Logic 9 Review – Flex Time (Timeline Shift)
By Paul Dakeyne
| Posted in Music Technology
In this, the first of a small series of more in-depth review posts about Logic 9‘s new main features, I’m looking at the long awaited ‘elastic audio’ style algorithm and tool, ‘Flex Time’. I’m assuming that most readers will be relatively familiar with Logic already, though I’ll try and keep all explanations as succinct as possible for those not yet acquainted with Logic Studio.
Prior to the introduction of Flex Time in Logic 9, any moving of beats and samples within an audio file had to be done by cutting out the slice and shifting it to the new position. Similar, any time stretching actions to change the tempo of such a file had to be done in DSP within Logic’s [fastly becoming archaic] Time and Pitch Machine. With the ubiquitous Ableton Live ‘warp’ capability, alongside Digidesign‘s ‘elastic audio’ feature, Apple had to do something, and damn quick – and boy have they!
So let’s check it out.. Firstly, dragging an audio file from the media browser on to an audio track within the arrange page now automatically renames the track as per the original audio file name – nice touch already. The initial try out exercise is to reposition the real time vocal delivery of a singer (file position illustrated left). When choosing the Flex Tool, a dialogue box pops up and offers the user a range of options to choose the best Flex algorithm the source material requires. These are:
Slicing: No time compression or expansion applied – good for drums and percussion, Rhythmic: Rhythm guitars & keyboard parts etc, Monophonic: Basslines and other similar melodic performances, Polyphonic: (most CPU intensive) Based on the ‘phase vocoding’ method, good for chords, piano, choirs and full mixes, Tempophone: Emulates the historic Tempophone time stretch sound with accompanying artifacts usually attributed to granular synthesis, and finally, Speed: This includes ‘pitch change with time’ effects.
Here’s the audio file of the above image – Straight Vocal – PLAY
Using the Flex Tool, I clicked on a vocal start transient singing the word “To..” (appearing around beat 4, bar 45) and dragged it to the right, thus extending that note and shifting the phrase “Me..” onto it’s new position bang on bar 46. As a subtle final touch, I clicked on the decay of the end note and dragged that out a touch to the right again, so slightly extending the legato content of the performance (these changes can be seen in the image left). This is the audio file of that change – Re-Positioned Vocal – PLAY
Nice huh? Boy could I have done with this tool when remixing Soft Cell’s ‘Tainted Love’ in ’07 – for the repositioning of Marc Almond’s vocal there into the new 4/4 time signature, 130 bpm remix (from 6/8, 142 bpm), I had to cut the heck out of the vocal file and shift everything around like that – with Flex Time, that problem would be solved and creatively actioned in a fraction of the time, and with more accuracy over the real time performance nuances – fantastic!
Using a similar process to the above, but getting into ‘creative abuse’ mode, you can have some real fun with vocals (image left) etc, and get stuff like this appearing – Extreme Vocal – PLAY
The behaviour of the Flex Tool takes a little bit of getting used to, especially when working within ‘sliced’ (eg) drum parts – you have the hover option of selecting a flex marker (anchor point) between, on, or (into 3′s) surrounding a transient and its adjoining counterparts (safely limiting time compression/expansion to this constrained area). Logic indicates these time expansion and compression movements with the effected region turning Green (compress), Orange (expand) and Red (excessive!) in colour. My advice is to study the chapter about this in the online manual with the programme running, and like everything, all will become second nature with practice.
Tags: Audio Editing, Flex Time, Logic Studio 9, Time Stretch
Wow that’s superb, what a great feature!
Richie