Logic Pro for iPad Keyboard Play Surface: Creative Chording Layout

The Logic Pro iPad app offers creative ways to engage with MIDI input and music creation. Most of these tools were already available in the desktop program, but the touchscreen interface brings a whole new dimension of playability to music production.

This post talks about the Keyboard Play Surface. I found it interesting that the app allowed me to pull up multiple keyboards in vertical alignment. In the portrait orientation, I could even get four keyboards stacked on each other. I started thinking about ways that I could use this to my advantage.

Obviously, playing a piano on a touch screen with your fingers has its drawbacks. Velocity information is difficult to control, and playing anything remotely complex or realistic might be possible, but it’s hardly ergonomic. Any somewhat serious music producer or composer can purchase an inexpensive MIDI keyboard and solve most of these problems.

So, instead of treating this virtual instrument as a less-capable keyboard, let’s think about what this application can do that our MIDI keyboards can’t do.

If we reduce the concept of a keyboard down to simply presenting playable notes in ascending and descending order, we can see how this format would be useful just from a practical standpoint—higher notes to the right, lower notes to the left. I engaged scale mode to remove notes that weren’t needed for my song and slid the keyboards to align in different positions creatively. Each presentation and arrangement made different musical ideas more accessible.

I found the most satisfying layout was when the keyboards were aligned in thirds with the normal scale mode activated. This offered several easy chord configurations with plenty of flexibility to move between chords and easily find creative voicings. I loved the opportunity to stumble across new sounds and chord combinations that weren’t intentional. Below is a brief video showing how I set up a chording layout in the key of C for exploration. I explain in steps following the video how to set it up for yourself.

Three keyboards are arranged to play a root position chord when vertically aligned. The darkened C keys show the scale root note, and the three keys aligned in the middle are greyed because I’m playing them in this picture.

How to set up this configuration (video below)

Open any MIDI instrument track and choose the Keyboard Play Surface. Extend the window to reveal multiple keyboard banks. In the surface settings, select the wide keyboard layout (or whatever you prefer) and enable key names since you won’t have the black keys as a reference.
Activate scale mode with the root note being whatever key you are using for your song. I used the key of C to keep it simple.
Using scroll mode, slide the three keyboards so that they align with each other. You can use the transpose button to move the overall range up or down. I found it useful to align all the keyboards at C3 since this is a fairly mid-range pitch center.
Now, slide the top two keyboards to the left so that the bottom C3 is below an E3 and a G3. The vertically aligned keys will play a root position chord. Explore different note relationships to discover unique chord voicings. I listed the three major chord inversions with a graphic below.

Understanding Scale Mode

A normal keyboard shows all twelve tones in the Western musical system, but any given key will only use seven of those tones. When playing a real piano, you’ll have to avoid the notes that are out of the key or scale to play music. It’s worthwhile to have all these notes present and understand each key according to the arrangement of the normal piano, but the iPad Play Surface isn’t as comfortable to play.

Scale mode takes all the black keys out and only shows the notes in whatever scale or key you’ve selected. This means that it’s not possible to play any notes outside of the key.