Logic Pro 8 Smoothing out a manually played click

[JeffreyHowardPearce]

Hello,

I have been trying to work out a solution to this for a while. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

I often need to make click tracks to accompany audio that has been recorded free time. I do this so a drummer can play along later.

Unfortunately my click always sounds a little choppy. It is natural to speed up and slow down, but not to the extend that my click is. This is something that the drummers I use always are quick to point out, and I know its true. My click tracks are very choppy

Given that....
1. It is more important for my work that the drummer has a natural sounding click than that he is completely locked into the original audio
2. That the audio that I am making the clicks for is not suitable for beat mapping or "audio to score"
3. That I am creating my click by tapping along on my keyboard

.... has anyone come up with a solution for smoothing my input. I would love it if Logic could do something like create an average distance between every 16 clicks that I input, and I have a feeling that this is there somewhere. I simply haven't found it yet.

Any help, ideas or tips would be appreciated.

Thanks!
Jeff

 

[Tangra]

I think you must try to make a precise manual "Beat mapping" of your project, after that you can easy draw a short "Click" midi region and loop it in the Inspector, so it will follow your temo map very smoothly.

 

[peterlemer]

I use a different technique, which you might find useful:


I open the tempo track and, using the metronome click as reference, insert a tempo that is the closest to the first bar or more. As the song progresses, the audio will fall out of tempo, so I go back to a suitable point and change the tempo to suit. AFter doing this for a while, you will get the hang of it, and means that Logic's own click can be used, with the bonus that anything played in can be scored, since it all now related to Logic bars.
I've just worked on Cat Empire's 'THe Rhythm' this way as my son wants to perform it at school. These guys recorded without a click, and my son needs a printout so I created a pretty good tempo map - it looks a bit like a drunken tron ride 🙂

 

[Eli]

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "choppy". Once you tap in your click, you can go in and manually tweak any specific hits in either the piano roll or event list to "smooth them out" ie: adjust there placement so they are falling where you want them to.

Other than that, you might want to try out a cool new, much overlooked, Logic 9 feature called Beat Detection. Under the global Options menu, go to Tempo ---> adjust tempo using beat detection. The advanced section allows for calculating the average across multiple tempo changes.