Ain’t no party like a Live Tips party. Just sayin.
Once you’ve got your beat variations dancing around using Follow Actions, the next step is to Extract Chains:
In the above example, I’ve created a fairly simple beat using only three drums – you don’t need anything complicated to get great results with this technique. (In fact, the variations can end up being so agressive that you get better results with a simple beat.)
Once the hat and clap are extracted (the kick can just be left in the original track), you end up with something like this:
Sure, so what?
Fire off the first scene and you’ll see. Each clip has it’s own random follow action in effect, and now you’ll get the results of mixing and matching the variations of the individual drums.
Notice that the Clap has no clip called Var 3. This is because in Var3 of the original beat, the clap was left out entirely so no clip was generated when I extracted the chain. This needs to be fixed, or you’ll never get the variations sans clap.
First, create an empty MIDI clip in that slot by double-clicking:
…then set it’s Follow Action to match the other clips…
(or, if you really want to save time, just copy over one of the clips from the kick or hat track.)
Now, one of the clap variations will be the empty clip, creating a “no clap” variation.
