At SoundEngine, one of our primary development platforms is Sampler in Logic Pro. Logic Sampler, formerly EXS, is a fast, easy, and deep in its capabilities. Today, we’re starting a series of posts focused on Logic Sampler – its UI, how to use it, what’s “under the hood,” and some tips and tricks along the way. So, let’s put on our overalls and start the Sampler User Interface Tour.

If you’re a new owner of Logic Pro – either by purchasing it outright or by acquiring it with your new Creative Studio subscription – you may not even realize you have one of the industry’s best software samplers in your garage, but you do. Let’s go over how to access it, then dive into an overview of its features. As always, we recommend having this tutorial opened in a side window, and follow along in Logic Pro.

How to get to Logic Sampler

Logic Sampler is sorta hidden away – it takes a bit of “know-how” to find it the first time, but once you do, it’s easy. The fastest way to access Logic Sampler is to launch Logic Pro. If you are launching for the first time, Logic will create a default, blank project for you and ask you what kind of track you want to start with. If you are launching into a project that already exists, simply press CMD+Option+N to create a new track, and you will see this dialog:

Build It Now!

Select Software Instrument on the left, and press the Details underneath that button. There’s a pop-up list of software instruments to select from, choose Sampler (Multi-Sample) and press Create. You’ve now created a new track with Sampler as its instrument.

In a new project, the Default Preset and the user interface for Logic Sampler will appear front and center. If this doesn’t happen, then you need to open the editor for Logic Sampler by pressing on the Sampler button on the channel strip in the lower left corner:

Once you have the primary Sampler UI open, you can open a Preset within it. Next to the Power Button in the upper-left corner, clicking “Default Preset” opens a pop-up navigation menu.

Navigate to App Presets > Acoustic Pianos > 01 Classical Piano. Now that a Preset is selected, we can begin the tour of the editor’s sections.

UI Tabs & the Editors

Right in the top center of the editor are five tabs – Synth, Mod Matrix, Modulators, Mapping, and Zone. By default, only the first three are enabled. Click on Mapping, then Zone to enable them all. Drag the bottom of the Editor window to resize and view all sections opened at once.

The Synth section is not really a synthesizer, but basic synthesis parameters that are available to adjust the samples within Sampler. The settings for Pitch , Filter, and Amp are here. Pressing the Details button in the upper right of this section unveils additional parameters that we’ll dive into in later posts.

Synth Section

Mod Matrix is the wiring diagram that connects all modulation sources in Sampler to all possible destinations. Assign keyboard position, velocity, the envelopes and LFOs, and all the MIDI Controllers you can imagine into the various synthesis and sample control parameters in Logic Sampler here.

Mod Matrix

Modulator

Below the Mod Matrix is the Modulator section. Set the fundamental parameters of Envelopes and LFOs here. By default, there are two Envelopes (ENV 1 AMP and ENV 2) and LFO 1 available. You can add more Envelopes and LFOs via the +ENV and +LFO buttons in the upper right corner.

Mapping

The next section is the Mapping section, where detailed programming of sample assignments – to MIDI Note and MIDI Velocity ranges can be set. In our Classical Piano preset, you can see that there are 6 different key maps – the low notes and high notes of three different sample velocities – that have been assigned in this preset. This section does more than just MIDI Note and MIDI Velocity switching; it offers a ton of features that facilitate the mapping and creation of sampled instruments. We will dive into those in detail in later posts.

Zone

The bottom section of our editing window is the Zone, where sample editing can occur. Here is where you will set Start and End points, Loop mode, and Length, and various other audio parameters that affect the playback of the samples that you’ve assigned in the Mapping section

Other Points of Interest

There are other goodies in the user interface as well. In the upper right section of the Editor Window are the Side Chain parameter, the Window Zoom parameter, the Link parameter, and a small gear icon. The small gear icon provides several very useful programming parameters, including initialization and parameter Copy and Paste from other instruments. We’ll explore the function of these tools as we get more adept at editing within Logic Sampler

High Level Tour Complete

There we are – a complete walk-around of the instrument in the showroom. We’ve checked out all of the shiny bits and are ready to take Logic Sampler out for a spin on the open highway – which we will do next time.

Thanks for reading this – we appreciate your patronage here at SoundEngine. This is the first in a series of posts focusing on Logic Sampler, and we hope to see you here again. Check out our Dexed Owner’s Manual and our K1v Owner’s Manual – they are a set of posts on our favorite, wonderful, free synths.