See, y’all thought I was kidding. Check this out:

…or how about this:

These are two of the synthesizers available to me inside Logic. Oddly enough, I know what the ADSR thingies are (see if you can even find them) from my days of playing with my Ensoniq keyboard: Attack, Decay, Sustain, and Release. I used them on the Ensoniq to modify and save my own string sounds, since until quite recently electronic musicians apparently thought string sections were for playing lush, quiet, slowly building “pads.” Trying to get one of their string sounds to play a quick run, or a sharply attacked chord, produced only sad little gulps and wheezes.

Of course, I don’t have to build all my instruments from scratch, and for my eventual purposes with this software, I doubt I’ll ever need even to modify them. I can just select one of the hundreds of voices/patches/instruments/whatever they’re calling them these days and go with it.

I’ve struggled through half another lesson in my Logic book, but at this point I’m not sure exactly what I’m learning. I seem to be looking at all the available windows for editing the “audio regions” and “MIDI regions” and all that stuff. I think the book is assuring me that we’ll dig in and learn exactly what they’re all for later in the book. I think.

Of course, even though learning this software is one of my goals this summer, I recognize that what I’m really doing is avoiding producing sucky music and lyrics for Day in the Moonlight. I hate this part of the process, even though I know it’s inevitable: you just have to produce the crap and get it over with.

But I hate producing crap. I hate it, hate it, hate it.

37 more days to go.