Working with sampled loops is an effective way to produce beats, especially if you know how to step beyond the obvious…

Using prefab drum loops to quickly make beats is probably one of the first things that you did upon coming face to face with a DAW for the first time. It’s a quick, easy and fun way to make music, no matter what genre you produce music in, and it can be a hugely creative, valid and rewarding technique. You just have to look at hip-hop, a genre that began with DJs creating extended, looping drum solos by using two turntables and two copies of the same record, to see just how innovative and exciting loop-based music production can be. DAWs are hugely powerful audio editing tools, and by fully exploiting all of their features, we can turn loops into flexible musical building blocks that offer endless scope and potential.

Not all loops will sit together perfectly, because of differences in timing and/or tuning. Thankfully, both of these issues can be resolved pretty easily with the advanced timestretching and pitchshifting trickery that today’s music software is capable of.

Ironically, to get the most out of loops, it usually helps to have a good understanding of how beats are programmed from scratch: if you don’t know how to construct the kind of rhythms you want to create, or have a grasp of how swing works, say, you’re going to be limited to making only the most basic of alterations to your loops.

In these walkthroughs we’ll show you how to slice, fade, rearrange, layer, timestretch, EQ and pitchshift and even clone loops to create new rhythms and create fuller, more satisfying beats. Combine these techniques with the advice in Drum Sequencing Essentials on p20 and you’ll be fully tooled up with the beat-sculpting skills required to make your biggest, baddest-sounding drum tracks yet.

Step by step

1. Editing sampled beats in Logic Pro

1 As with most DAWs, Logic comes with a multitude of ways of creating and editing beats with samples. On a basic level, you can go in and do things manually. Load in the 80s Back Beat from the Apple Loops library. Because it is an Apple Loop it will adjust its tempo to whatever project tempo you have set automatically.

2 But if you want to change the way the loop sounds in terms of its beat order, you have options. First there’s the manual method of going in and slicing the beats up with the Scissors tool, and dragging them into a new order. The division timing is according to how you have the Snap set up, but you can home in on very specific beats.

3 Now it’s a case of simply copying beats (Option>click>drag) to add fills, extra hits and a lot more interest to that standard back beat. Logic now even puts in crossfades for you so you don’t get any sample clicking - a far cry from the old days when you’d have to do these fades by hand.