Did some experimenting today with some loops I’d chopped up in Koala and exported for a remix I plan to do of Roxy Music’s “if there is something”.
It’s quite a slow song bpm wise and not exactly on the grid. I wanted to bring the tempo up from about 79 to 87. Here’s what I’ve learned.
You can drag a sample from Files onto a track. In the Tempo context menu you can ‘Analyze Tempo’, then do ‘Apply Region tempo to Project’ which will line up a loop of for example 8 bars to the logic grid. If you open the Tempo track you’ll see this will have adjusted the tempo for the bars that egion covers. What I’ve found is that for shorter samples this is a just a single tempo change, but for longer samples it will have lots of tempo changes as the rhythm ebbs and flows. Before you change this, use the Info sidebar to turn on ‘Flex & Follow” for the region. Once you’ve done this you can remove all those tempo changes the region applied to the project and set the project tempo you desire (E.g. 87bpm). You can do this for many samples.
What I found when first did this and set a tempo quite a bit faster than the original is it sounded a bit crap. I tried using the new Sample Alchemy in Spectral mode and that does a better job of smoothing time stretching and avoids you having to do the above process to get the samples to fit the grid - it has good recognition of sample tempo and loop length. But something sounds slightly off with that sample mode. It probably will work well for some styles but I felt it wasn’t quite right for what I was doing.
You can also use the Quick Sampler to get samples to conform to the tempo you want but after an hour or two fiddling with this I wasn’t that satisfied with the workflow. Plus I like to have the waveforms of my samples on the track to chop and rearrange etc. Call me old school.
So I persevered with the original method with ‘Flex & Follow’. The trick is to set the right Flex mode. Go to the Info sidebar again, for the track this time, and ensure Flex Mode is set to the best option for your sample. Polyphonic is the default and that works well for the sort of sampling I’m doing where there’s drums and multiple instruments. However, it’s well worth setting the ‘Complex’ option underneath which does wonders for smoothing out the timestretching. It turns out after a few hours experimenting that setting was all I needed.
I’m now more than happy with the timestretching ability of Logic Pro for iPad. Now I’ve imported all my loops and got them conforming to the right tempo, I’ll probably convert them to Live Loops to try that workflow for remixing.
I should probably record a quick tutorial on this as it’s simpler than I’ve made it sound. Hopefully some useful info here for someone.
you can now indeed monitor through the ipad speakers, or if you use an additional interface.