Here lies the whole problem with Logic: the left hand side of the screen, that somehow manages to ignore just about every one of the most basic rules of user interface design.

Here we begin with that most hideous of Logic's wares... the top left box.



You press on the various words, and it brings up the following box:



Now, what is the point of this? If you 'select' any of the words in the new box, such as "Q-Swing" or "Q-Strength", the box disappears and nothing's changed! So what's the point of bringing up the box?

My next bugbear... The "Icon" 'button'. (Is it a button? What do I call it?)



You press on it, and it brings up a huge tall list of icons, but if you let go of the mouse button, the list vanishes.
Great!
Now try scrolling to the bottom icon in the list - only takes about ten seconds...

Why not:
a) Make the list stay up until you press the mouse button again, and
b) Make the list appear in a rectangular box, so you can see all of the options on the screen at once?

Also, what is the use of using tiny little icons that have no real meaning in today's world of VSTis? If you have a synth VSTi with 800 voices, what is the point of having at most two or three icons that represent a synth, if you are using more than 3 in your song? Why not just use words like everybody else does?



If you double click on the 'icon', you can then input a number, as shown below:



My two ways listed above ( a) and b)) would have been much easier...



Next is the midi device select 'box' (or whatever you want to call it, since it doesn't conform to any known Windows standards...)



It brilliantly cuts off the first words of the name of the midi device...
At least it sort of works normally.

Again, you can double click on it, and it brings up a dialogue box with a number in it, a dialog box that is so badly designed it's unbelievable.



Anybody going to be entering 12 digit numbers in here? Why does the dialogue box extend over the right hand side of the grey box it lives in? Bad design...
Why not have a button that says "Midi device - Audigy" that opens up a window that displays all the midi devices, without having to hold the mouse down? (Like 99% of other programs use...)



Here we have the Volume parameter.
No up and down arrows. That would be too easy...
Click on the value and it changes to that hideous dialogue box (or whatever you call it).
Sorry - double click on it, and it changes to that dialogue box. Single clicking doesn't work. Great! Why not? I have no idea...



Then we have the 'transpose' function.
Well, it looks like the rest of the adjustable parameters.
But single clicking on it does nothing.
Hold on, double clicking on it does nothing too!
Pure genius!
So I guess it's a game of "Guess which words you can actually click on, which ones you have to double click on, and which ones are just there for show"...
Oh no! Sorry, my mistake...
If you click in just the right place... (i.e. directly under the first digit of the 3 digit volume number above) you can bring up a box with seven transpose options.
And you can click and drag (on what was originally a blank space on the bar) up and down, to alter the transpose value.
Would it not have made slight sense to put the value "0" there in the friggin' first place, so you knew just where you had to click, or drag, or whatever?
Obviously not. Logic users are meant to be mind readers. (They must be!)
Oh, I forgot to add - in a piece of programming genius that confounds all human logic, when you drag the value up or down to zero, it doesn't say zero (that would be too easy) - it disappears!
Sheer brilliance...




Next we have the velocity parameter. It works in the same (stupid) way. I say "works" - I really mean "doesn't work" as it's designed completely wrong.
What's the most likely thing you'd like to see in any sequence, especially when first using a sequencer? The volume levels of all the tracks, and the patches used for the midi tracks.
I can't see any of that on the Logic window.
Only the velocity info. for one track.




Next we have the "Lim" function (presumably the keyboard start and end values?)



This again 'works' by dragging the mouse, but if you double click you get:



Up 12? I don't know. After double clicking on it a few times, I got all sorts of odd combinations coming up:
i10, i50, "10, etc.
Meaningless drivel!



Then we have the Velocity Limit (I presume) function.



Hey- I finally got the hang of it! Just click and drag up and down. Still a bugger to get used to.





Then we have the Delay function - another 'hidden' value jobbie. Great! Very intuitive!





I can't remember how I opened this window. But look at the scroll bar on the right hand side.
You'd expect to be able to scroll down a bit, right? Judging from the size of the scroll bar...
But of course, you can't, there's nothing further down, so the scroll bar shouldn't even be there...
Actually, it moves the contents of the window up and down a few pixels, but why? It all fits in the window anyway!
I remember how I got this up now - double click on the word "Auto" at the bottom of the 'control box' (or whatever you want to call the box of death in the top left hand corner of Logic...)
But this is yet another example of atrocious program design!
It starts off saying "Auto", so you hold the mouse down on it, and can change to something else, like Organ.
If you then want to bring up the Organ window, you have to double click on the word "Organ". So if you then want to change to the "Bass" window, you have to click and hold down the word "Organ", select "Bass" from the list, let go of the mouse button, and then double click again on the word "Bass".
Sheer genius.





Next we have the track view window (or whatever it's called).
You would have expected that if you clicked on one of the names of the instruments, that it would bring up a box with a choice of instruments, right?
WRONG!
It takes you into the 'Midi Screen From Hell'...
So how do you change the instrument you're using? I still don't know...





Do you want to solo a track? I can only see a 'mute' button.





The first rule of GUIs: don't use meaningless icons if you can use a meaningful word instead.



What do all those icons mean?
I have no idea. There's no balloon help either...




The only one that's obvious is the one that uses a WORD! (Sysex).
Still, why not use Japanese characters instead? That's just as easy to learn as a group of meaningless icons...



Yet another example of atrocious programming on a £200 program.



Look at the way that box doesn't even display the entire lower characters!

Perhaps now you can see why I gave up with Logic... Try Music Studio Independence instead - look at how easy it can be, if designed properly in the first place...

Here's how it should have been done...



Some examples of waveforms: