Looping a sample

Hello,

Can someone help me smooth out my loops? Is there a way to test a sample for loopability before I truncate it?

I'm trying to sample the beginning guitar part in "The Girl from Ipanema" by Frank Sinatra. My goal is to take that 4 bars and loop it, then layer beats on top of it.

I've tried two methods so far:

1. Assigned the entire song to a pad
2. Trim the beginning and end of the song down to the 4 bars I want
3. Record a pattern with 4 bars
5. Hit the pad once at the beginning
6. Adjust tempo of the pattern to try and get it to loop

The last step is tedious and does not work very well.

The other method I tried was:

1. Same 2 steps as above
2. Slice simple into 8 parts
3. Try to tap through the pads as I record

This worked a little better but still did not get smooth transitions. Please let me know if you have suggestions! I'm using this as a learning experience to hopefully move on to bigger things!

Thanks,
Mudflap

 

Well for starters, I would use some software to "pre" chop the song so you dont have to who song on one pad. If you got Pro Tools, chopping is like super easy, takes about 5 minutes to get the hang of it honestly. If you dont have that, get Audacity, works all the same. Once you got the section you want sliced up in one of those programs, there is a loop play option in both programs to see if the loop is indeed cut right. That is the key, making sure its cut exactly on the first transcient and the last one. If it not, just undo your last cuts and re-cut it. That's my two cents and so far I've had no problems getting my loops right. Hope this helps. Peace!

 

Hmm I'm going to give this a try. Good idea. The only DAW software I have is Reaper. Maybe I'll try out Audacity.

Thanks,
Mudflap

 

Pre-slicing in Reaper is super easy too, I use that instead of Audacity to lower the number of moving parts in my workflow. Slice it up, render, and you've got your sample...

Sometimes I'll even have a couple of elements/slices in a single files if I'm considering multiple parts, then I follow KnockSquared's method for pad-binding. Again, less is more when trying to keep track of things later on.

Classic sample source -- Frank rulz! Look forward to hearing the results.

L8r,
D

 

Thanks Dirkson. I didn't know I could do that in Reaper. I'll have to learn about pad-binding. Haven't tried that yet.

Thanks,
Casey

 

Yes, use Audacity here as well