teCHNEWS IN ASSOCIATION WITH POINT BLANK’S PRODUCTION TIP OF THE WEEK turN YOur MACBOOK iNtO AN MpC!


LOGIC CAFÉ’S PAUL YARROW INTRODUCES HIS NEW CONTROLSKIN FOR LOGIC PRO


Point Blank Online School brings you weekly fresh nuggets of music production advice courtesy of the team of pro producer course developers and tutors… This week they talk to Paul Yarrow (Loic Café), inventor of the ControlSkin:


“The ControlSkin is designed to make creating music with Logic Pro intuitive and hands-on in a similar way to using controllers such as the Akai MPC or Native Instruments’ Maschine. Simply place the ControlSkin over your Macbook, Macbook Pro or Apple Wireless keyboard, install the included patch fi le for Logic Pro and your computer becomes a dedicated control surface and MIDI keyboard. It is a total re-think on the way Logic Pro can be used as a music production tool and gives users of Apple’s fl agship DAW software the ability to make beats on the fl y wherever they are. My demonstration in the video above takes you through just some of the features which show how the ControlSkin can dramatically streamline your Logic Pro production workfl ow. The colour co- ordinated layout and organized transport on the ControlSkin are designed to stimulate quick response use of the keys with minimal necessity of reading or memorising key commands. The Demo begins with two loops: a simple drum loop and a bass


loop cycling over four bars. One of the features on the ControlSkin is the ability to chop a sample loop and split it instantly over the caps lock keyboard in much the same way you can slice samples in the Maschine or MPC over the 16 drum pads. I chop and re-play the sample to create my own edit in seconds. An EXS24 instrument track with the sliced bass loop spread over the piano keys is instantly created, enabling me to play the edits back on the caps lock keyboard. For fi ne tuning the Piano Roll and other Logic Pro edit pages are easily accessed at the push of a button and the ability to punch in and out of record make putting ideas down at the moment of inspiration as intuitive as ever before. A dedicated cycle section on the ControlSkin makes editing selected areas in your arrangement quick and easy, alongside single button access to the tools menu. With a visible caps lock keyboard, the QWERTY keyboard suddenly becomes a powerful performance tool with selectable velocity and octave controls. In the demonstration the User 2 key is pressed to


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