Apple Logic Pro for iPad

Is it the dawn of a new era in digital audio workstations (DAWs)? Apple seems to think so with the Logic Pro for iPad app, and version 2 adds many improvements—including AI-backed session players, new instruments, and a vintage-vibe effects processor. Apple wraps these in a refined, multitouch-focused UI designed for people sitting on a couch, on a plane, or just about anywhere with an iPad and headphones. It doesn’t replace playing a real instrument on its own, of course, and you’ll want to stick with Logic Pro for Mac if you’re scoring a film or recording lots of live instruments. But you may well find you prefer producing music on an iPad with this app over a rigid desktop setup.

How Much Does Apple Logic Pro for iPad Cost?

Apple offers Logic Pro for iPad on a subscription basis: You pay either $4.99 per month or $49 per year. A one-month free trial lets you test it out on your tablet, and you can cancel at any time, the same as any other app from the App Store. I imagine Apple is threading a needle here: As Logic Pro for iPad is almost entirely equivalent to the $199 Logic Pro for Mac app, this pricing splits the difference between subscriptions (which I usually don't like) and the fact that the market has spoken; few want to pay $199 for software confined to a tablet. It strikes me as fair, and the free trial and easy cancellation make trying it out risk-free.

Logic Pro for iPad requires an iPad with at least an A12 Bionic SoC running iPadOS 17.4. For this review, I tested a prerelease version on an iPad Pro with 2TB of storage, a cellular modem, and iPadOS 17.4.1. I also used a third-party USB-C-to-3.5mm headphone adapter (I bought this one, but any should work) and tested the app using Audio Technica ATH-M50X and Sennheiser HD 280 Pro headphones, which sounded great throughout the test. The minimum install is just under 1GB, but you'll need 31GB for all the instruments, loops, and other free material.

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Relearning the interface on the tablet is tricky if you’re used to the desktop, but it makes sense for the touch experience. The app opens with a home screen with options for creating new projects (either with Track or Live Loop views), accessing new Sound Packs, starting interactive video lessons, and cueing up prepopulated Live Loops Grid templates. It also has shortcuts to two demo projects from Ellie Dixon and Take a Daytrip, both of which are useful to open up and play around with to get the hang of scrolling between tracks, viewing sections of the large mixing boards included with each, and opening instruments and effects boxes.

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Create a new project, and the main view looks a lot like the desktop version of Logic Pro, albeit with touch-friendly icons and full multitouch support. The tracks dominate the top right portion of the screen, and you can pinch zoom in and out or tap on a region to see editing options. The transport sits on top, and the track info is on the left. The bottom portion can switch between the mixer, edit windows, and playable instrument interfaces.

For the latter, you can select from a piano keyboard, drum pads and triggers, chord strips, and a fretboard with strings you can tap or strum. Resizing the window also modifies how some of these look and how much playing surface you get. The screen is responsive enough to convey a modest level of touch sensitivity; the piano can tell if you're pressing the screen harder or softer, which is enough to get you rolling and save you tedious minutes of editing note velocities all the time. The recording and editing tools are all in different locations than on the desktop, but they have the same names and make sense for the touch interface.

AI Session Players

The big news for Logic Pro for iPad is its AI-powered Session Players for keyboards and bass. These join the original Drummer, which has been revamped with new styles and presets, new Drum Kit Designer mixes, and no more personalities (bye, Kyle; we hardly knew ye). At first, I tried testing the Session Players by emailing some audio tracks to myself the way clients often do, but I couldn’t figure out how to download them from Gmail in a way that let me load them into Logic. Eventually, I just set up a desktop Logic Pro project with two prerecorded vocal and ukelele tracks and opened the project on the iPad.

Next, I created a Global Chord Track for the song from start to finish. Logic Pro can't analyze an existing guitar or keyboard track for its chord structure. This isn't a huge limitation when you're working on your own stuff. But if you import someone else's tracks to work on them, you can’t add an AI Session Player without taking notes on your collaborator's chord changes. I also made a drummer, a bass player, and three keyboard players. It took some fiddling to get the regions to appear in the right spots and then to size them all correctly.

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The default results were like inviting musicians on stage to join you and do whatever they wanted. It was a bit of glorious cacophony but not right for the song's feel. So I dug in and started tweaking the players and sounds. For example, I tweaked each region's pattern numbers to ensure the accents were happening in the right spots. I took away the left hand for the keyboard players most of the time, as the upright bass handled that on its own. I also made the piano player pick up the intensity as the song went on. I brought a rock organ player in for the middle section before the second chorus, and I put in stops everywhere to give the vocalist a few beats for accents where she typically stops strumming the ukulele and just sings.

