Manipulating Loops You Want to Use

Let's clarify where you should be right now. You should have something that looks like this, with or without the editing out of dead air (blank audio). You have your drums on one track, bass on one, guitars on one track, and so on and so on. All in mono (except for any special track you picked especially to be in stereo). Ya with me here? OK, let's get started.

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Here's an interesting yet complicated tidbit: keep in mind that once you import your loops into the Beatnik Editor Pro you will be applying MP3 compression to your 16-bit 22.5 kHz samples. The audio file size is going down; down towards something acceptable for the Internet. Well, it turns out that the codec that Beatnik uses is the real deal from Fraunhofer. High quality, yes, but there's an added bonus. The Fraunhofer codec was designed for commercial music applications, so it automatically encodes a 50 millisecond teeny, tiny "blank," or "dead air," at the beginning and end of anything you encode. So, what do you do? You have to first get a perfect loop going and then put a tiny chunk (50 ms worth) of space junk (a part of the sample that you do not want) at the beginning and the end of your loop before you export it. Don't worry about the extra junk nugget as the Beatnik Editor Pro has a window where you can set the beginning and end, like other samplers. Be sure to add the same amount of unwanted audio to the beginning and end of every loop.

The goal is to make a good sounding presentation with the smallest file size possible. So with that in mind, here are some pointers.

Step 1 -- Let's start with the drum track. Set up your audio editing/MIDI sequencing software to be able to play back say ... four tracks. OK? Mute or completely disable every track but the drums. Click on your click track button or go to your menu and make it so the click track clicks away while you "audition" your instrument tracks. Now listen to which drum parts actually work to the click. Your drummer may have been playing to the click while tracking, but you may still notice that they were playing behind or trying to catch up to the click at specific points. Pick a two-beat or one-bar phrase where they are playing perfectly in time with the click. Do this for every instrument. Go ahead and pick a bunch of loops that will be considered for your remix. You might end up not using more than a few of them just because they simply do not "groove" or "jive" together or whatever.

Step 2 -- Which similar tracks can you mix together after you have picked the loops? Remember these are things that are normally going on at the same time in the song anyway. In our example, we mixed the drums together with the congas. We mixed the two guitarists together playing rhythm. Ummmm, we mixed together a guitar playing a unison (the same thing) line with the bass. And lastly, we mixed a lead guitar doing another unison line with a keyboard. We panned them stereo and exported as stereo (two mono files). We will then use these as the only stereo track in our remix. You can do more, but we only did one.

Step 3 -- After you have chosen a good drum loop, make a completely new session or sequence within the master session that you made when you dumped all the tracks into your digital audio/MIDI sequencing program. Copy-and-paste that drum loop into your new sequence. Do a drum A-B-C check for the different A-B-C parts that you have in your particular song. Do this for every instrument (A-B-C).

Step 4 -- Now you have to make sure all of your loops are seamless by setting the loop function in your specific program and checking them against the click again. Digital Performer has a little metronome that you can turn on by clicking on its little metronome icon. And a button that makes the loop start and end appear on your sequencer so you can drag it to the desired section. Your program should be just as friendly. Listen to every loop you have chosen and make sure it is seamless. It should sound natural. Audition every loop by dragging it into the 1-4 digital audio tracks you enabled earlier (again, that's if you do not have a hod-rod computer that can handle 24 tracks).