Logic Pro: Editing Drum Timings

Here, my drums comp has been duplicated and renamed to indicate it contains Flex edits. Quantize Reference has been enabled on appropriate tracks, and the Slicing algorithm is selected. The different coloured regions indicate that they come from different takes; the highlighted markers are manual edits.

Now that your drums are organised, it’s time to whip them into shape!

It’s time to wrap up this series on working with live drums in Logic Pro. So far, we’ve discussed grouping, organising Track Alternatives, track stacking, phase alignment, gain staging, and constructing our final comp. We’ve also looked at approaches to routing the individual drums to busses and creating sends for processing.

Now it’s almost time to finally start time‑editing the drums.

Prep Work

We not only want our drums grouped, we also need to ensure that groups are enabled (Shift+G to toggle on/off). You can easily tell if groups are enabled or not; simply click on one of the drum tracks or regions, and if all the other regions become selected, groups are on.

Confirm in the Group Settings that Editing (Selection), Quantize Locked and Track Alternatives are all ticked/checked.

If you have a comp that you’re satisfied with, duplicate the track alternative and add ‘Flex’ to the name. Now, whatever timing edits you make, you can always revert back to the clean comp.

Flex Factor

Besides tuning and timing individual tracks, Flex allows you to time edit multitrack drums. You’ll notice a green Q button on each track. This is for quantise reference, ie. telling Logic which tracks to consider when determining how to line things up. Enable this button on your inside kick, snare top and tom tracks. This means that Logic will, for example, use the snare top track as a reference for snare drum timing, rather than the snare in the overheads, room mics and so on.

Enable Flex view (Command+F) and engage Flex on each drum track by clicking on the ‘twisty bow tie’ icon. If your tracks are grouped (as they’d better be!), clicking it on one track will enable Flex on all of them.

If Logic doesn’t pick the Slicing algorithm automatically, choose it from the drop‑down menu. While it may be tempting to choose the Monophonic or Rhythmic option, rest assured that Slicing is the one to use for optimal drum editing results. After Logic does a bit of analysis, transient markers will now be visible on each hit of each track. If you see hits that don’t have transient markers, there’s no need to panic. You can easily add them by manually clicking on the start of the transient.

If you zoom in on the tracks, you can then see to what degree they line up to the grid.

Rather than using your eyes to determine how in‑the‑pocket the drums are, use your ears and try to feel what’s going on.

Manual...