Best way to find tempo and Lock to Grid!!!!

[greeneye]

I have a 4 minute track produced on cd from someone. I imported the track into L8 and now I want Logic to find the tempo and lock the track to the grid to record vocals and do remixes with everything synced and in time with each other... How can I do this? What is the easiest way?

Thanks

RD

[L Hall]

Personally, I haven't found a better way than the trial/error/ear approach. Here's what I do:

 

I do a tap tempo after listening to the song to get in the tempo ballpark.

 

If the song has some could downbeats close to the front that can be seen in the waveform, I'll trim the audio file back (non-destruct of course) to that beat and set the whole file at bar one. then I adjust the tempo so that the downbeat for bar 2 lines up. Then I check every 8 bars or so to see if it drifts and adjust accordingly. Once I've got the tempo, I move the songfile back up a few bars and peel the file back so I see all the front.

 

If the song is not recorded to a click and drifts alot, the only way is to create a click manually and use the beat mapping function which works really well.

 

There may be a more automatic way to do it I'm not aware of, but this always works for me.

[Ashermusic]

I actually did this with Flex audio quite well the other day.

 

1. I brought in 5 drum tracks from a PT session.

2. I used Detect Tempo on the Hi-hat and it came up with just a little under 130;

3. I set Logic to 130 and soloed the kick. I turned on Flex and set the quantize to the smallest value which was 1/4 note.

4. I played back against the click and it started dead on but as the cue went on, got out of sync, probably because there were tempo changes in the original.

5. I cut it into smaller regions and did the same thing, and then voila, all was locked to the click.

6. I followed the same process for the other tracks. Took about 5 minutes.

6. As a test, I created a tempo map featuring a slow ritardando over the last 8 bars. All good.

 

BTW, several LA composers got together the other night to run some tests on audio files in Flex with large tempo decreasing. The Polyphonic algorithim consistently sounded the best, no matter what the material, monophonic, drums, etc. It is, however, the most CPU intensive.