I’ve been digging in deep with Flex a lot lately and have learned that Quantize-Locked editing is not what many of us had thought it to be.
Quantize-locked audio ensures that the transient markers of Q-reference tracks are applied at the same location across a group of tracks. In the case of drums, the transient marker for a snare selected as the Q reference is applied to the kick, overheads, etc for locked editing and quantizing.
While this works well for Slicing and okay for some other modes, unfortunately this falls apart with Polyphonic mode.
Sure, Quantize-Locking ensures transient markers of Q references are applied across a Polyphonic group. But as I’ve found, it doesn’t mean edits will result in perfect phase coherence.
Just try hard panning your stereo guitar tracks, group the tracks together, and then quantize with Flex. I bet you’ll hear the sound of the guitar shift around. Throw Voxengo’s free Correlometer on the Stereo Output and watch the signal go in and out of phase at different frequencies. An unfortunate bummer!
The workaround I’ve found is to bounce multimic signals together into a new file/region, then edit the new region with Flex.
I hope this helps!