How many ways are there to cut up a loop? OK, there's the obvious way, cut on the transients and re-arrange the bits, or chop up two and re-arrange, but what other ways are there to creatively chop up a loop. I'm sure I'm missing a few tricks here.
gating fx plugs can be very handy for chopping hits out of grooves without having to edit audio manually. particularly gateboy - great for chopping kicks out of breaks so as to aid in getting the groove pumping round the kikdrum.
Cubase's Audio Parts actually provide a wickedly accurate and fast way to slice beats, and you can set it up to edit non-destructively. What I like doing is slicing the whole beat into sections, then apply reverse/flip and effects to some of those sections. A tip I like to use to make a 1-bar loop sound interesting over multiple bars or even a section is to take the loop, convert to Audio Part, slice it up and then copy/paste it 4, 8 or 16 times. Then you can apply different effects to each of the bars and you'll end up with a sequence that doesn't sound like it's repeating itself even though it's all based on the same 1-bar loop. J.
Don't be limited to transients when choosing edit points. Granular effects provide a quick and easy way to access parts of sounds that you might not have thought of using before, and which can inspire not just new rhythms, but ideas in synthesis and sound design too.
Not sure what you mean by granular effects.Is this like putting the loop in Alchemy and opening as a granular sample?
I like to scissor up loops into 16's or 32's and savagely discard, reverse or even doubling the amount a section's played, making it shorter and rolling it... just pissing about basically. Good fun all the same Also a really good idea when you get a nice texture out of a synth that you want to make sound really interesting
this one is great and free, but only Max 4 Live: http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device/1001/supacut-live-1-4 "similar" to Strutter Edit... otherwise there are two things i like to do with loops in live: 1. - make few percussive loops with the same sounds but different in rhythm (some more off beat, some straight on beat etc.) - then i put all of them on one audio track in session view, so they are placed vertically - then i set them all to legato (this is the most important), and choose appropriate launch mode and quantization (16th usually)...these are all parameters of launch section in the clip view - then i map midi keys to launch buttons, so i trigger different loops with different keys - that way you can achieve some very interesting rhythms and breaks, that are otherwise "impossible", if you're not a drummer 2. - make/take few loops that work with the track you're working on...so make/get few loops that work with your bassline basically....they can be of different types - synths, drums, stabs, etc. - again, set them all to legato mode, but this time put every one of them on different audio track. but each one should be still below or above the neighboring clips, if looking vertically. so you get the diagonal of audio clips across a chosen amount of audio tracks. - put different effects on each track, change the warp settings and transpositions etc... - now in order for this to work in legato mode, you have to "fill the empty clip slots around the diagonal" with silent clips (volume=-inf)...see the attached picture, white clips are silent - map midi notes to scene launch buttons... - and for cherry on top, group all audio tracks, insert effect rack, make some chains, insert effects, leave one chain empty, and modulate chain selector with your mod wheel. also add some fades between various chains, so when you move the mod wheel, you smoothly fade from one effect to the other all this madness can be with some trickery recorded as midi and later fixed, or just record audio... Shitloads of fun guaranteed, success maybe
