by Vijith

I'm having to start from scratch with a lot of workflow issues after jumping ship from Digital Performer to Logic, and during a project I worked on last week, I was forced to re-learn an old trick that's definitely worth passing along here.

In part because I use a lot of MIDI, I generally try to adhere to a click track unless there's an artistic reason to drift -- rubato, and even rushing, have their uses, but I've always felt strongly that DAW-based composition gets much easier when you can visually see and edit the relationships between beats, bars, and whatever musical content you've input, and -- not insignificant, this part -- snap your musical phrases around in musically useful increments. Trying to slide a keyboard riff back by one bar comes much more naturally than trying to move it back by 191,387 samples, and having to calculate the latter every time you want to move something around is, in my opinion, one of the quickest ways to kill a productivity buzz.

Where I depart from a lot of people, I think, is that I think this same reasoning also extends from matters of composition and arrangement and into production. Delays and modulation effects, in particular, can be incredibly effective when anchored to the tempo of the piece, and even compressors can be made to pump in and out in musically useful ways (though you'll rarely see any sort of beat-oriented controls on those plugins). This means that I can quickly turn quite surly when I have to calculate millisecond values in order to get a basic quarter-note delay or swirl a flanger around symmetrically on every bar -- again, it always feels like I'm screeching to a standstill to address some stupid procedural hangup (not unlike doing excessive paperwork, actually).

Most people, particularly when focused exclusively on mixing, don't seem to worry about this -- in fact, I'd wager that an overwhelming majority of the Pro Tools session documents in the world have the metronome set to the default 120 BPM no matter what they actually contain. I've heard arguments that unpredictable tempo asymmetries can make the effects more interesting, and also that locking things in too tightly makes it easier to forget that such details are usually just meant to be frosting. Both are valid points, but I'm not convinced, because if you want the asymmetry, you can always flip your plugin back into millisecond mode. Properly placed beat and bar reference points give you a very powerful new way of addressing your time-oriented production effects, but there's nothing forcing you to use it.

The obvious problem here: playing to a metronome is hard! And even assuming that I've already won you over here, if any of the material is tracked without you around to play resident click stickler, chances are this line of reasoning will be dispensed with, and the project tempo will be set to that dreaded 120.00 when you see it next.

There's a really elegant solution to this with most major DAW platforms, though. No, not yelling at your drummer, although there's often a reason for that too, in which case, have at it, Cowboy.

Rather, you can retroactively move the beat and bar lines of the metronome's "grid" around to match up the musical content in the audio recordings. Thus, it's not actually a grid at all in the end, instead pulsing subtly over the course of the session to match up with the musician's natural pacing. Or even wildly, for that matter -- who cares? I just want to beat-sync my plugins, remember, so if the wildly fluctuating tempos (rubato, incompetent, whatever) are considered acceptable at this point, my cognitive flow has been restored and we can move on.

This is not beat slicing or quantization or Live Warping or time stretching or any number of other terms that might have just jumped to mind. Most of those processes are ways of conforming deviating performances to a rigid tempo grid. Here, we're conforming the grid to the performance, and through it all, the audio is absolutely untouched (for better or worse).

In order to set up your sequence for this, you'll have to do a bit of prep (which I must sheepishly admit might feel a bit like doing paperwork) but for me the payoff comes in never having to stop making music to switch to a calculator.

Platform-specific:
Logic
Digital Performer
Pro Tools
Cubase