Flexible Time
Perhaps the most significant new feature in Logic Pro 9 is Flex Time. If you’re familiar with Cubase’s Audio Warp feature, or Elastic Audio in Pro Tools, this is essentially Apple’s take on such methods of non-destructive, tempo-oriented audio manipulation. You’ve been able to set audio regions to ‘Follow Tempo’ since Logic 7, making it possible for Apple Loops and other audio material recorded in Logic to be automatically time-stretched to play back at the Project’s tempo, but Flex Time goes much further.
Rather than simply time-stretching an audio region, Flex Time analyses audio regions and creates a series of markers at transients that identify musical beats in the audio. For example, given a bass-drum recording, Flex Time will theoretically create these so-called Flex Markers for each bass-drum hit. If you later wanted a particular bass-drum hit to play slightly earlier, you could simply drag the appropriate Flex Marker to the left and Flex Time would automatically time-compress the audio preceding the hit, while expanding the hit itself so there was no gap between it and the audio identified by the next Flex Marker.
Send In The Replacements
The second new feature that utilises EXS24 is the Drum Replacement/Doubling command, which analyses audio regions on a selected track and automatically creates a MIDI region with notes triggered from the transients detected in the source material. As the name of the command suggests, you can either use the resulting track and region to replace the original drum recording, or complement it by playing both tracks together.
The Drum Replacement/Double window has a number of settings that enable you to tweak the MIDI region that’s created, before clicking OK to confirm the result.
A Relative Threshold can be set, specifying the level at which notes will be created for detected transients, and you can specify the MIDI pitch of the trigger notes that will be generated or leave Logic to pick an appropriate pitch for you