Part II of a three part series on sampling.  Part I covered one-shot samples.  Part III will concern multi-sampled instruments.

Talk Radio VS REX2

I hate talk radio.  Actually, I like radio news and interview shows.  What I hate are call-in shows where people get on the air and rant on subjects they don't really know about.  Sometimes it seems like all of AM radio exists to provide a public forum for the uninformed and their ill-considered opinions.

What does this have to do with sample loops?  I'm getting there.  Stick with me.

A sample loop is a digital recording that is intended to repeat, usually over multiple bars and usually starting and ending evenly on the bar.  They are commonly synced and time stretched to match the tempo of the song they are used in.  In the case of REX files, Apple Loops and ACIDized WAVs this is aided by metadata embedded in the loop.  Other applications such as Ableton Live will automatically sync, stretch and loop audio files that have not been prepared in this way.

The current popularity of loop manipulation is important in two ways.  The first is the raft of benefits looping provides to serious producers, which I will get to later.  The other important thing (the one I want to get out of the way because it so clouds this topic) is that inexpensive looping software and commercially available loops have lowered some of the entry barriers to music production.  Basically, if you can send e-mail you can now also produce a song.  Loops like the ones sold by Loopmasters and software like GarageBand have made it easier than ever to make bad music. 

Fear Of A Looped Planet

Loops a producer creates on their own are not at issue here.  He or she plays or programs something, records it, warps it in Live and strategically repeats it as needed in a new song.  No problem.  The analog equivalent of this has been around since Les Paul and Mary Ford did "How High The Moon" in 1951, if not longer.  Outside of a few uptight folks in the classical and jazz communities (who probably wouldn't touch a DAW without latex gloves anyway) I don't think anybody has much of a problem with it anymore.

Purchased loops are different matter and the focus of the rest of this article.  The artistic and ethical questions surrounding their use abound.  Unfortunately, I feel I need to address them before we get to any technical stuff.

With pre-packaged loops a complete song is just a phone call away.  Sony Acid, Apple GarageBand and the like make it possible for someone who has never been more involved with music than listening to the radio to put a new song together in minutes.  GarageBand, for example, lets you drag loops from a list into a song without leaving the program.  Because they are in Apple Loop format GarageBand matches their tempo and key automatically so everything sounds "right." 

Loop based "construction kits" from various sources extend this idea.  These sets of commercial loops are grouped to work together in a song.  A kit typically includes one or more examples of each instrumental part called for in a song of the given style.  A user no longer needs to find a bass sound which works with a given synth loop.  It's all right there in the kit.

In the hands of the unskilled GarageBand and a construction kit CD will undoubtedly yield music that is entirely unoriginal and possibly truly horrid.  That's the down side.  The up side is that a complete neophyte can quite easily produce a song that sounds like "real" music, if not “great” music.

If it sounds like I have a problem with all the know-nothings this software has invited to the music production party, I don't.  I think all the bad music being made with Garageband and Acid these days is great!  If I could, I would deny ignorant people access to the airwaves but I think everybody with the slightest desire to do so should make music, no matter how talentless they are or how bad the music is.  If a future BT wets their inexperienced toes in the warm waters of Sony Acid all the junk they initially produce is worth it.  God knows I've created some entirely unlistenable things over the years.  As Iggy Pop said about hearing Lou Reed for the first time "He can't sing.  I can't sing.  Let's sing!" 

Which brings us to what loops offer a producer who doesn't need them. 

Raw Materials VS Partially Finished Goods

Let's say you know what you are doing.  The possibility of using commercial (or freely available, for that matter) loops raises a lot of questions.  Is it right or honest to use "canned" loops in serious music?  Will the music still be coming from you?  Will it make your music boring, or maybe sound like a track made by somebody else with the same loop library?

Finally, and perhaps most importantly for serious musicians: Why risk creating something less than entirely fresh and original when you are perfectly capable of producing music with programming and live instruments?  

There are lots of potential reasons.  Loops are fast and easy.  Some of them sound really cool.  It's fun. 

The best reason, I think, is this: Good drumming is precious.

Drum Loops

When it comes to production there is a big, big difference between drums and all other instruments. 

First, good drummers are rare.  You can't swing a cat around without hitting a guitarist, but how many good drummers to do you know?  In my years as a musician, I can't start to name all the great guitarists I have jammed, performed and lead worship with.  I can name the great drummers.  I also have their phone numbers.  Both of them.

