It’s all of the older, heavily skeuomorphic ES stuff from decades ago that made me run away from wanting to use a DAW.
But here I am now, checking out Alchemy and Sample Alchemy for the very first time. The pared down, fairly clean UI is surprisingly pretty good. 
Don’t give up hope. The biggest problem in Logic iOS (in my humble opinion) is how they completely took a pass on designing UI for half the native plugins, opting for a simple list of properties instead. It’s such a usability nightmare that they have to go back and give them some UI eventually. When they do, you can bet they’ll bring it over to the Mac as well. So I go to sleep at night telling myself chances of a modernized ES2 have never been better 
Ironically, being new to daws, once I really decided to commit to learning one, I went with Ableton first. Because of the Push 3 and all. And it made zero sense to me.
It felt like a typical product from the age when UX design was a matter of packaging virtual workflows in a fashionable way and aligning boxes with wires to make it look tight and professional, but not spend too much time thinking about how the brain actually works. Just trying to understand the patterns in Ableton, hurt the few cells I had left in my brain. As soon as I tried to move from triggering clips and loops to writing songs, it just fell apart for me.
Whereas Logic just clicked right away. Once I decided to let it click, that is. In terms of interacting with it, Logic felt miles ahead from Ableton, which to me felt like something that was hot 10 years ago. As far as design goes 
I know it’s the shit in town still, and it’s Ableton and then nothing and then the rest and I’ll get persecuted for this post now. But here we are.
Also, I’m a classically trained musician and tend to always think music is linear - because the end result is a start to end experience, no matter how you look at it - but the way to create it is everything but. So there’s that too, I guess.
Alchemy is not appreciated enough. For enthusiasts on a forum people will typically rave about 3rd party plugins. So will I because yeah things like Dune 3 or Diva are going to get you insane depth. But Alchemy still has like 3,000+ patches with plenty of parameters on each. Of course not everyone is capable of just picking something they like and running with it. For some there isn’t any second thought - others feel they need much more to achieve their goals.
Thank you for this. You articulated perfectly my complete inability to wrap my head around Ableton Live. And not for lack of trying. I’m not knocking the software or its features in any way. I know it’s taught in schools and young people seem to pick it up quickly. I don’t doubt any of that. And yet, it continues to make me feel dumb and miserable when using it. So eventually I moved on to something else.
I think if I decide to use it I’ll ignore the thousands of bundled patches and just start from scratch with my own samples. I can see it’s capable of a lot but the architecture of the synth engine doesn’t intimidate me in itself.
Also, for funny inspiration: https://nilamox.com/mancave21/apple-alchemy/
What I’ve learned is that both have their strengths in my workflow. I alternate between Logic and Ableton based on what I’m trying to accomplish. They are very different in their workflows that it’s hard to compare them aside from they’re both DAWS.
New Logic update is pink cookies in a plastic bag getting crushed by milkshakes. Hot sex on a platter. Mama se mama sa mama coo sa.
Don’t let the limitations of others distract you from mastering this portal into the lands between harmony, melody and rhythm. Seriously, there isn’t a better value in pro audio software for Mac users. Not even close really.
Chord Track with the Session Players, (boost by routing thru plugs like Scaler 2, various fav synths) is magically delicious. Endless immediate sound explosions, full arrangements, improv, remixes, sketches randomized, generated or audio sample inspired arrangements done in a few minutes when you route Stem extracted audio into Scaler and back into Chord tracker. Owwwwww.
Gotta see if I can get Scaler EQ to also follow Chord and Sig tracks for dynamic EQ’ng. 90% sure it can which will mean sicko mode mixes.
Holy surgical rhythmic harmonics and/or inharmonic frequency modulation. It would take a very talented engineer forever to do the same with Fabfilter EQ and it still wouldn’t be as accurate.
Stem Sep with Sampler, Beat Breaker, Sample Alchemy and the Chromas are surgical dome shots for rhythmic music of any genre.
Bruv, it accurately splits everything neatly onto its own tracks where you can Flex it into midi and manipul-la-jig-it into whatever tf.
What a time to be alive.
Better tools, more time for Elden Ring 
I read this with a gear YouTubers thumbnail face.
I’m going to trial Logic (as an Ableton user) just because I’ve been looking for autotune and stem seperation and in Vst format they are quite expensive.
Did anyone tried the new AI based tool inside Logic for extracting instruments/vocals? How does it compare to other available tools?
several posts above there was a bit of discussion on it as well as some results:
Vocals were also successful in all my tests yesterday, posted one example above. Synths/other are not quite there yet but what doesn’t get separated on the first run will get caught on a second of your separated stem.
I tried with a variety of genres, old and new. Even things like retro video game music. It’s really good. I consider myself someone who has decent hearing for when I transcribe things, but when I did some stem separation yesterday on some of my favorite stuff I realized there were in many cases things going on under the covers that I had no idea were even there…
For vocals separation I even found some hot mic moments that made me go WTF
Breathes new perspective and understanding into your existing conventions.
It sounds much better compared to other solutions.
It’s also extremely fast on my M1. No crazy wait times.
Welp, considering the above result is essentially the goal of creative writing, I guess I accomplished what those goofy YouTube thumbnail faces do (click/watch/engagement) with just words. 
A video review mentioned that the vocal stems sometimes had artifacts. RipX allows you to manually edit out artifacts. I’m assuming Logic doesn’t offer these types of features and that RipX might still be better for vocals and maybe instruments.
How do you get Scaler 2 to provide the chord track for the Session Players? This sounds very interesting!
I’m using the Session keyboard tool to generate samples for sonic textural fun in Drambo:
I’ve used several DAWs over the years & Logic is the one I like the most. I have tried with Ableton, several times, but just don’t gel with it (should probably sell my license at some point - LOL), mixing in Ableton is just horrible 