Update – this post is about Logic Studio 8, there is a new version (9) and now I write a blog about it. www.logicstudioblog.com
I began working with computers and music in 1987.
A lot of people ask me how I started with computers and music, this is a little story of how I have navigated through technology changes in the last 10 years.
I would squat at a Mexican-American couple’s home where they had a brand new Atari 1040ST computer and well… One of the best things about the 1040 is that it had MIDI ports, the ports we use to connect to electronic musical instruments. But I never got them to work with my keyboards.
Then in 1991 the IT room in my high school had a relic from the past, a Commodore 64 and well… you could somehow program it to produce beepy little songs. The process was lenghty and you could only enjoy it after you had finished working. And by the time I’ve finish programing any song it was time to close the lab. Another thing was that the IT master didn’t want me hanging around touching their stuff (even if it was the very old stuff).
At music college in 1996 we would have McIntosh machines with Cakewalk, they were equipped with headphones and not available all the time, you would have to take turns or register at the counter to get a chance to program your MIDI songs.
Finally in 1998 I got my hands on a Windows machine (courtesy of my uncle Jorge) and started producing with Logic Audio V 3. 
Logic had only the name because it didn’t make sense to me at all. It was confusing and the user interface was like a labyrinth and the frustrating thing is that I would spend hours reading the manual before achieving anything musical at all.
Why? I think it’s only because Logic was in the beginning German software and at that time German software engineers had a very different way of building user interfaces, in their view software didn’t have to be easy to use nor pretty, it had to be efficient and stable.
But wait…
When I finally understood it enough to begin producing music with it something really, really nice happened.
Apple (yeah the iPhone Apple) bought Emagic, the company that made Logic Audio and soon after they discontinued the Windows version of Logic.
It didn’t matter as I continued to work on Windows with Logic Audio but soon after, other options came into the Windows market and I switched to Cubase in 2002.
Cubase was easy to use and it presented me to other ways of working with audio and MIDI but I still was hoping to maybe one day comeback to Logic…
That day has come:
Apple finally released a version of Logic that is both powerful and affordable, best of all it comes in a bundle of great applications. Although I’m not a fan of unboxing photo sessions I’d like to share the first impressions I got even from unboxing it.
You can see here that it came in a big, hefty box (the package weighs 5 kilos!) and it features a set of books which are the guides to: Logic Pro 8, Mainstage, Soundtrack Pro 2, the Studio Instruments and Studio effects.
I’m used to reading technical manuals for music instruments and software but some manuals can be quite long, just the Logic Pro manual this time around is a whopping 1133 pages long!
This time though, there will be no steep learning curve as in the core Logic remains the same. It’s like Photoshop, only in the sense that the way it works remains intact, you just get more features in each new version.
