Setting the tempo for your song - Logic Pro Tutorial

- [Instructor] Now that we have our initial audio track created, let's add some audio to it. Here's where we can utilize something I like to call a song seed. This can literally be anything, humming or beatboxing into your phone, whatever you come up with. And from that seed, we can grow a song. Now, first I want to introduce you to the concept of tempo. Simply put, tempo is the way we mark time in music. And you want your Logic project to map to whatever tempo you decide for your song in a consistent way. That way you can make all the music and all the instruments you use in Logic locked together in sync. The default tempo for our Logic project here is 120 beats per minute and I know our project is at that because I can go up here this little window at the top of our range window and see that it's set to 120 BPM. Now what does 120 BPM sound like? We can actually hear that if we turn on the click or the metronome. This little purple button here enables the click to be audible, and we can hear how Logic marks time at at this case, 120 bpm. It sounds like this. And count it. One, two, three, four, two, two, three, four. So it's marking the top of every measure and it's clicking along with each beat at 120 bpm. Now I made a little song seed of my own. I got inspired and just turned on voice memo on my phone, my iPhone, and tapped out a rhythm that was inspiring to me. Let's take a listen to that and just have it. It's just an MP4 file. It's just an MP4 file I have here in a folder on my computer called stomp dash clap. And again, this came from a voice memo I made on my phone. It sounds like this. (rhythmic beating) Just banging along to a little chair and clapping. So that's a rhythm I like. I'm going to bring that into Logic and we're going to try to make Logic's tempo a line to that rhythm. So you can just go ahead from your finder if you, you know import or export from your phone to your computer, grab this file, drop it right in to a track. I should bring this right into our first track there. Now let's take a listen to this along with our 120 BPM metronome. (rhythmic beating) Okay as you can hear, it's a mess. It doesn't line up at all. The start is in the wrong time. It's definitely the wrong tempo. So let's get these aligned so that we can actually use my little idea in our song. First I'm going to just grab the bottom of the track and just pull it out so we can see it nice and big, and I'll use some of the zooming tools. You can go up to the top of the screen here and zoom in a little bit closer. You can also use command right and left arrows to zoom in. Command right arrow zooms in, command left arrow zooms out. Now the first thing I want to do is edit my little clip here to be right at the beginning. So it's called the downbeat is like the first beat of a rhythm, right? So I'm going to just grab the edge of this region and pull it close. But I want to be really exact, so I'm going to zoom in pretty close here with my key commands and go right up to the beginning of that downbeat. Just like that. Get it a little even, a little more. Perfect. Okay, now that I've done that we can zoom out and pull this region right to the beginning. So now that we've done that, we can use some of Logic's smart tempo functionality to determine the tempo of this audio clip. And the way to do that is to open up what's called the audio editor, and you can double click on the region, pop open the audio editor. This gives us a close up look at our audio and you notice there's three tabs at the top of the audio editor. What we're interested in is the smart tempo. And notice the smart tempo tab has a little button called Analyze where it can actually analyze the rhythm and determine the tempo. That sounds like a good thing. That's what we want to do. And click analyze and notice, it tells us right here that the tempo of this clip is 110. Let me hit play and you'll see as I hit play that the tempo is kind of fluctuating, but it basically is averaging about 110, and that's really good information to know. So now that I'm armed with that information, I can actually close the audio editor. Just click on the little scissors button here to close it and I can set my Logic project tempo to 110. So I'm going to go up here and double click where it says 120 and just type in 110. Now that Logic's project tempo is 110, does it match if I hit play? Let's take a listen. We'll be hearing the metronome beating out at 110 and we have the rhythm, which is supposedly 110 according to Logic. (rhythmic beating) Hey, those sound pretty close. Not perfect though 'cause remember when we analyzed this, we saw that it was fluctuating. So the last step here to really align these is to stretch or morph the tempo here to match exactly 110 all the time, and that'll give us the most consistent tempo. So, and we've now conformed Logic's tempo to our kind of inherent tempo of our performance. Now I'm going to just slightly morph the performance to be perfectly in time with Logic's tempo. And we can do that by right clicking on the clip itself or control clicking on the clip to get this little sub menu. And we want to apply the project Tempo, Logics tempo to the region. And watch when I do this, you'll see the little waveforms kind of shift around very slightly. There we go. You saw a little shift, and now when we listen they're going to be perfectly in time with the metronome. Right on beat. (rhythmic tapping) Okay, great. So the last step here, if we want to use this is to make this into a perfect four bar loop. You can see the bars marked up here on the timeline and notice it's a little longer than four bars. it goes past the five. So I want to zoom in real close here and just get over to the edge of our region. Pull that in right at the five mark. In other words, four full bars. And now we have a perfect loop of four bars. At this point, we can just grab the upper edge of the region and pull it out, and it becomes a loop. We can say, we can make like, for example another iteration of it. So it's now an eight bar loop. And we'll use that eight bar loop as we progress and enhance this rhythm as we add to the song. So now we've taken our basic idea, our project seed, and we mapped our project tempo to it. And in the next movie, I'll show you how to use the built-in apple loops to enhance this rhythm.