What’s the deal? I feel like I don’t see enough love for Logic’s Smart Tempo feature online.
Unfamiliar with Smart Tempo? It’s only the best thing to happen to musicians who don’t want to play like a robot to a click track.
In fact, with Smart Tempo the grid and click are merely an afterthought.
Back in the old days of Logic (and current days of other DAWs), if you had a new awesome riff to lay down, you’d have to:
- Load up Logic
- Spend about 10 minutes playing along to the click trying to figure out the tempo of your riff
- Forget why you even liked your riff…
- Remember why you liked your riff!
- Record a bunch of takes trying to lock in with the click track so you can lay more parts down later
This procedure was even MORE important with Software Instruments and MIDI!
Because if your MIDI performance wasn’t recorded to the right BPM, good luck trying to adjust the BPM afterwards…
(BTW: you can SMPTE Lock your MIDI regions to stop tempo switches from destroying your performances)
But in this new, enlightened age of Logic & Smart Tempo, simply:
- Load up Logic
- Plug in and record your part with Smart Tempo
- Logic analyzes your performance and creates a custom tempo map (with all its humanity)
- Loops, Drummer, and everything else will magically play along to your performance
- You eat a sandwich because that was way too easy
Man, I love Smart Tempo 🙂
It gets even easier than that though. And if you’re using 10.4.2 (and above), Smart Tempo will work with MultiTrack Sets and MIDI.
So in today’s video, we’ll take a deep dive into the magic of Smart Tempo.
PLUS: learn how you can take a performance that wasn’t recorded to a click track, and use Smart Tempo to lock it to a consistent tempo.
Logic pro X needs to enable ghost notes (shows the other instrument’s notes that are playing). As a person who primarily draws on DAWs to make music that is the one thing that is needed to compete with the producers of other DAWS.
This is just such an incredible feature I can hardly stand it. I was a Pro Tools engineer for 12 years before I saw Logic Pro for the first time, and back then it was version 7. I abandoned PT right afterwards and have been sold on LP ever since.
Without a doubt, the recent upgrades have made LPX better than ever these days, and so noticeably different than version 9. I like the new GUI and I have converted many other engineers to LPX once they see how easy it is to use and how many great features are included in the program.
Furthermore, Chris just does an amazing job at highlighting these unique features and bringing them to the forefront. With more than 30 years in this field, Im having more fun now than I have ever had. Theres never been an easier time in the history of recording to make music.
I agree as well even though what I said before was a little critical of Logic Pro. Logic Pro is now for us mutants trying to push the boundary on every level. It is so fun right now. It is so ahead on every level, all they need to do is add ghost notes for us DAW drawers.