Getting creative with sampled beats
Using prefab drum loops to quickly make beats is probably one of the first things that you did upon coming face to face with a DAW for the first time. It’s a quick, easy and fun way to make music, no matter what genre you produce music in, and it can be a hugely creative, valid and rewarding technique. You just have to look at hip-hop, a genre that began with DJs creating extended, looping drum solos by using two turntables and two copies of the same record, to see just how innovative and exciting loop-based music production can be. DAWs are hugely powerful audio editing tools, and by fully exploiting all of their features, we can turn loops into flexible musical building blocks that offer endless scope and potential.
Not all loops will sit together perfectly, because of differences in timing and/or tuning. Thankfully, both of these issues can be resolved pretty easily with the advanced timestretching and pitchshifting trickery that today’s music software is capable of.
Ironically, to get the most out of loops, it usually helps to have a good understanding of how beats are programmed from scratch: if you don’t know how to construct the kind of rhythms you want to create, or have a grasp of how swing works, say, you’re going to be limited to making only the most basic of alterations to your loops.
In these walkthroughs we’ll show you how to slice, fade, rearrange, layer, timestretch, EQ and pitchshift and even clone loops to create new rhythms and create fuller, more satisfying beats. Combine these techniques with the advice in on p20 and you’ll be fully tooled up with