Crucially, after some futzing around, I figured out that you can adjust each track to "follow" another track to get the rhythm right by popping up the Pattern dialog; the toggle is below the numbered list. I instructed all the players to follow the ukelele strumming and then got rid of the Swing percentage I was adding to try and approximate it manually. Suddenly, everything gelled perfectly and locked in. The result sounded like a full-blown band. And because I had the “complexity” dialed up quite a bit, it sounded like a good band, with some nifty interplay between the AI upright bass, the recorded ukelele, and the AI drummer with brushes. Not bad, I thought, especially since I didn't play anything. I felt so talented!

ChromaGlow and Stem Splitter

The aptly named ChromaGlow is an excellent compliment to the shimmering ChromaVerb but in the compression and dynamics department. It presents a simple interface with a single knob in the center, but there's hidden complexity. You can choose from five models: Retro Tube, Modern Tube, Magnetic, Squeeze, and Analog Preamp. Each model changes the function of the central knob.

Additional controls along the bottom let you toggle and adjust the low-cut and high-cut filters, including the slope, frequency, resonance (the sharpness of the peak), and whether it's pre (before) or post (after) the ChromaGlow effect itself for each filter. I tried the Analog Preamp, and I liked it better on the Roots upright bass than the default Squeeze; it pays to experiment. You can get all kinds of vintage flavor out of this plug-in.

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Stem Splitter is billed as a way to rescue old demo tapes or Voice Memo recordings and extract actual mix material to work with. It separates the track into four pieces: Vocals, Drums, Bass, and Other Instruments (guitar, strings, keyboards, etc.). You could also use it to learn complex instrument parts or make dance remixes, with the obvious nod toward respecting copyright in these cases. A few other DAWs have this, most notably the budget-priced Acoustica Mixcraft.

To test it, I did what you're not supposed to do with Stem Splitter: I used it to pull apart an array of commercial tracks and separate them into stems. The results were pretty astounding. It's more accurate than Acoustica's version, with fewer artifacts. You still get some moderate phasing and chorusing in some vocal instances, and pulling out the drums also takes a little bit of sibilance and the legibility of some words, but not always. The results are easily good enough to extract what you did on an old recording or demo—and, in most cases, remix it into something else.

Instruments, Recording, and Mixing

Almost lost in the glitter of the AI assistants are their accompanying new instrument plug-ins, which you can also use on other tracks. Studio Piano offers three different multi-sampled and modeled piano sounds, including a one-mic version and the ability to blend the mono and stereo mics differently, adjust the amount of pedal and key noise, and add as much sympathetic resonance as you want. All sound much better than the go-to Steinway sample in Logic, and the Concert Grand is especially dynamic. I was taken with the Soft Cinematic preset. The upright sounds are fun as well.

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The new Studio Bass plug-in offers six electric and acoustic instruments that sound full and fat, with plenty of character. The basses have their own knobs for dialing in anything from roots, rock, and jazz to growling '70s Rickenbacker and '60s Motown. The upright bass is a monster; you can dial in the fret noises, dirt, and grit to your heart's content.

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Like Logic Pro for Mac, the iPad app contains hundreds of other instruments spanning synthesizers, drums, guitars, electric pianos, organs, orchestral instruments, ethereal textures, and arpeggiated sequences. Thousands of royalty-free loops are also available in a variety of styles. All are cued up simply by dragging them to the Tracks area, and you can browse through them according to categories using the sidebar on the left or run specific text searches, including by the name of the Sound Packs you may be interested in from the home page.

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You can record with the built-in mic, and it's surprisingly decent. Still, you'll want to hook up an audio interface for professional-quality tracking with instruments and microphones or a proper MIDI controller to play more detailed keyboard passages. But a big part of the appeal here is simply holding the iPad with headphones and using the on-screen keyboard, drum pads, step sequencer, fretboard, and so on to do everything.

The bottom of the screen is also where you access the mixer—just one of the many massive leaps from GarageBand, which has no mixer view. Here, you can access faders, pan kobs, inserts, sends, busses, mute and solo buttons, and insert effects plug-ins. You can also simultaneously automate movements for multiple tracks and edit all the plug-ins visually.

