I’ll never forget how hard my jaw dropped when Flex Time was first introduced in Logic Pro.
It was like the laws of reality didn’t matter anymore. Play a bit out of time? No problem! Pull the timing of that recording around like play-doh and fix the performance!
Flex Time freed us from the endless pursuit for the perfect take. Instead of recording take after take after take, all you needed now was one really good take.
And let me tell you – the difference between perfect and really good is actually much more lenient than you think 😉
Thanks to Flex’s different time-stretching algorithms, no recording is ever fully committed to tape. Which is pretty amazing, don’t you think?
So in today’s video I wanted to share how awesome Flex is. In the video I dissect:
- What time-stretching is,
- What the 6 different shades of Flex-Time are, and
- What each Flex Mode is best suited for
Enjoy!
This is such a cool feature! Would love to see how it works on cleaning up fast, shreddy, lead guitar licks!
Great video, Chris – I took notes (literally!). Many thanks.
A shame Flex Time isn’t avail. for MIDI; I’m sure there’s a good reason. Hmm… that makes me wonder if any LPX features exist that could be employed as a kind of work-around…?
Anyway thanks and keep up the good work!
Hey Charles, thanks so much! I assume Flex isn’t available for MIDI because MIDI automatically adjusts to tempo shifts. Also, you can Quantize MIDI notes quite easily. Check out my post about using the Paintbrush Tool for MIDI. I dig into how to Quantize for writing MIDI: https://whylogicprorules.com/paint-brush-tool/
This is great. Thanks so much. I’m a little (actually a lot) you mixed up multitimbrality and polyphony and/or smushed them together. In this case it did not detract from your main point, but, again, just surprising for someone giving instruction in this area. For any viewers who were not aware: Polyphony is number of simultaneous individual notes (irrespective of number of instruments), which is what is relevant here. Timbrality is the number of different tone qualities, for all intents and purposes, the number of instruments.
Woops: missing word “surprised” after “a lot)”
Hi Jared, thanks so much for clarifying. This video is from a while ago, so it’s hard for me to remember what you’re referring to. But most likely I may have mentioned the word “polyphonic” in relation to Flex Time.
I’ll be sure to be more clear in the future regarding the differences. Thanks again!