Slow down drum tracks and retain quality?

I need to slow down a recording with live drums (no click). The song came out way too fast and I can't sing it properly! I have only tracked drums and bass guitar (which can be redone), the rest of the tracks are scratch tracks.

 

I know Logic offers multiple ways of slowing down audio, but which one would retain the highest quality on the drums?

Rhythmic works best. If the drummer is rhythmic, that is.

I would use slicing as it doesn't time stretch the audio....thus not pitch adjustment necessary.

Slicing cuts the audio material at transient markers, then shifts the audio while playing each slice at its original speed. No time compression or expansion is applied to the shifted audio. Any gaps that occur as a result of shifting the audio can be filled using the decay function. Slicing is a good choice for drums and percussion and comes with the following parameters:

 

Fill Gaps: Turns the decay function on or off, allowing you to fill any gaps that occur between sounds as a result of shifting the audio.

 

Decay: Sets the decay time between sounds, because no time stretching takes place to compensate for the gaps.

 

Slice Length: Shortens each slice by a percentage value. Shortening slices can be helpful for removing unwanted pre-attack sounds from the following slice, or to create a gated effect.

 

You can also slice an audio region at transient marker positions, splitting it into multiple regions. You do this by Control-clicking the audio region, then choosing Slice at Transient Markers from the shortcut menu.

I haven't had pitch problems when using Rhythmic. Slicing always did trash the cymbals. I might have to look more closely at its Fill Gaps and Decay parameters, though.

Another vote for slicing. It won't always work perfectly, but is made specifically for transient/attack sounds and as volovicg described, has some options to fill in gaps caused by the slowing down tempo. My only addition would be that you should listen to the drum tracks separately to check the algo created the markers in the right spots, right in front/right in the beginning of the drum sound, so that it doesn't create a flam or eat the attack, which can happen sometimes.

 

I'm really liking and using Logic's Flex stuff a lot these days, as while it's most of the time just fine enough quality, regardless of the qualit you can really quickly try out different tempos that way, and hey, in your case, who's to say that you can't speed it back up to the original tempo after recording the vocal? (unless of course you want to be able to perform the song live, too)

I also prefer slicing in most cases. It doesn't time-stretch, so there's no distortion. On the other hand I don't normally use "Fill Gaps" which does (or at least can) create weird artifacts. That's an issue only when slowing down, not when speeding up. My solution with cymbals is to carefully craft some kind of reverb to add a tail to them so they don't stop abruptly. Depending on the mix, it might not be such a big problem that the cymbals don't sustain for their whole length. I've been in situations where it was clearly an advantage.

 

One thing I've learned over the years is that there's no absolute best tool for one situation, each song/mix/production is different, so ultimately you have to experiment and find whatever works best for you.

Thank you all. Sorry for the boneheaded question but HOW do I do this? I have a live multitrack recording with no click track and no tempo map, and I want to bring it down 10% in speed. The Time Stretch menu doesn't allow to do this. Do I have to create a tempo map and then somehow reduce the tempo?