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April 22, 2020

How to Find Tap Tempo in Logic – Plus: How to Lock in a Riff With Smart Tempo After the Fact

 

Creativity waits for no woman or man! And sometimes you just have to get the riff recorded before you lose what could be gold.

But recording first and worrying about Tempo later can cause some problems down the line.

For example: Let’s say you recorded a MIDI piano part or drum beat into Logic using the metronome. And the Project Tempo happened to be at 120 bpm.

But soon after you want to start laying down other tracks. So now you need to figure out the actual Tempo of the riff.

But that MIDI piano part or drum beat isn’t going to play nice when you start changing the Tempo. And that’s because MIDI relies on the grid for note placement.

So you bump the Tempo from 120 bpm to 85 bpm…

And your MIDI track starts playing back suuuuuuuuuper sloooooow.

What the heck? Now you have to re-record your idea. Which just duplicates effort.

(Sidenote: if you ever do need to change the Tempo of MIDI performances after the fact, there is a way to lock MIDI into place:

  • Right-click the region you don’t want changing tempo
  • Then in the dropdown menu go to SMPTE-Lock > Lock SMPTE Position
  • Change your Tempo
  • Right-click that region again and go to SMPTE-Lock > Unlock SMPTE Position)

In the past it made way more sense to figure out the Tempo first, and then record to the Metronome after.

Unless you’re a human metronome though, the Tempo of your riff could be anyone’s guess!

So instead of guessing random numbers, why not tap in your Tempo? You tap, tap, tap a key on your Mac’s keyboard. And Logic can adjust the Tempo to match what you have in mind.

But Logic’s Tap Tempo isn’t immediately available. Once you have it set up though, tapping in Tempos is a breeze.

However – why not skip the tapping part and get right down to recording your idea?

Logic can sort out the Tempo afterward with Smart Tempo. And then you can lock in one consistent Tempo easily. And this can work for both MIDI and audio recordings.

In today’s video, I’ll show you how to access Tap Tempo, plus a Smart Tempo alternative workflow.

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Filed Under: Recording, Smart Tempo

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Comments

  1. Joe says

    April 22, 2020 at 10:10 pm

    This was another great video. I’ve had plenty of issues where timing was out of whack. Mostly will use flex to fix timing issues which in itself has a tendency to produce googly eyes for me. Thank you for this video it is a great help.

    Thank You,
    Joe

    Reply
  2. David Bilides says

    May 14, 2020 at 3:09 pm

    Subscriber, learning a a lot from these videos, thank you. Question about smart tempo and compound rhythms, which it doesn’t seem to support . Example, I have a file in 9/16 (4+2+3)/16 and there are no options for that (or 11, 13, 15, etc.) in the drop down menu. Is there a work around for this? Right now, I’m beat mapping the whole thing manually. I was able to use your auto/quantize method above for a simple 6/8 piece; it worked great.

    Reply

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