Message 4/10
Date: 17-May-02 @ 03:45 PM -
RE: Working with loops
This isn't gonna be any help I guess, but I do all of my loops in Sonar. I think that kind of sequencer is really a great resource. You take your drum hits, move them to where you want them. Add in noises, chopped up pads, anything really. When you have what you want for say a 16 bar loop but say the last hit is on 15:4:720 of the loop and the tail of it ends at 840. You have a 120 tick space left to fill up the full 16 bars. If you turn that into a groove clip (a loop in Sonar that you can drag out to forever) the timing will be off, so all you do is record silence to fill up that last 120 ticks, doesn't matter if there's overlapping, then crop the clip combined with the silence to stop exactly at beat 17. You haven't changed a thing in the clip and you have exactly 16 beats. Bingo. It makes it so easy to get loops. And you can record more sounds and hits and combine them if you want at anytime. In Sonar, Acid, and other programs I think now too, you can take that loop you just made in 120 bpm, stick it into a new 155.35 bpm piece and the loop automatically adjusts itself to that tempo and if you like, to the new key signature as well.
I mean you could record the sound of somebody throwing their garbage out into a 135bpm piece. Not trying to line up the sounds to beats you record silence to fill up the loop. When you're done you can put it into another project and you'll have somebody throwing out the garbage at 110 bpm. I likey.