What's the best way to use Logic's Environment with Pulsar ?

[dblbass]

Finally received Logic Platinum in the mail ! (Although the stupid mail-order vendor sent me 4.8 after a two-month wait, even though I was assured on the phone I would receive 5.0. Fighting this out with them now.)

Struggling to get the first few steps up Logic's learning curve, and the so-called "Environment" is the biggest hurdle I see at first. I may not quite "get it" yet, but it seems like its main purposes are:

1) to provide a virtual model of my setup beyond the sequencer, so that other parts of the program, mainly the arrange window, can interface with the world beyond in a powerful but simple manner. It seem like the environment is where I draw a picture of my studio setup for the rest of Logic to talk to. The environment itself is where actual interface with things beyond Logic is driven from.

2) to also enable additional setup of processing functionality, such as with MIDI signals.

(Does that sound about right, or am I missing it still?)

Assuming I'm close to right so far, the bit that still has me confused is the proper relationship of the Logic Environment to the Pulsar environment.

Logic's Environment seems to be aimed at a hardware world, with multi-channel MIDI interfaces and hardware synths with Sysex and hardware MIDI links. In my case, I am use only Pulsar samplers, synths, processors and effects (or host-based, VSTis, etc.)

My MIDI keyboard controller is plugged into Pulsar, Audio In from mics through a little Berhinger Eurorack into Pulsar converters, one stereo track at a time, otherwise everything is either in the Pulsar or in the PC (sequencer and VSTi).

So what should my Logic Environment look like? Should I try to have a device in Logic to represent each device in Pulsar? Can I have Pulsar synth presets show as patchlists in Logic? STS programme pool? I'm still confused here.

My Cubase composition and production style has been to work first mainly in MIDI, then gradually render track by track to audio back into the sequencer once a work has pretty much taken shape. It seems like the Logic environment could be a more powerful way to implement this approach, but I can't seem to grasp how to relate Logic and Pulsar devices.

I've searched PlanetZ forums archives to no avail. Can anyone Logic experts shed some light for me. Any insights or tips gratefully devoured !

[Gregory]

I'll try to answer one question for you about the environment. In general, you'll want to create a "multiinstrument" in the environment. There's a little Mini-menu in the Environment window you can pull down to create those. This will give you one block of 16 MIDI channels. Call it Pulsar or whatever you want to and then drag it over your tracks window's MIDI tracks and it should create 16 tracks of Pulsar. That's in general. MIDI setups have a bunch of variables depending on whether you're in Windows or Macintosh, etc.

I know you can create software ports for the Sequencer Dest/Source modules to Pulsar that can give you multiples of 16x channels so you could create several Multiinstruments in Logic but I don't know about your computer and how you'd set that up. On Macintosh you would have an OMS Creamware Driver to do it but Windows is a different land to me.

[garyb]

you don't HAVE to do anything with it if you don't want to.there are many ways to do things in logic.i have found it best to have a task to accomplish,then it starts making sense............