Apple’s new Logic Pro update brings AI-powered Session Players feature

Apple hosted its Let’s Loose event on Tuesday where it unveiled the new iPad Pro and iPad Air models along with the Apple Pencil Pro. But amid all the hardware announcements, the Cupertino-based tech giant also introduced a major update to the Logic Pro app. The new Logic Pro for iPad 2 and Logic Pro for Mac 11 will now offer new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered features and new tools for mixing tracks and beats. Notably, the company also unveiled an update for the Final Cut Pro app.

The Logic Pro app, the company’s in-house digital audio workstation (DAW), has for years been a vital platform for users to mix beats and create professional-quality tracks. With this new update, Apple has added more features for music lovers to play with. In total, there are three new features – Session Players, Stem Splitters and Chromaglow. The first of them is powered by AI.

Users have been seeing and using the Drummer feature for years. It is a virtual session player that can play drum beats in a wide range of styles and techniques along with the track. Apple is now expanding this feature by adding two more virtual session players, a bass player and a keyboard player. All three of them are grouped as session players. The tech giant revealed that like the drummer, the other two players have also been developed using AI and sampling technology. There are eight bass players to choose from and each of them can be further customized using parameters such as slide, mute, dead notes and pickup hits.

Keyboard Player is another virtual session player that comes in four different styles. It comes with chord tracks and studio piano plugins that can control block chords, chord voicings, extended alternate harmony and more.

Apart from session players, the stem splitter is another unique feature. It will allow users to split and extract any audio recording into drums, bass, vocals and other instruments. Once separated, individual effects can be applied or new parts added before reassembling them.

Finally the company has also added ChromaGlow. Based on its description, this feature appears to be a saturation-style controller that can add five different styles of reverb with varying amounts of sound saturation. Apple says the feature will add “surreal warmth, presence and impact” to any track.