Keyboard Splits, Multi-Tier Keyboard Setups, And Logic

[Dave Leo Baker]

So as preamble, if you haven’t I’d suggest checking out Tom’s tutorials on track arrangement and track stacks on the Logic.band Youtube channel. I’ve been doing this for a minute now, and I’ve learned a few things from those tutorials which sped up my workflow.

So on hardware synths we can obviously layer multiple instruments together, split the keyboard into zones, and in a studio environment as a keyboardist doing session work could play both manuals (keyboards) at the same time, the way the organists and harpsichord players always have. There’s pressure nowadays to do one take one instrument, and there are good productions reasons for it, but Logic Pro gives us this amazing happy medium so you can treat your stack as a full instrument, even if she’s recording onto several tracks at once. 

I’ll use my genre in the wellness industry / “New Age” music as example, but most genres have an ambient aspect that this example will work with. 

So I first get the patches up that I need, maybe 2 separate pads who may partially layer each other. In each pad do any needed synthesis to keep them from cross phasing each other, and to fix any LFO timing issues. Many of Tom’s tutorials actually help with this, even if they’re not specifically about synthesis. 

Next figure out where each pad’s voicings complement each other, and complement your composition. I have some pads from Quiet Music which we use for hospitals / pain clinics etc. but they’re positioned less flexibly than what Alchemy, ES2, or Omnisphere do. 

So for synths that cooperate with you you will need to go into Region Inspector and find the track table like Tom’s tutorials show. And you need to move down to Transpose. Everything is by semitone and I don’t know if you can click and type, I just use the slider. VO left and right move by large increments, shift make the increments smaller. so you wil need to transpose plus or minus 12  s  emitones to move it by an octave. You don’t want to use the transposer or key zone splitter in your hardware, because you’re directing the midi from that zone into one or more instruments through Logic.

Now move down to where it says Key Limit. Interact with that row and move to the slider. Move the mouse to the VoiceOver location like Tom has shown in some of his tutorials, and double click with VO Shift Space twice. Here is where you put start and end zone markers. 

C-1 is the lowest your keyboard can possibly go, up through G9 being the very highest. This is almost 2 octaves more than an 88 key keyboard. 

So type something like C-1 B2 and press enter to assign that zone. It’s immediately active for the instrumet you’re on, and it’s the kind of thing you can save as part of a patch, we all know those typing into sliders can be finicky.

If you haven’t changed this setting, you are using the Yamaha method for key  designation, where c3 is middle C. I have mine set to Roland, which is the classical / score setting of Middle C as C4 on the piano. 

Go to Logic Pro settings, then MIDI, then Input. In the Keyboard section there is a Middle C pop up.

Set it how you want, or ignore it, but now you know.

Do the same keyboard zoning for your second instrument and remember you can audition both. Like Tom shows you you can set individual tracks to arm for recording, and that means you can play / audition them as youre making these settings, so you know for sure where your overlaps happen, and if it’s where you want.

Once you have them set, make a track stack of them like Tom shows on the tutorials by selecting them both and doing the VO Shift G. Make sure that if you want to play the stack as one instrument, which we are going to here, that you turn off arm for recording for the tracks you were auditioning first. You don’t want to record midi data on each track and also on the instruments separately. The cool thing with recording midi data on the stack is that it’s like playing a set of organ stops where the bass may have a coupler, the treble may have a viola / flute register, etc. But you get to decide what zones, how many, and how large they are. And they can most definitely overlap.

If you are playing 2 keyboards at once, I would label this stack something like lower or upper manual, or if you know organ parlance something like Great for the lower manual, Swell for the upper. Or just Rhythm and Lead.

But again I find it helpful to rearrange even the stacks into the order they are played upon. Labels and order matter when a year from now you want to modify and use this same setup over again.

Now before going to the upper manual if you have one, we want to   make sure any controllers we want to use are appropriately separated if necessary. So often, Omnisphere’s pads put a nice filter sweep on the mod wheel, Alchemy’s pads use that same wheel in a polymorphic context. So in that case, if the control in question isn’t really subtle like a sweep, I change that to use Midi control 67 which is my soft pedal for my piano, since I don’t have aftertouch. Every synth is different for how you do this, so I’d suggest getting to know the Midi plugin Modifier. This lets you take one midi parameter and route it to another before the instrument gets it. This is powerful because you can optionally use Thru or not, I generally do not. You want to mess with Modifier, and save yourself as many presets as you will need to compensate. It’s very easy to add multiple instances of Modifier before your instrument and get the results you exactly want rather than going through and trying to figure out how to move a target from one source to another and resolve conflicts within a given synthesizer. And synths that aren’t default Logic plugins don’t always let you, so knowing how to use Modifier is really helpful. Again all of Tom’s tutorials on plug-ins basically set you up for success with this.

