Apple released Logic Pro 12 at the end of January this year, with a number of additions and developments including more AI session musicians, enhanced sound library, step sequencer enhancements, and (finally) a chord recognition tool.
Chord ID
Chord ID is what a lot of people have been asking for — and probably more.
Ever since the global chord track was introduced, we’ve wanted a way to have logic automatically take tracks and create the chords. In Logic 11, it wasn’t to be, and we developed workarounds to try to make it a bit less painful…
Then Apple intros Chord ID.
If it had simply been MIDI track to chord track, that would’ve been something. After all, Logic has always known what chords you’re playing.
But no — they added it for audio as well. And as far as I’m concerned that’s a complete game changer.
It’s certainly a massive time saver for anyone who wants fast chords generated from their own and other people’s music — whether that’s MIDI or audio.
It uses AI so you do need a Silicon-based Mac in order to use it — if you’ve got that, away you go.
How It Works
Just play your MIDI or import an audio track and then either drag regions to the global chord track, or right-click and and choose “Analyze Chords”.
Once your Mac has worked on the music, you’ll get standard chord symbols at the bottom of the processed region, and also in the global chord track if you dragged it there.
That chord track is then available to be used for other features which can use it, such as the session musicians.
First Impressions
Even on my Mac mini M1 it’s a pretty nippy process.
I began by playing some ordinary piano chords into a MIDI track and then converted it. Perhaps unsurprisingly given that it was already telling me what I was playing as I was playing it (as Logic has always done) it got everything right.
That said, it wasn’t super keen on doing much except root position chords and sevenths — perhaps I hadn’t challenged it enough.
There aren’t any settings (as far as I can see) which tell it how complicated chords should be (I did stumble across a massive guitar chord dictionary though). So I was a bit concerned that I was going to get kindergarten chords for some of the jazz numbers I was itching to try it out on.
I needn’t have been concerned.
First track I found was Bob James’ “Angela” (the theme from “Taxi”). I imported the audio file, dragged it into the chord track and — boom! Some pretty awesome chords going on in there.
Now I genuinely don’t know if they are absolutely the correct notes as Mr James wrote them — but they play well. And include all sorts of funky chord colourations and inversions.
Presumably, within reason, more is more — Logic’s AI is likely using the bass as a strong guide to the root note of a chord, hence the inversions, and putting together chord colours such as sus and so on.
I worked my way through a few other songs I’d wanted to try, from pop to folk. It always came out with more than passable attempts. Occasionally there wasn’t enough going on in the track and it seemed to miss a chord change or two — but as a basis for learning, jamming, composition and the like, it’s a brilliant tool.
It happily added chords when arpeggios were played as well.
Room for Improvement
A slight frustration with very busy melodies isn’t down to the AI but just the overall user interface — with a lot of chord changes, if the horizontal zoom is quite low you’ll get chord names cut off, or even invisible. Yet if the horizontal zoom is high, everything scrolls past too quickly — not great if you’re using it to jam or record other parts using those chords as a guide.
It would be nice to have the ability to export the chords or have them displayed in some other way in the position the changes happen. This isn’t so much of an issue with music containing fewer rapid chord changes.
A way to generate a quick lead sheet would also be great, but again, that’s not part of the chord recognition itself.
As with a lot of Apple’s software, improvements come over time. This is a big step up from what we had in Logic 11, and I’m very grateful it’s there, free (assuming you already have Logic Pro that is) and ready to go.
Yes, there are other tools and plugins which can do this kind of thing, but Apple has put it front and centre, ready to go as soon as you need it.
I’ll definitely be using it a lot.
