Logic Pro X Tutorials: 3 Ways to Time Stretch

Logic’s time-stretching capabilities have always been one of the most comprehensive out of any DAW, providing a variety of ways to perform the function from advanced to easy, each has their positives and negatives depending on how you fit them in with your workflow.

Time Stretch Through Dragging

Identify the audio region you want to time stretch and highlight it, this part is done completely in the arrange window so no need to double click and open up the sample editor or time and stretch machine as you traditionally may have, we’ll get to those later.

Now its time to perform the stretch, click alt’ and then drag your mouse to the bottom right-hand corner of your audio then click and drag to the bar of your choice, but! take into consideration when time-stretching drums like we are here! that stretching too far can ruin the quality of the audio, so its best to keep it simple unless you’re doing some crazy experimental shit!

Once you’ve done that your audio should look as it does below.

This particular method is especially useful when needing to time stretch small bits of audio such as drum loops or one-shots, on my lazy days when i want a quick way to get time-stretching this is my go-to technique.

Time Stretch to the length of the locators

This method is another quick tip, simple but effective and good for making quick edits on the go.

Have your sample ready in the arrangement view and set your locators to the bar you wish to time stretch the sample to.

The next step we take is to double check that our track and our audio are highlighted and that our cursor locators are set, once you’ve checked you’re good to make the stretch. Go to Edit> Time Stretch> Time Stretch Region Length to Locators.

Once you’ve done this your audio will look a little bit something like this.

Time Stretching using the Time & Pitch Machine

Step one is to make sure your advanced tools are turned on otherwise you won’t be able to see some of the functions we are going to use, go to Logic Pro X> Preferences> Audio> Advanced> and ensure that every option is checked and then x out.

Now say that you want your project to be at 140 Bpm and you have a piece of audio at 75 Bpm! the question that you might be asking yourself is how exactly am I going to make this work? time-stretch the audio up to 140 Bpm?

No! please avoid doing that as it will only once again as I said earlier will ruin the quality of your audio.

If you want the audio to be as close to the original as possible and just want to knock it into time, then you have to understand that you can’t get super crazy with your time-stretching, best practice is to keep it simple and only stretch by 10-15 Bpm.

The best solution in this situation is to time stretch to 70 Bpm which will knock the track into half since we want to be at 140 this will work fine.

Double click on your audio file in the arrange view and select File

Now let’s pull up the Time and Pitch Machine, got to Functions> Time and Pitch Machine

Now that we have the Time and Pitch Machine up what we have to do now is ensure mode is on free and algorithm on complex, next enter under tempo and original the original Bpm of your sample in this case we are entering 75, next is to enter the destination Bpm under destination and tempo we are typing 70, finally click process and paste.

Now that we’ve done the hard parts your audio in the arrange view should turn out something like this…

Your audio will now be perfectly in time and match up with our desired Bpm of 140. let me know how you get on with these 3 time-stretching methods in the comments below.

Video Tutorial: 3 Ways to Time Stretch