Any Logic ninjas out there that can help me with an alignment problem?

The Lounge General Discussion
#1

I’m hoping someone can point me in the right direction.

I’m doing my first collaboration with several other musicians, and have an alignment problem in Logic that I suspect is caused by latency (although maybe I’m wrong).

Specifically, I did some drums and recorded some electric piano in Logic and sent the bounced file to someone. He loaded it up in an old Korg multitracker (Sound on Sound) as a reference track and recorded guitar and bass parts along to the file I sent him. He output the stems of those and sent them to me, and at the same time, sent a combined version of his parts and mine to a sax player that recorded his part using that combined file as a reference. The sax player sent back stems of his part along with a new combined file that included his sax part for reference.

When I loaded up the stems in Logic, everything seemed slightly off. I first thought I was lining things up incorrectly, but when I looped a section of the final reference track the sax player sent me and my original drum and electric piano parts, his file is sped up by somewhere less than a 16th note I think, so less than a couple hundred milliseconds, but I’m not skilled enough to narrow it down beyond that.

Is this a common issue when working with multiple collaborators on a project that are all using different machines/software? Is this likely caused by someone using an old multitracker machine? What’s the best way to resolve this in Logic (flex & follow?)?

If this was all stuff right on the grid it would be easier to deal with, but it’s live musicians. The guitarist in particular said he usually plays slightly ahead of the beat, and wants to preserve the feel of his playing, so I’m a little worried about making things too stiff if I just snap everything to the grid (although I’m not even that sure the best way to do that here).

Any Logic ninjas out there that can give me some advice on how to proceed or troubleshoot this? I don’t really work with live musicians much or do much in the way of collaborations, so I’m way out of my depths here.

Thanks!

#2

Interesting… one question is, what about the guitarist’s part, do you have their combined version (with your tracks and the guitar+bass, but without sax) as a reference? Would that be helpful to determine if things got out of sync at the guitar stage vs the sax stage?

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#3

If it’s latency (offset from grid is constant), simply select the offending stems and nudge them all together until they align with your grid.

If it’s a sample rate or sync issue (offset from grid increases as time progresses), you might have to snap the content of the stems to the grid.

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#4

Yeah, I need to check if I have that file. I think I do somewhere. I also need to make sure there’s not some tiny degree of latency between the guitar and bass stems he sent me. He’s kind of a loose player so that’s not as easy of a task as I would hope it would be, and nobody likes to start in the “1” it seems. Lots of little flourishes leading up to it, so you can’t just drop the parts on the bar.

I spent a good chunk of my weekend troubleshooting this, so my ears are shot and I’m tired. Haha. I think I need to put it aside and come back to it, but I hate having an issue lingering in the background.

#5

Thanks! I suspect it’s this.

#6

This sounds like a headache haha, good luck man!

The easiest thing to do is ask the both of them for a bounced file of the entire thing together the way they recorded it. That way you can at least determine if any timing offset is caused by technical issues or is part of their artistic intent/bad playing.

If you notice the tracks are completely off and sound dissonant, it could be 44.1 vs 48 going wrong somewhere in the chain.

If things are just nudged a bit you can just nudge it back a little using their complete bounces as reference.

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#7

Thanks, man! A headache for sure, but I keep reminding myself it’s a learning experience. :slight_smile:

So I’ve managed to get the sax players stems aligned properly.

For the guitarist, I suspect something went wrong in his use of that finalize function on his multitrack, as it was the first time he was using it. It turns out I don’t have a file of his parts together so I’ll get him to redo his stems and send me a file of both parts together for reference. Definitely seems like the easiest way.

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