least for me, maybe T.O.M will do it sometime if there are enough calls for it. But till then, there is a channel on YOutube called “Music Tech Guy” and he has a playlist full of synthesis / sound design videos. He’s describing with a mouse, but you can take principles you learn from his channel, and knowledge of how to navigate plug-in windows with VoiceOver from Tom’s channel and you should be good to go for years and years to come. I will do a much simpler write up of something we as keyboardists all do and Logic makes very easy once I actually learned: Keyboard Splits and Double / triple manual playing on one recording. Basically turning your entire stack, even bass pedals if you have them, into one single instrument like an organ that you record from. A lot of us in the ambient community who came from prog decades ago have been doing this, but it’s taken me a while to figure out just how the best workflow for us VoiceOver users will work for this.
Anyway happy synthesis. After awhile, you will view your synthesis work as paramount to your composition, rehearsal and performance as your piano technique. Everybody’s style is theirs, and I’m here for it.
Cheers,
Dave Leo Baker,
Your Spa Productions
Gentle rain for thirsty souls on all music streaming platforms