Logic Pro Book / Lesson 6 / Messed up when assigning pads to loops [SOLVED]

[skress]

Hi,

 

first of all: thanks a lot for the book, it really helps a lot. I am "new to everything". Using Logic Pro X 10.6.1 on an Intel MacBook Pro (latest Big Sur) together with a Novation Impulse MIDI keyboard.

 

If I remember it correctly at some point in time I had a drum kit opened and assigned some drum pads on the keyboard such that I could play certain parts of the drum kit (e.g. kick drum, snare, ...). So I "simply" assigned the respective midi notes to the drum pads ...

 

Later I bought the book and started working through the lessons. Yesterday, in lesson 6 I assigned a couple of the drum pads to live loops. I'd say it was working like expected.

 

Today I remembered that I did this assignment for the drum kit earlier and it might be a good idea to do a factory reset of the midi controller and start over again. So I did a factory reset ... now Logic Pro did not recognize when I played certain notes on the keyboard. These notes were those that corresponded to the drum pads which were assigned to live loops.

 

I deleted the assignment and now all my keys on the piano work again. But now I am not able to successfully assign a key to play a live loop.

 

I hope it's just a configuration problem, for now I have a couple of questions ...

 

I have two live loops as seen on the screen shot

 

When I click on one of the loops and the press CMD-L, the controller assignments window opens. On the screenshot below you can see how it looked after I pressed the C1 key on the midi piano (did not try the drum pads for now) - sorry for the UI being in German, I hope that's not a problem ...

 

 

But when I press the C1 key now, nothing happens. When I press D1 I can see it as a MIDI input event in the LCD on top of Logic Pro. When pressing C1, there is no input. So when playing any kind of instrument, the C1 key is not working anymore. It is blocked by this controller assignments mapping - although nothing else happens.

 

Any idea why the live loop does not start playing when pressing C1?

 

Is it expected that this kind of assignment blocks the piano keys from being used for regular playing?

 

Now back to my drum pads. They were configured to issue some "normal" MIDI notes. I was able to change their setup such that they do not play "normal" MIDI notes. Now, instead of returning something like C3, D3 (or whatever it was), they return only numeric values (60,62,64,65,67,69,71,72), the LCD on the Novation puts "CC#" in front of it.

 

But even in this configuration, doing an assignment of one of the drum pads to one of the loops kinda works, i.e an assignment is recorded, but I does not start the loop to play. In addition, just like with the normal MIDI notes, there is no more MIDI input seen in the LCD display on top of Logic Pro when the assignment was recorded. So Logic does realize that the assigned key was played ... but it just does not react.

 

Hopefully anyone can explain to me what's going on here ...

 

Thanks

Soeren

[David Nahmani]

first of all: thanks a lot for the book, it really helps a lot.

You're welcome! Happy to hear!

 

It looks like your Novation keyboard may be in some form of control surface mode, I would look up its manual to make sure it isn't set up as a control surface in Logic at all, then you can make your manual assignments as described in the book. You can go to Logic Pro > Control Surfaces > Setup, select the Novation and delete it so that Logic does not recognize it as a control surface. Then make your own assignments.

[skress]

Thanks for the tip. I think I got it working now. The drum pads were configured to send MIDI notes. I've changed it such that they now send CC messages. Now, when assigning these messages to the live loops cells, the assignment does not interfere with the piano keyboard. Additionally pressing the drum pads now starts and stops the live loops again.

 

I also deleted the LPX preferences and removed the Novation Impulse from MIDI studio settings of macOS. Don't know if that was necessary. At least it is working now.

 

Thanks again

[David Nahmani]

Great, good to hear!