Tunes Development - Chopping Drum Loops

We'll provide you with how you can slice pre-made sampled drum loops to help you re-arrange them, create versions as well as fully new new drum grooves.

To aid us we will be working with Propellerhead Computer software 'Recycle!' software package make your own dubstep to aid the slicing of one's drum loops given that this quickly results in a MIDI file representing each and every conquer slice of your loop. This enables you to definitely load the ensuing Recycle! file (REX) into your sampler software for simple arranging. An alternate for both equally Pc & OS X is iZotope's Phatmatik Pro, a VST & Audio Unit plugin that'll work from within your sequencer. They've recently added Recycle loops support too so this one's a definite contender for slicing drum loops. FL Studio also has it's own built in conquer Slicer tool.

We will be working with Recycle & Apple Logic for this tutorial so lets start off by choosing a sampled drum loop to manipulate. We've loaded up our loop in Recycle! and ramped up the sensitivity slider to highlight each beat as a 'slice'. We're assuming here that your loop is a precise amount of bars, which will almost certainly be the case for samples from CD's and sample download sites. Recycle! offers you the chance to enter the correct amount of bars and beats for your loop - this will make sure that your import into your DAW application goes smoothly. Now that we've got our loop defined into slices we can save the chopped sample as a recycle drum loop or REX2 file. To do this choose 'Save As' from the File menu and save the file into you 'Logic' -> 'Sampler Instruments' folder. Equally if you'd just like separate the drum slices and a MIDI file the 'Export' command from the File menu will do this for you.

Now we'll start the fun and get re-arranging our loop. Load up Logic and insert an EXS24 sampler (if Logic's already running hit 'Refresh Menu' from the EXS24 front panel - this will reveal your newly exported Recycle file in your sampler instrument list).

Choose your loop from the EXS24 menu - this will automatically import your sliced drum loop and generate a sampler instrument for it, also as import the corresponding MIDI file into Logic's timeline for editing (click OK to the 2 dialogue boxes that pop up).

Now that we've got our loop imported run your cycle points around the drum loop MIDI region. Double click to open Logic's piano roll editor and you'll see the slices within your loop represented as notes in the roll. This is where we can build some variation or even spawn an entirely new loop utilizing the beat's individual components.

We've decided we like the kick drum in our loop and want to use it to drive our new track's percussion section. To achieve this we're going to split the loop into two tracks, one will deal just with the kick drum slice, the other with the rest in the loop parts. Hit Logic's 'duplicate track' button and copy the loop's MIDI region to the newly created duplicate track.