Why are there so few good drummers?  It starts with drums being expensive, hard to maintain, move and store.  It ends with good drumming being quite difficult and unappreciated.  Nobody ever asks a drummer to lead songs around a campfire.

The demand for drummers exceeding supply isn't the only factor running up the value of drum loops.  Drums are also very, very hard to record well.  A typical drum kit is made up of at least several different instruments.  Sometimes they sprawl out to dozens.  They have broad dynamic and frequency ranges.  In almost every case this means recording from multiple microphones at the same time.  Multiple mics means considering phase and bleed issues, in addition to the many placement issues for recording with a single mic.

All of the same factors drive producers into the arms of drum machines and drum samplers.  I won't go into the pros and cons of programmed drums relative to recorded live drums, except to say that they both have their place and are fundamentally different.  Recording original live drums is not realistic for a lot of us, and most of us who cut our teeth on other instruments can't be expected to consistently program drums at a professional level.  Thus, when we hit a wall with our programming abilities commercial loops start to look pretty attractive.

If you look at any of the web sites that sell commercial loops you will find that a huge portion of their content is drums.  Some companies cover a wide range of styles, from heavily processed electronic drum sounds to standard acoustic kits.  Others push libraries with various instruments collected by musical genre or ethnic tradition.  Quality, quantity and compatibility vary widely.  Know what format or formats you are buying and be sure your software will be happy with it.  Read reviews.  Download demos. 

Personally, I have gotten useful sounds and loops from a few different sources including Perimeter Sound Arts, Freesample and Sampleswap (both free sources), Equinox and East West.  There are two companies I want point out as being exceptional sources for drum sounds.

Natural Grooves and Beta Monkey Music are two sample and loop companies specializing in drums.  Both companies make a point of only selling acoustic drum loops and samples.  They pride themselves on going to the considerable trouble it takes to make top quality drum recordings.  They eschew electronic kits, drum replacement and the other short cuts used to avoid the painstaking process of properly micing a kit.

The reason Beta Monkey and Natural Grooves loops peel my grapes is the performances.  No matter what I do with these drum loops (editing, distortion, other effects, extreme tempo changes) the results are better than when I use acoustic drums from other sources.  I'm convinced that it isn't the authenticity or sonic fidelity of these loops that puts them over the top, although those seem to be what the companies are most proud of.   It is the choice of drummers and their inspired playing.  Beta Monkey, in particular, has not only miced their kits properly, they have captured great performances on them.

How To Make Commercial Loops Your Own

Assuming you aren't content to slap a few royalty-free loops produced by others, as is, into your DAW at their original speed, you will want to think about ways to alter and adapt them.   You can mix and match, add live or programmed instruments, layer them together and edit them in various ways.  Here are some examples.

Layering

The selective use of multiple drum loops in a single track can have interesting results.  Beta Monkey provide information about what sets of loops are recorded with the same drum kit, and even details about the differences between kits, to help you seamlessly mix their loops.  In other situations, you might be going for contrast.

In this track I use loops from multiple sources.  In spots I use partial loops, and the number and combination of layers varies over the course of the 32 bars shown in this Ableton Live window.
    

Here is what this passage sounds like with just the drums and David Byrne sample.   The Byrne sample is perfectly legal.  It is from "My Fair Lady," a song he released under a Creative Commons license.

Of course, layering loops on top of each other can sound terribly busy and mushy in a hurry.  Unless you are going for an ultra-dense or mashed-up feel, layer with care.

Mix and Match

Of course, additional sounds can come from virtual instruments, other recordings or wherever.  You can also string loops together to extend the time between repeats if monotony is an issue.  

In this track I alternate between just two loops, but I have individual drum hits arranged on another track for more contrast and variety.     

What is true of samples in general is true of loops.  They represent a rich body of sounds that can be used as is or endlessly modified.  They can also speed up some parts of a production, giving you more time to work on other elements.  On the other hand, it may well be worth investing some time in fundamentally changing a loop to make it "yours" and conform it to your needs.  
    

Editing  

One nice thing about REX files, compared to other loops, is that they are not monolithic.  In the screen shot above you can see that the REX loops are automatically stretched to the song tempo, just as an Apple Loop would be.  They both started life at a leisurely 118 bpm and I cranked them up to 202.  Unlike an AIFF or WAV I also have access to the REX file's component parts.

Double clicking a region representing a REX loop in Logic Express opens a separate Arrangement view showing the component audio slices of the REX file. 