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Tap a plug-in, and it opens up a compact Tile view that you can expand further or crunch down to show just the essentials. The Tile views make mixing on the iPad a pleasure in a way you can't get with the desktop Logic Pro. Otherwise, almost everything is here from the desktop, including the terrific Channel EQ, Compressor, ChromaVerb, Adaptive Limiter, the new Mastering Assistant added in Logic Pro for Mac 10.8, and more.

I also tested Logic Pro with the Magic Keyboard and the Apple Pencil. I didn't take to the Magic Keyboard because I know the desktop version so well. The cognitive dissonance of trying to use the keyboard while not having all the usual shortcuts and tool icons in the same places just made it more complicated. On the other hand, drawing in automation curves with the Pencil is terrific; all you have to do is tap the Automation button and Brush tool, tap a track, and start drawing. Imagine the time saved over recording (and fixing) fader movements! However, even automation via the screen is pretty good because the iPad supports multitouch, so you can record it for as many faders or dials as you have fingers.

Limitations

Despite its tremendous power, Logic Pro for iPad lacks a few key features, most notably Flex Time and Flex Pitch—two powerful features from the Logic Pro Mac version. The app played tracks with these flawlessly from the desktop Logic Pro projects I tested. But you can't edit any of the markers or, more importantly, start new tracks from the iPad and edit those. The iPad does support Smart Tempo, but this could be a sticking point for anyone working solo on the iPad Pro, as surgical time and pitch correction in a DAW have become table stakes in recent years. The iPad does have the Pitch Correction plug-in, which generates good results for what it is. Until Apple adds Flex Pitch, you can still do in Logic Pro for Mac or use a third-party surgical pitch iPad app such as Vocal Tune Studio ($19.99), although I haven't tested it.

Logic Pro for iPad also lacks a notation view and Spatial Audio support. Although you can score a picture by hooking up with someone using Final Cut Pro, you can't import a standalone video file and add it to a session to score it directly.

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Roundtripping between the iPad and Logic Pro for Mac mostly worked well in my tests with new projects made in either app. I say "mostly" because I ran into several bugs involving the AI Session Players while testing a prerelease version, but all should be fixed by the time you read this. Projects with third-party desktop plug-ins, such as Kontakt 7, will open but not have those plug-ins, of course, and if any projects happen to contain pointers to audio files not in the package folder, those tracks won’t populate correctly either. These are expected behaviors, and you can remedy them on the desktop by bouncing everything and saving it as a new package before collaborating with someone (or yourself) on the iPad. Amazingly, Logic Pro for iPad does support third-party plug-ins using the Audio Unit Extension format (AUv3), which you can bring up by searching that term in the App Store; look for more of these as time goes on.

I did run into some other limitations, though. For example, Logic Pro for Mac projects using the multi-channel Producer drum kits can’t be opened on the iPad. Several of my projects threw a “can’t open” error because it doesn’t begin on 1 1 1 1, a common way for people to structure their projects to give themselves some lead-in time. Even some Apple plug-ins like Sampler and PedalBoard can't be edited from the iPad, although they're retained for compatibility and do play correctly. But in one desktop project, the iPad version played a Choir Pad patch as a default sine wave in Sampler, which didn’t sound right.

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Most of the above won't matter much; it was all from me trying to break the iPad app by opening and testing lots of existing projects. The point of Logic Pro for iPad isn't to go in and transfer all your existing work to it. That's part of its use case, sure. But the real purpose is to make new music in an intuitive and inspiring manner and on a professional level to the point where you don't need a desktop DAW.

If you want to bring up a desktop session, just be ready to bounce a few extra tracks to audio first if they don't open correctly on the iPad, and you'll be fine. The more I used the iPad app, the better I got at the touch interface, even though I was essentially "unlearning" decades of keyboard-and-mouse behaviors. I can only imagine what someone can accomplish with this from the get-go.

Verdict: A Portable Super Studio

The competition on the iPad isn’t even in the same league; the closest apps are probably Steinberg’s Cubasis and Image-Line’s FL Studio, which are stripped-down, iPad-specific versions of their excellent desktop DAWs, and there's always GarageBand. But nothing else offers you anywhere close to the power of an entire desktop DAW, in something you can hold in your hand and use just about anywhere. Contrast that with a laptop, where you must sit it on a table, boot it up, and mess around with a pointing device. All Logic Pro for iPad needs now is Flex Pitch and Flex Time (or equivalents). But even the way it stands now, used within its limits—and they’re pretty high—Logic Pro for iPad could get you to the top of the charts.