New Music Development - Chopping Drum Loops

We'll demonstrate ways to slice pre-made sampled drum loops to help you re-arrange them, generate variations in addition as entirely new new drum grooves.

To aid us we'll be applying Propellerhead Program 'Recycle!' application read full report to assist the slicing within your drum loops given that this simply results in a MIDI file representing each beat slice in the loop. This permits you to load the resulting Recycle! file (REX) into your sampler software for simple arranging. An alternative for the two Computer system & 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 beat 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 every single defeat 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 program 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 will 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 build a sampler instrument for it, likewise 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 generate some variation or even spawn an entirely new loop making use of 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.