The developers at Apple must have been ‘listening to the ethers’ lately as I’ve been asking for this kind of functionality in a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) for a really looooong time…
To cut a long story short, I was driven half crazy by those rigid time grids and metronomes after 1000s of hours in recording studios working on audio projects — fixed tempo grids have been standard sonic artistry fare in the digital world since year dot — it has always felt unnaturally constraining to me, almost stressful to be rigidly time bound like that.
Regarding music and the life n’ soul of things: to me tempo is breath and heart beats and the ebb and flow of the cosmos as it spontaneously is. Subtle deviations and shifts are totally desirable and feel good to us, feel much less imprisoning…
On a philosophical and cultural note: I feel finally we’re seeing the beginning’s of machine/tech bending to our natural tendencies & desires as beings, rather than us finding ourselves continuously contorting our ideas to fit platforms & programmers design limitations. May the trend long continue!
To the credit of digital/tech space: I LOVE the capacity that ‘digital land gives’ us to store settings, do recall, quickly iterate through ideas, splice edit & mash, and make our work super portable — I have on my Macbook these days more power and processing potential than we had in studios full of gear not so long ago (especially with such high quality analogue emulations by the likes of Slate Digital and NI’s Guitar Rig). This is sooo important when travelling & living a more fluid lifestyle.
This tempo fluidity is warmly welcome in my world, big thanks to Apple and Logic Devs : )
P.S. For the more technically minded: I know this approach has always been possible with tempo mapping and such — which I’ve also done in the past — but let’s face it having this stuff ‘automated out’ for us with the likes of Logic’s Smart Tempo is waaay better for creativity!
Leave a Reply