Ever since I've figured out how to use Slice-to-MIDI I've been using it quite a bit. It's a huge time-saver for cleaning up drum loops and creating variations. However, one thing always was bugging me: When I have several drum loops, I end up with one Track/Drum Rack per loop. This makes it difficult to mix and match across loops.
I took a look at
this tutorial, and... it's close, but what I really want is one Drum Rack with all the loops in it, so I can mix and match sounds / notes across all of them. Dragging cells from one rack into the other doesn't really do it for me because it doesn't copy the notes, and if there are a lot of slices it's just not what I want to spend my day doing.
So, how to make one giant Drum Rack with all the slices and a track with all the midi notes from each loop? It's not that hard, actually:
- In arrangement view, create an audio track for placing drum loops.
- Copy and paste loop sections, and line them up one after the other in the audio track.
It should look something like this:
Keep in mind that a Drum Rack is limited to 128 slices, so it's best to keep each clip fairly short. Just the essentials of each loop.
- Adjust the clip levels to even things out. Adjust the fades to eliminate clicks.
- Duplicate the track so you can easily see the boundaries of the original clips later on.
The duplicated track has orange clips in this screenshot.
- Select all the loops in the audio track and consolidate them (cmd-J, or right-click, Consolidate)
The consolidated clip will probably be warped automatically. If it isn't, warp the clip.
The orange clips are for reference, and the red clip is the consolidated, warped clip that we're going to slice.
- Now that you have a consolidated clip of all the loops together, you can slice-to-midi the whole thing. Right click on the consolidated clip and choose Slice into New MIDI Track.
- One slice per: Transient and the built in slicing preset will probably work well for most drum loops.
- If you need to, you can add / adjust warp markers before slicing.
- NOTE: This might produce a lot of slices! Since a Drum Rack is limited to 128 cells, you will want to keep that in mind. The slice feature will tell you how many beats and how many clips.
In this case I've got 60 beats and 116 slices. That should be enough to get some creative loop-mangling going!
- Move the new MIDI track next to the reference clip audio track. Split the midi clip in line with the original loops. Go through each MIDI clip: rename, consolidate and loop. Now you have a MIDI/Slice loop for each audio loop.
Now you have all the slices and MIDI loops, you can have a whole bunch of creative options:
- Sweetening up loop slices by dropping EQs on selected slices, and / or adjusting the Simpler filter on various slices. Saturator can also work well. Filter out lows on hat slices. Put a kick eq on kick slices. Adjust sample start/end points to get rid of clicks.
- Don't forget pan and level changes.
- Create some 'returns' in the Drum Rack, and route them out to your main return tracks (e.g. reverb and delay). Send some slices to the reverb and delay. Every other snare slice through reverb, for example.
- Mess with the notes too. Quantize some on the downbeat. Play with velocity.
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