Hopefully yesterday’s tip inspired you to experiment a bit with the Transient Envelope. Today we’ll take it a little further by digging into the Transient Loop Modes.
With some material, switching between the various Transient Loop Modes may not seem to have much effect. In particular, when you play a drum loop back at it’s original tempo or close to it, you may not hear any difference whatsoever. To fully realize the glitching potential of the different loop modes, you have to get into some serious tempo changing.
Start out with the loop of your choice and set Live’s master tempo to be the same as that which appears in the Seg. BPM box in the Clip view.
The next step is to hit the *2 switch to double the value of Seg. BPM.
What this does is tell Live that the original tempo of this loop is really 230 BPM, so live will now play it back at half speed to slow it down to 115.
Once you’ve got your slowed down loop playing back, flip through the different Transient Loop Modes.
Big difference. With it set to Off (the single arrow), you’ll hear a big gap in between each hit since Live isn’t looping to fill the space. The other two modes will fill the space by looping the tail of each transient either forwards or back and forth. (NOTE: I made a mistake in yesterday’s tip and referred to “Off” as “Loop Forward”. sorry for any confusion.)
If you played with yesterday’s tip, you may have found that you only got cool gating effects when Transient Loop Mode is set to Off. However, in today’s context it’s a whole different can of loopy, glitchy worms. (eew.)
Dialing down the Transient Envelope will now have a dramatic impact on the sound of each hit regardless of what mode you’re in.
Once you’re getting some cool stuff, start messing with Live’s master tempo. It’s not at all necessary to play back the loop at half it’s original speed to get this sort of effect, it’s just important to be slowing down the loop a good bit from it’s original tempo.
Or is it?
(The answer will be revealed during next week’s episode of LOST. Unfortunately, it will only raise additional, far more troubling questions)
