Editing Rhythm Guitars w/ Flex Time For Project Perfect Tempo

Great demonstration of Flex Time for sure, but it should not have had to have been this drastic. I'm glad you pointed out at the end how much editing work it would take to salvage this recording. The real lesson to learn here is that the guitarist clearly did not pick a tempo or use any kind of rhythmic reference to lock to, and can't play in time well enough with out it. They're just winging it and paying no attention to the tempo chosen for the song. I could hear the time shifting within the first few beats--even without a click (and you can see it in the waveform as well). What's more frustrating is that they then apparently blame the issue on Logic (Logic isn't "keeping up" with me) which they clearly don't know how to use well enough to edit their own performance... Hence this video. This is a fundamental issue with a lot of people getting into music. This supposition that you don't have to practice and develop BASIC musical skills because software will just "fix it" for you. Like becoming a competent musician is somehow "gatekeeping." Yes... I have heard people make that ridiculous statement when confronted with their lack of basic skills. What the guitarist SHOULD have done, is gone back and re-recorded this part with a tempo reference to lock to. Even if they weren't perfectly in time, it would have been a much less invasive edit. They would have then also gained experience in developing their timekeeping skills. Not to mention having significantly less to edit, since everything else would have been built on a solid foundation. I understand that some people don't like playing to a click... however, there is an unwarranted stigma surrounding the use of a click as though its "cheating" or "destroys the feel," and yet people will happily quantize and auto-tune their performances! But the reality is, when you are recording alone, layering instruments into the recording, you HAVE to have some kind of tempo reference... whether its a click, a Drummer track, some percussion part or even another recorded part that is IN TIME. Otherwise, you get THIS chaotic mess that requires a lot of editing experience and potentially hours of editing. Or that may not be salvageable at all. Relying on DAW tricks like this to "fix" significant problems... like not being able to play in time... is a crutch. A shovel used to bury the functional issue that needs to be addressed. Playing in time is a fundamental musical skill every musician needs to develop in order to make music well.

Your videos are always helpful, but this was JUST what I need! Thanks!

Thank you!! Learnt a lot from this video, super helpful! Looking forward to the next one!!

Very nicely done, thank you 🙂

That's such a great tutorial. Thank you so much for making things easy to follow yet very informative.

I agree it’s a great feature. My years-old Apogee Duet supports this and I use it all the time. When the time comes to replace it, this is among the features I will look for.

This was super helpful, thanks!

Super helpful!

Fabulous video, well done on explaining so well

Great video, super helpful, entertaining and fun!

I've used flex on rhythm tracks to varying degrees of success. Sometimes it works, sometimes it sounds bad.

Very good explanation! Thx

Very informative and I like your presentation. Thanks. 🙏

I love logic (and I’m looking forward to next week’s lesson) but warp mode in Ableton saves me hours of this post editing work. Both softwares have great pros and cons, and I tend to use both for the same song. Great lesson btw; thank you!

you are the man May I be allowed to give another solution to this guitar track, obviously the guitarist here is competent but often when laying down distorted guitar tracks such as this with only a metronome click as a guide you can lose it especially as in this case you get into the groove and get a little carried away,, the best solution or prevention to this is: Lay down a rough 44 rock drum guide track and play along to that. Sometimes the simple option is the way to go and I really felt sorry for you as it looked like a real headache of an edit I think for this particular one as the old saying goes prevention is far better than cure looking forward to the next video with anticipation but on the beat

Excellent video as always Chris! What I’ve been doing is take a performence like that into a new project, let Logic figure out the tempo variations project-wide (Adaptive Tempo), activate Flex Time and then remove all the tempo changes so it flexes to one tempo. Then possibly bounce that. Might be a nice alternative to (a large part of) the manual stuff.

I have tried this and failed. This helps so much. Thanks!

This was really helpful! Could you please do one for more complex guitars such as lead guitar parts or fingerpicking patterns on acoustic, and more specifically how to align these things when doing a double take(for hard left and right pan)?

Thanks for this video. I see what I have been doing incorrectly previously when I tried to do flex time. I never removed the tempo information. I thought logic would handle all this automatically based on a less than perfect performance. Thanks for clarifying. Looking forward to next weeks alternative

100K! CONGRATS!