Each one starts with a transient and can be edited, moved, copied or removed, just like any other audio file in my Logic Express project.  This is an enormous advantage to having an application that natively supports REX files and one of the reasons I don't expect to ever move entirely to Ableton Live for production.  Using REX loops in Logic Express I burn more channels on drums than I would if I got the same sounds from WAV or AIFF files because of the way REX slices are spread across tracks, but it's worth it.

Here are the contents of one of the REX files I use in Otter, the track pictured above.
    

Each of the tracks the REX slices are spread across is a "real" separate track with it's own channel in Logic Express's mixer.  In Otter I take advantage of this by putting different effects on each of these tracks.  For example, I use three different distortion effects, each one tailored to the slices of the loop on that channel. 

Here are bars 7-22 of Otter's drums.

Time Is Relative

Editing isn't just for REX files and one shot samples.  In this example I am going to show the process of making a WAV file of a 4/4 drum loop into a 5/4 drum loop.  For producers who work in strict dance genres this may seem like an odd example, but I think it powerfully illustrates the fact that loops aren't static.  They aren't even just elastic.  They exist for you to do whatever your heart desires with them.

I am going to start with a 120 bpm jazz loop in common time with some swing to it.  It is eight beats long sounds like this .  

I got this loop as a REX file with Beta Monkey’s Jazz Essentials library, but I wanted to demonstrate how to do this without the built-in flexibility of REX.   I bounced it, unmodified, to a WAV file and drug that copy into Logic Express.  I double-clicked it to open it in Logic Express's editor and normalized it.

Beta Monkey had their reasons for letting this loop be soft, but normalization will help me see and hear better.

Logic Express's tempo is set to 120 bpm so even though this loop is no longer elastic, one beat in the loop is exactly one beat in the DAW.  I will now change the DAW's time signature from the default 4/4 to 5/4.

There are other ways to do it, but I am going to change the time signature of this loop by picking a beat from the first bar and repeating it.  This strategy has the advantages of being based on an easily identifiable time interval and using only sound from the loop itself.  There is nothing stopping me from inserting foreign sounds into the loop, but in this case I’m suppressing some of my experimental tendencies in favor of a cohesive sound.

Looking at the first bar of the loop by itself I can see that some of the transients fall very close to the beat markers in the ruler.  This makes my job much easier.

The second beat has a clean beginning and end and I like the cymbal.  I will carefully select it and copy it to the clipboard.

After inserting the copied beat into the 4th beat of the first measure and fifth beat of the second measure I can hear that something is not right.

The last beat sounds wrong and doesn't loop right.  Closer examination reveals that I did not copy and paste exactly 500ms of sound (one beat at 120bpm is 500ms).  I eyeballed it and now I'm paying the price.  Besides that, there is something about that particular cymbal ghost that sounds funny ending the bar.

I can also see that toward the end of the second bar the transients are farther from the beat markers on the ruler than they are earlier in the loop, adding to the "wrongness" you can hear in the clip above, especially if you loop it a few times.  I am going to address all of these problems in the editor.  I won't lead you through everything I did (and un-did, and re-did) to clean up my edited loop but here are some of the high points.

Because nothing I did made the 2nd beat of the first measure sound good as the last beat of the second measure, I give up on using the same additional beat in both bars.  Repeating the last beat of the second measure sounds considerably better.  So that the two beats sound slightly different, and because I think it lends a sense of resolution, I hush the cymbal ghost a little on the fifth beat.  Notice I used "Change Gain..." not "Fade Out," which would sound very awkward when looped.

The timing problems created by my sloppy copy/paste job really come to a head in beats four and five of the second bar.  To get the transients closer to the beat markers I make many very small edits.  Mostly, I delete tiny lengths of sound right in front of the transients.  I listen to the loop repeatedly to make sure I have not created more problems.

After I have the last two beats tightened up adequately I see that the loop is ever so slightly too short.  If I were to use it in Live, or make it an Apple Loop I could leave it to my DAW to correct this on the fly.  However, I prefer to have this loop be exactly ten beats of 120bpm.  Also, I like the idea of correcting the length problem primarily where I caused it--the last two beats.  Therefore, I use Logic's off-line time stretching utility, Time And Pitch Machine, to pull the last two beats out to their full length.  It was a very small change so it did not recreate the timing problems I had just fixed.

The final loop looks like this.

And sounds like this.

Either using commercial samples and loops or being creative and original is a false choice.  You can do both.