Are you wanting to take advantage of software instruments like the many pianos, synths, bass and drums available in Apple’s Logic Pro, but do not have access to a hardware Midi Keyboard? you can use the Virtual Keyboard, which uses the computers regular typing keyboard to emulate a midi keyboard, and this screen reader friendly tutorial will Walk through how to use it with VoiceOver.
Logic refers to this as the musical typing keyboard and you can toggle it on or off with Command+K. When the musical typing keyboard is active, your home row on the keyboard (A, s, D, f, etc.) are the white keys starting with middle C. The row above it will be your sharps or flats or the black keys on the piano. This starts with C sharp/d flat on the “W” key. Because the letters “R” and “Q” are not used for sharp/flat, their normal function of starting recording or quantizing respectively can still be performed without toggling the musical typing keyboard off. You can shift the keyboard note range down or up an octave with “Z” or “X” respectively. you may sustain notes by pressing the “TAB” key, and pitch bend down or up by using the number “1” and “2” keys respectively. You may also modulate the software instrument by pressing the numbers “4” through “8”, and turn modulation off with the number “3”. What parameter gets modulated depends on the software instrument currently in use.
As demonstrated in this tutorial, you can take advantage of Logic being set to MIDI merge by default and play in the sustain, pitch bends or modulations after recording the actual musical idea.
Want to dive deeper into using Logic Pro’s Soft Synths? Book a One on One Session and lets get more familiar with everything you can do with this DAW.
