What is tempo in Logic Pro 9?

Question

Hi,
I am a professional musician with 30 years of experience and academic background.
I seriously consider buying a LogicPro. I'm familiar with it, I've been frequently using it in the recording studios.
I have a simple question, yet it has to do with the thinking behid LogicPro9.
In all the documentation it has been rather poorly covered:
What is a tempo and how and where it connects to a measure definition?
OK, one may say, 120 BPM, for example, or whatsoever, and that's fine.
But what is *a beat* and where it is getting defined?
In "Metronome Settings" there is a sensible approach:
A click tone for the bar setting (which reflects the barline)
A click tone for the beat setting (which reflects the beat definition)
A division definition + (optional) click tone for the division.
However it is only for clicking purpose.
To my surprise, if one tries to set a tempo in global tracks that relates to the the beat definition for a song section, confusion occurs. Tempo happens to be a hard-coded dogma. How come?
A trivial answer is: it has to be a quarter-note. But here is no such definition in music practice or theory. This happens to be very false for beats other than quarter notes, such as half notes, eight notes, or, let's say dotted quarter notes, to name just a few. One may not frequently find such designations in mainstream pop music, or music for commercials & games, but music in general is full of such designations, for example film music, classical music, chamber music…
Beat is a fundamental concept in music and has to be definable as such. Tempo has to relate to the definition of a beat, not to a fraction of a mainstream prejudice or unquestioned practice.
What if one wants to use Logic as composition tool for making a serious piece of music? Where to define such a tempo, so it that both, signature and tempo read and behave correctly for a respective section, without having to do manual on-the-fly calculations, and without misdefining, let's say a 60 BPM tempo for a 2/2 measure as a 120 tempo, or a 2/2 measure as 2/4 measure, for example?
Thanks in advance.
S

Answer 1

I'm not entirely sure whether I'm on the right track here, but I'll give it a shot.
The glossary in the Logic manual has this definition of what is reffered to as a tick -
'The smallest unit of timing resolution in a MIDI sequencer. In Logic Pro, this is 1/3840th
of a note. Logic Pro can go down to single sample accuracy (at sufficient zoom levels) for
edits and positioning, but the MIDI protocol is not fast enough to support this.'
So, the value (number of ticks) of a whole note, crotchet, semiquaver, whatever, is in fact variable, according to the tempo of a piece of music. This doesn't matter - the important matter is whether that particular resolution issufficient for all normal musical purposes; I can't imagine anyone finding that it isn't. It has to be like this because that's how digital processes work, by manipulating numbers on a basic level - the program does that for you though, you don't have to calculate anything yourself !
You can easily insert tempo or time signature changes in Logic (you don't need the global track to insert time signatures). The score facilities are very extensive in Logic, although I don't use them myself much; certainly capable of use a serious composition tool, as many musicians have and do.
I think you may be thinking about it in perhaps a little too much detail - the best thing to do is get Logic and get stuck in to doing something and work it all out as you go along - there is a lot to learn, so be aware that it will take time and a bit of head scratching and purple language if you're that way inclined, but it will very probably pay off in the end.