Hi all,

Happy with my Motif XS, mainly live gigs playing.

I also like to use internal XS sounds through midi and audio and use Logic as the recording sequencer for both midi and audio.

My workflow is to record midi tracks first in Logic, and then afterwards record audio of each midi track seperately in Logic, so I can also modify them later onto my taste with Logic EQ, FX etc.

Now here is the problem :
With the bass and drum sounds it seems like Logic (I guess) does not record the transient of for example the very first kick on the first count of a bar. The other ones are just perfect.

Somehow, when I insert an extra empty bar or count before that ‘count on the one’ of then it does record the transient. It is very annoying with copying tracks etc. in Logic

Of course I can make some workaround with it, but I assume this is not how it is supposed to be.

Does anyone here know how to fix it?

Hope I explained it clearly, but pls feel free to ask if not.

Thanks a lot in advance.

Hi CJ4ever,

This is not specific to Logic or Motif.

Your playing is out of time because you are human. Everybody does this no matter how good their timing.  It will always be much more problematic with drums and bass.

You are early with those particular notes, and even if your notes are a fraction of a millisecond early, they still fall on the wrong side of the first beat and will not be recorded properly.

There’s a few things you can do:

1 - Make every part of your entire song start after a few empty bars and then you can crop it later on.  Most projects I work on usually have 4 empty bars before any music is heard.

2 - Drag in some ‘negative bars’ in Logic before the start of your song. You can do this by dragging the start marker to the left of the ruler for as many bars as you need.

Either should be fine.

Thank you for the clear reply Phil !

I will try it.

Yes, I also use quantize to be sure of
timing, but considering your reply I assume it has nothing to do with quantize .

I’d test that if I were you.  Quantizing a note that falls before the first beat of the first bar can sometimes (not always) sound weird, but I guess it depends on the length of the note. Using a looped recording can certainly cause problems when it returns to the start of itself.

I’m sure a little space before everything will help you play naturally or play naturally and then tidy up with a quantize anyway.

You can always butt everything back up to the start when you’re sure that nothing has been cut off or when you’ve finished the song and need to bounce down.

Negative bars in Logic are very useful in this situation. 

For example, you could add two of them and the ruler would show bars -1 | 0 | before 1 | 2 | 3 | etc.

I think you can go back as far as bar -8 which is very useful AND you get to keep your original bar numbers as they were.