You’ve just purchased your new sample pack and are ready to create your next underground jam, you’ve created your core beat with loops but now your a bit stuck on the arrangement. Here is a tip on how to take your loops even further in ableton, which can not only help with sound design but arrangement manipulation as well helping to extend your 4 bar loop in to an interesting 16 or 32 bar piece turning your beat into music.
Go ahead and select any loop, tops, percs, vox, and leads work best for this trick.
Add a filter delay to the selected track/loop, mess with it a bit until you get a rhythm pattern that sounds good in your track. Now turn the volumes for each delay in the plugin all the way down so you no longer here the delay.
Go ahead and open up the envelope editor of the loop in Ableton and select one of the delay volumes from the menu that you’d first like to start tweaking. For the purposes of this tutorial we are going to start with Filter Delay – 3 Volume.
Now De-Select the LINKED button, turning it red and causing your loop to “disappear” while the loop brace turns a pinkish color (depending on your color settings).
Here is where things get really interesting. Pull your loop brace as far out as you’d like, but for the purpose of this tutorial we are going to do a simple 16 bars. Basically what you’ve just done is separate your loop length from your automation/modulation length. Now just draw in some random automation either with the arrow or pencil.
You’ll instantly here that your raw 4-bar loop has taken on new life, has a bit of controlled randomness but is much more interesting to listen to overtime greatly improving extension of your record for the song as a whole. Repeat this step for other delay volumes and truly any parameter of any plug-in and your loops will truly begin to set themselves apart from the rest creating not only interesting rhythms but textures as well. This is just a basic way to do this to get you started, remember you can do this with anything so let your imagination run wild and pure magic will begin to happen!
