One of the best techniques to master in electronic music production is how to prevent that over-looped feeling, combining consistency with inconsistency can be an art unto itself. Here’s one of our favorite methods to inject that glued moving vibe to your hi-hats:
First drop a crash or ride cymbal on your audio track, something with a bit of tail is needed to take full advantage of this technique. Then engage the warp and loop functions in the sample editor, to simplify things pull your loop brace to 1.3. Once you master this technique messing with varying loop lengths can add even more variation to your loops.
Now change your preserve to 1/16 beats and select the sample offset modulation in from the Envelope Menu under Clip mods.
Alter your grid to 16th notes and add in some varying modulation on your audio file.
Then switch to volume modulation and convert your grid to 32nd notes and drag down on every other adjustment.
Once that’s complete start randomly altering the decay and start-times for each volume mod. Press play here and you should start to hear some nice whipping hat action.
Now duplicate the crash audio file 4 times and change the sample start times for each looped hit by one 16th note.
To complete this trick select all the audio files, hit the Launch Clip editor and set the Follow Action to ‘other’ and drop down the start position to 0.1.0 or similar.
Here you can press play and hear a constantly varied hi-hat loop, sure to add that much needed DE-Looped flavor to your records. Keep in mind, sparseness is the real way to masterfully add this trick to your tracks. A balance between consistency and inconsistency is needed to keep peoples ears intrigued, a form of controlled chaos to sort is key.
