A few months back, I did a little series on creating audio files full of strange sounds, then getting them into your productions via Drum Racks. Today I was reminded of another way to work with glitchy goodness. Above you’ll see a sample placed directly into the timeline in a couple of spots. It’s from […]
GROUP IN A GROUP
Every now and then you’ll bump into the problem that you can’t have a Group track within a Group track (the way you can nest Racks within each other). For example, you might want to group a set of keyboard parts together, but one of the parts is made up of two tracks you’ve layered […]
GROUP THE EXTRACTED
Before you extract the Chains in your Drum Rack into separate chains, make a note of the volume of the track the Drum Rack is in: When you extract a chain, the volume of the new track will be set to zero. In the example above, this means that extracting a chain from this Drum […]
DRUM EDITING WORKFLOW
In the previous tip I mentioned that I extract the drum rack chains once I’ve got a basic arrangement laid out. There’s another piece to my workflow, though: I usually do one pass of drum editing before extracting the chains. After the arrangement is laid out, I find spots to create additional variations – such […]
EXTRACT CHAINS
I’m a big fan of Drum Racks. Every track I do has its main beat programmed using one. There are lots of reasons for this, but a big one is the Extract Chains command, which is accessed by right-clicking in the Chain List: In the above example, this command will remove the chain called OB-Hat […]
ARPEGGIATOR: TAKING STEPS
The Steps setting can be used to generate some fun pitch effects when along with some of the delay-style effects we’ve been looking at. For example: In the example above, the sound being triggered is a percussion sample. The Rate, Gate and Velocity settings generate a series of rapid repeats which fade away quickly […]
ARPEGGIATOR: FUN WITH VELOCITY
Hopefully the last couple of tips have made the point that Arpeggiator is not just a device that eats chords and craps Baba O’Riley. I find that exploring what it can do with one note at a time really helps to demystify some of its more interesting features. The nifty thing about the Velocity section […]
ARPEGGIATOR: MIDI DELAY, pt. 2
To make the Arpeggiator behave a bit more like a conventional delay, you have to engage the Hold switch: By default, Hold takes any note you input and repeats it indefinitely. However, by turning up the Repeat knob, you can specify a specific number of repeats: (tip continued below) ~*~*~*~*~*~ THANKS FOR SUPPORTING LIVE TIPS! […]
ARPEGGIATOR: MIDI DELAY
Tonight I’ve been having a little fun using the Arpeggiator as a sort of MIDI delay. In this example, I’m using it for a rapid, slapback echo sort of effect that you might otherwise produce with the Simple Delay. I’m only feeding in one note at a time (not holding down chords the way […]
PRINT THE RETURN
Now that I’ve added some satisfying junk to my drum sound, I’m going to render the processed signal to an audio file. (I’ll discuss why in a moment.) Remember that all of the processing from the prior tips is happening in Return A: To Print Return A to an audio file, open up the Export […]
