How to Cheat Tap Tempo (Without Tapping) and Align Free MIDI to Bars and Beats

Read this if you’re frustrated with the standard ways of creating a bar/beat map

Here’s a relatively unusual – yet simple and practically foolproof – method of aligning bars and beats to MIDI you recorded without a click, even if the tempo goes all over the place. It’s for those of us who often find ourselves swearing uncontrollably and throwing things when we try doing it the standard ways.

This is for Logic Pro, but you can do the same thing in all the major DAWs. It’s especially relevant after saving something captured from your DAW’s always-open buffer that you weren’t planning to record, by whatever name the feature is known (in Logic it’s called Flashback Capture, in Cubase it’s called Retrospective Record, etc.).

The concept is to create a track with a note on every downbeat – or better yet, every beat – for the DAW to use as a reference to align to.

What’s different about this process is that you don’t actually have to tap the tempo in real time. Instead, you just select a note on every downbeat – or even better, every beat – and copy/paste it to a new track that you’re going to use as the “tap tempo” track.

Then you can set a constant tempo for quantizing, notation, and so on.

So here are the steps in Logic Pro. (Obviously, your screen may look slightly different, reflecting the way you have the program customized.)

1. After using Flashback Capture, move the music you want to keep to the beginning of the Project so that it starts on Bar 1, Beat 1.

The easiest way to do that is to hit Return to move the cursor to the beginning, select the music you’re moving, and then use the Pickup Clock command. (If you haven’t done so, I recommend assigning a key command to it, because it’s very useful.)

Observe how the notes in this performance have nothing to do with bars and beats, let alone the 120 BPM tempo. 

2. Select a note on each downbeat, copy those notes, and paste them into another track using Paste at Same Position (Shift V). Just for clarity, I copied them and transposed them down an octave first.

Issuing the Beats From Region command in the next step will tell Logic that these are the downbeats to realign everything to. And most of the time you’ll be done. But of course this is NOT most of the time, it’s an article

The first question is What if you didn’t play notes on every downbeat? You’ll need them, so it’s necessary to put them in manually, either by drawing the missing ones or recording them in real time.

Or you could put a note on every beat in the beat mapping track, in which case Logic will ask if you want it to try and fill in any missing notes in step 3 below. That’s not necessary, however.

BUT WAIT – THERE’S A WRINKLE!

2a. This example has shifting time signatures – bars 1, 2, and 4 are 3/4, the rest 4/4. If you don’t tell Logic about them in advance, it’s going to create a big mess.

Before entering the time signatures, you must select all the notes and lock them to their original SMPTE position (Functions -> Lock SMPTE Position in the Tracks window).

Now enter the time signature changes. When you first locate to bar 3 to enter the 4/4 time signature, Logic will ask whether you want to set the entire Project to 4/4. No, you meant what you’re telling it!

Unlock the SMPTE position.

3. If it’s not visible, show the Beat Mapping track in the main Tracks Window. That requires showing the Global Tracks in the main Tracks Window (G is the default), and then Control- or right-clicking in that area to tell it which tracks to show.

Also – important – notice that Logic is in Keep Tempo mode in the “LCD” area at the top.

Select the track with the downbeats, click on Beat Mapping, and select Beats From Region in the drop-down menu.

4. Look at the Tempo window here. You can delete all the tempo changes after the initial one (or set a new one), and your music will play back at a constant tempo.

You can also quantize the music to your newly-created grid.

Why do it this way?

Logic has two other ways of mapping beats. The more recent feature is Smart Tempo, which can work and do all of this automatically (not including the variable time signatures). If you enable it before recording, it works more often than not, and of course it works with audio as well as MIDI.

The other way is to drag bar lines to notes from the Beat Mapping track in the Tracks window. 

Give both a try – and see whether you don’t like the method here better.