I submitted a shortened version of the feedback below to the Logic Pro team. Here’s my email: We need to help them make Flex Pitch accessible. It’s very unacceptable for it to remain inaccessible for so many years now. They had a character limit, so I had to omit a lot of details, but hopefully, they will follow up with me. You can also submit feedback to the Logic Pro team by going to the Logic Pro menu with VO+M and selecting ‘Provide Logic Pro Help’ under the menu. Thank you, hopefully, they will release an update to allow us to use this tool effectively.
Hello, Flex Pitch is one of the essential tools for vocals in Logic. However, it is mostly unusable with the keyboard. Therefore, it is impossible for blind musicians to use most of the features in Flex Pitch. Here is a brief list of the features we cannot use.
1: Manual pitch correction. We can navigate by transient and use the MIDI In function to correct the pitch at the playhead, but that means we can only correct pitches to A440, making them perfectly in tune, which is not always ideal. It would be fantastic if we could navigate between pitches with the left and right arrow keys and adjust them by, for example, 10 cents with the up and down arrows, or a cent with command+option+up/down arrows. It would also be great to hear the pitches as we navigate or adjust them.
2: Other adjustments such as vibrato or pitch drift are completely inaccessible. VoiceOver cannot read or interact with these elements at all, which is a huge problem. It would be great if we had these tools also accessible by the keyboard. For example, Command Option 1 could allow us to adjust pitch, and Command Option 2 could switch to vibrato adjustment view, so the arrow keys could control different parameters depending on the selected tool.
3: It is not possible for blind users to select pitches and transpose them individually. It should be possible to select pitches using Shift with the left or right arrow keys. VoiceOver should also announce which pitches are selected as we move between them. This would make many workflows possible. For example, if I want to create vocal harmonies and need to transpose all selected pitches by four semitones, it should be easy to do. Right now this is not possible, which forces blind musicians to rely on assistance from a sighted producer or use other tools such as Melodyne.
Please implement these features, as they would greatly enhance many musicians' workflows. These improvements would not only benefit blind users but also sighted musicians who prefer using keyboard shortcuts instead of dragging notes with a mouse.
I am paying the same price for this software as sighted users, so I should be able to use it just as effectively in Logic. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions.
Comments
Re: Midi in at playhead.
Some synths, e.g.Surge XT, let you do microtonal tunings via Scala. I wonder if, for instance, you set Surge to use one of the makamlar, if using midi in would let you correct to one of those notes? There's some way to get Logic to use Scala files as well I think, but I didn't particularly understand it. Anyway I know that only potentially solves one problem. But it's at least something to consider as a possible workaround.
thus us moot
this is all moot for me. having absolute makes this feature unnessessary. it should be accessible for those without absolute pitch, but for me, personally, there are more features of macos which need attention first. iPhone mirrering in macos tahoe for example. it was working in saquoia, broken in tahoe, bit through beta testing, i just might lend a hand in restoring accessinlity feature.
Accessibility toggle suggestion.
Perhaps one in the advanced features pane of logics Preferences which confirms whether or not you have absolute pitch before making flex-pitch inaccessible.
@Daniel Angus MacDonald
I do have perfect pitch and that has nothing to do with needing flex pitch or not. What if i need to tune/correct another vocalist? No matter what everything in logic should be usable for us, and also iphone mirroring should be accessible as well. But they are completely different things and we should be able to have it all
Also microtonal stuff.
Yeah, perfect pitch doesn't really enter into this, particularly if you're doing a chunk of non-Western music, or really anything that's not 12-TET. There's a whole set of related systems of music from the Balkans and Greece, through the Middle East, and into India that uses various kinds of microtonal intervals, we call them microtonal from our perspective naturally.
Flexibility
I'm on the verge of switching from Logic 10 to Logic 12. In 10, flex does everything I need it to do, although I don't bother with individual pitches beyond using the "human" feature to randomize pitches a little. More to the point, however, I believe you will have better luck using other third party pitch correction plug ins. I use a couple, and they've been perfectly accessible, although, again, I don't bother manually changing pitch, instead using the "human" feature described above.
Perhaps you might think about checking out the Waves pitch correction plug in? Or some other third party plug in? also, you might check out using pitch shifter if you want to mess with vocal pitches. I use it to drop certain instrument parts an octave, such as turning my bass flute into a contra bass.
@Bruce Harrell About the Waves pitch correction plugin?
What additional features does it offer compared to the standard pitch correction plugin I had in Logic? What could be a reason for me to pay for this plugin? Thank you so much for the recommendation! Regarding Flex Pitch, even if I don’t use it frequently, I believe it could be made much more accessible and implemented very easily. Therefore, Apple should take it seriously and find a solution regardless. I even summarized my opinion on how the implementation should work.
i see your point
yes, you're right. absolute pitch doesn't acomadate everything. like transposing a clairnet or trumpet, two instruments that are not concert pitch. for this, fiex pitch would be useful. yes, we should have it all. I mean, we pay just as much for logic as anyone else, and for that innical pricepoint, logic should be fully accessible. logic 12, is a subscription, if i'm not mistaken, it is a requirement to subscribe to apple creator studio, which has it's unique accessible issues. downloading it VoiceOver keeps repeeting, apple creator studio insteaed of progress indacators, as expected. so, yes, apple has lots to do, and there pro apps, need work. finalcut seems to work well, though i don't know much of it. it's $500.00 and xhange, so it's exspensove. I herd it is accessibile from an apple accessiblity advizer, though they didn't go into datale. so i bought it when i had money, and subscribed to apple creator studio when that was available. was plainning on getting instduction from a filmily member in that industry, but there are busy doing there job, they don't have time. so udemy is my next root. anyway, logic is different now, the sound lybary is like iPadOS, and you can't download all instruments and sounds all at once. you've gotta do it indevidually for every5hing. i think apple did that on teh mac, 'cause logic for iPadOS doesn't seem tp be selling well. and maxpa logic is a subscription now, so apple has an insentive to maeke it fully accessible. logic 12.
microtonal and many things
ALthough i have perfect pitch, flex pitch can not do all my needs.
I love Logic because most of it's interface is accessible, but it's a shame that still Flex pitch is not accessible