Now everything I just mentioned you can do for your upper manual with a couple more patches. In my example, I might add Healing Glass with my personal shamanic skin drum I have created using Sculpture. 

I won’t have to worry about phase / polarity or other pad issues, but there may be some that I might. My shamanic drum I often insert subtle pitch bends. For psychedelic reasons, I do love to bend glass also, but while my stoner fans love it, it gets mixed reviews from the more conservative wellness practitioners. So on the glass patch, after zoning and any transposing needed, I go into Modifier plugin and turn off Pitch Bend, save it as a preset in Modifier for later as Bend Off or something I will remember.

Output Event is set to Off, Input Event is Pitch Bend, Thru is unchecked.

For many synths you can change that in the plug-in window itself, especially Logic stock plugins. But many don’t or like Alchemy it’s hard to find and pretty nuanced / which synth is set to 0 for pbu and pbdown.

This is where Modifier clearly comes through.

Also on my skin drom, I want it to ignore the volume / expression pedal so on that track I do the same except for volume / expression instead of pitch bend. That way I can perform decrescendo tails and curves on the glass notes without any interference to the drum. These subtle touches could of course be done later via automation, but if you really like the effect of performing as much as possible per take, coloring your sound live, this helps.

Finally, on the drum I need to turn one more event off, and that is the sustain pedal. So add another modifier plugin and set the incoming event to 64 / sustain and output to off, thru unchecked.

Unlike organ players, we have sustain pedals so we can hold down a drone and a descant drone with the bottom keyboard’s pedal, tap a heartbeat and accents on the drum half of the upper manual, and with the right hand play the glass. Then when we’re going to change chords on the bottom, pedal down on the upper keyboard, only glass sustains while we roll in our new chords on the bottom. Typical double-manual playing, even if a lot more slow-motion than the prog or jazz playing days. This also means we can play these live.

Now here’s the part that won’t save to your patch library and why labeling your tracks matters.

For the instruments and the stack that represent each keyboard, you have to go into Inspector, then into the track table, not the region. Move down left column until you find Midi Input. A lot of people will say Channel, but Channel is best for one Midi Organ console if you have that, where one device, multiple boards assigned to different channels. If you use MIDI Input: instead, you just select the instrument that will send midi data to that track.

The reason you have to do this for the individual tracks and the stack also, that is unclear to me, but I always have because not doing it starts a recording session with overlap you didn’t want.

These Midi Input settings from the inspector will not save as part of the patch. Possibly because it doesn’t know what hardware will load the patch?

Finally, collapse your stacks all of them thanks to Keyboard Ninja with Option Shift Accent. And we’ll make one big stack to save as the patch in the library. But we will never record from this stack.

Save this in the library like Tom has shown in his tutorials. I have personally made folders in Finder under the instrument and other patch categories so I can easily find things. But if you save it in the default location you will find it under User Patches in the library.

Now to rehearse / record etc.:

In this example, I would first open the main stack with option accent. Then the upper manual where the drums and glass live, I will open that also. But the pads I will keep closed. Now arm the stack of pads, the glass and the drums for recording. But don’t arm the full stack or the full upper manual stack for recording and you can probably guess why. The midi data going to the pads is all going to relate to each other. But playing drums and glass, or worse, chimes and flute, will benefit from the midi data going to their own separate tracks. That way when you go to edit in the piano roll or event list, you don’t see controller data not related to the instrument you’re editing. The drums will never show swell or sustain pedal data, and the glass will never show pitch bend data. Also these two lead instruments (drums in this case acting more like alt. percussion than a real drum track), it’s so much cleaner to edit. Also, this is just the first recording, so who knows if you will want to double the gladd, write some flute harmonies later that play against the glass, etc. But whatever you are going to do, you could split and copy a region from the glass track, make a new chime track pitched at a different octave, paste that glass section in with the chimes, etc. the possibilities are endless.

The real value of the master stacks besides being a very convenient mix bus is so everything gets to save as a patch, and you don’t have to do most of this setup again.

Most the inspector settings you set will follow you even if you swap out an instrument. Duplicate Healing Glass with a Glass Harp from Sampler,   and you’ll find the splits are exactly in the same place. The only thing that will not save to a patch preset is Midi Input. 

Anyway I hope this helps if you have been wondering how to do this. I struggled for my first couple years figuring this system out, and I guarantee it’s worked in live spaces as well as recording sessions.

I’m happy if someone turns this into a tutorial, happier still if they make money from it, because their explanations are going to be better than mine and less verbose.

Dave Leo Baker,
Your Spa Productions
Gentle rain for thirsty souls on all music streaming platforms

[Ramy Moustafa Saber]

Very great explnation.

I suggest using Logic magician after walking some how in logic.

Because, it will save you time.

warmregards

Dr/ Ramy Moustafa Saber

tel: +201002221750

Music Instructor, Music Producer and Sound Engineer

www.ramymoustafaproductions.com

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[Dave Leo Baker]

So I haven’t gone out and bought Keyboard Maestro or Logic Magician yet. But can you give me examples here on how it will save me time in the steps I gave? I have a Mac Mini 2018, I bought it in 2020 with everything on it / 32 GB of RAM and as many cores as possible. I know the M series is all the thing but not really ready to spring for that yet. How much overhead does this Keyboard Maestro and Logic Magician take? You nneed Keyboard Maestro for Logic Magician to work? 

Also I use a ton of project templates for my own contracts and things I do for others. Will this mean I have to redo a bunch of template settings? If you have examples of things I mentioned and how Logic Magician would speed me up or make me more accurate or anything, I’m all ears.

Dave

Dave Leo Baker,
Your Spa Productions
Gentle rain for thirsty souls on all music streaming platforms

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[TheOreoMonster LogicBand]

Regarding Keyboard Maestro and Logic Magician, Keyboard Maestro is a paid app, Logic Magician is free, it just requires keyboard maestro as a means to triggering the scripts and having them passed to Logic as necessary. No real overhead here. The enhancement will well be worth it. 

Regarding your templates, you won’t need to change your templates outside of setting the control bar in logic to match the layout Logic Magician needs to function. When you set up Logic Magician it includes a template of its own. This is really so you can save it’s control bar layout as default then in your own templates just right click and select apply defaults so the control bar layout in your template now matches. Then resave the template and you are good to go.

Logic Magician will save you having to go into the inspector both the region or track inspector as control 1 through 0 will allow you to quickly access parameters in the region inspector and Control shift 1 through 0 for the track inspector. Once you select the parameter you can adjust with control up/down or control shift up/down for smaller increments. Also things in the inspector that already have their own key commands still work but now with spoken feedback.

Loading plug ins and opening plug ins are quicker as well since numbers 1 through 0 lets you select a plug in and you can hit dash to open it, x to change plug in, and shift accent to remove a plug in, Accent toggles bypass for the selected effect. If no effect is loaded then pressing the number will drop down the list to select an effect. Sends are similar except those are shift numbers, and page up/down, or shift page up/down adjust send levels.

This is documented in the Logic Magician documentation and in tutorials in the Logic Magician Documentation playlist on the YouTube channel. https://logic.band/logic-magician has the full documentation.

-T.O.M
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[Dave Leo Baker]

Thanks this all seems more than worth it. I will see about Keyboard Maestro and check out this tutorial / getting Logic Magician set up. 

Dave

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[Dave Leo Baker]

Oh this is going to be amazing! I just set up Logic Magician / Keyboard Maestro. I will have to experiment and see if those keyboard split sliders will let me type in the values right from the Logic Magician keystrokes.

Obviously this is an amazingly complete product, and besides, the documentation is very complete. This is so often not done with software, due to how much time it takes to just develop it. So thanks to all for having done so. Clearly it will speed up my workflows: My hands aren’t what htey used to be / I try and save them for playing the instruments as much as possible, so saving these kinds of keystrokes moving around everywhere is going to be really helpful!

thanks all for the recommends.

Dave

On Dec 30, 2025, at 1:36 PM, TheOreoMonster LogicBand <theoreo...@logic.band> wrote:

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/logic-accessibility/E0E877CD-775A-4E0F-94F9-4F788908015F%40logic.band.

[John Isige]

Yeah, Logic Magician is the awesomeness. Logic is the DAW I've gotten on with the best and LM just improves things immensely.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/logic-accessibility/620796EE-B109-4202-88B9-24112DDA19C8%40gmail.com.

[Dave Leo Baker]

I will be happy to join you when it’s convenient for this. I now have Discord set up and my username is DaveLeoBaker and for any sighted people the profile pic is exactly what my daughter has done for my official channels. 

Now off to learn more of Logic Magician, this stuff’s very cool!

Dave Leo Baker,
Your Spa Productions
Gentle rain for thirsty souls on all music streaming platforms

On Dec 30, 2025, at 1:36 PM, TheOreoMonster LogicBand <theoreo...@logic.band> wrote:

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/logic-accessibility/E0E877CD-775A-4E0F-94F9-4F788908015F%40logic.band.

[Dave Leo Baker]

That last message was meant for someone else. got to get better about these mailing lists. Anyway thanks for the Logic Magician stuff here, using Control shift 7 selects Key Limit then Option W and then type your entry like c-1 b3 not forgetting to do the space between the start and end keys.