The Reaper forums reveal a lively interest in Reaper on Linux, and the developers will address issues with running the program under Wine.Īll the applications profiled in this tutorial include tools for stretching or shrinking the time of an audio file or track (with or without shifting the pitch) and for changing the pitch of a sound (with or without changing its tempo). Although the program is written strictly for Windows it runs well in Linux with Wine and very well with Wine and the wineasio driver. Reaper is currently in beta-testing for its impending 2.0 release. Time-stretching And Pitch-shifting With Reaper Alas, I haven't the space to get into all that here, so I'll leave its further exploration to my interested readers. You can have a lot of fun forming and reforming any audio material with these tools, and then there's the LADSPA signal processing plugins and their parameter control automation. To end this section I remind readers that any kind of soundfile can be used in this way, it doesn't need to be a drum loop. These isolated segments can be copied and recombined into new patterns (Figure 5), and each segment can be reexpanded to all or any part of its original length, a very cool and helpful feature. For our example, we'll the Snap to Beat, then use Ardour's segment lengthen/shorten function to isolate individual beats. Once again, the Snap setting is your friend. The last measure is made of two copies of the same half-bar fill, with the first copy reversed.įigure 4: An 8-bar track with multiple loopsĪrdour wasn't designed to be a beat-slicer, but you can do some handy cutting and chopping with its segment tools. The example in Figure 4 uses three loops, the original groove loop and two fills. Simply load the new set of audio files as new tracks, edit as desired, then mix and match until you find the right combination of patterns (i.e. We can liven up our example by replacing every fourth loop with a variation of the groove or a fill taken from the same source loop collection. Figure 3 shows a repeated loop with a series marked for copy.ĭrummers are pattern-playing creatures, but to keep things interesting they vary those patterns from time to time. The default map accelerates the selection and copy/paste functions, greatly simplifying the creation of basic tracks. Power-users will want to learn some of Ardour's keyboard map. Now we can easily create a track from a seamless series of loops. Just set the Snap target to Bar, move the blue Edit cursor to the barline, then select all the tracks and split them at the cursor position. If you do want, you can quickly edit your loops to a uniform length. If you don't want to edit the loops themselves, unselect the autcrossfade option. The end of one loop will be automatically crossfaded with the beginning of the next one, causing unintended and undesirable consequences such as muting the downbeat of a drum loop. Don't worry, the extra length is usually dead space, but it can create a problem if Ardour's Options/Crossfades is set to Created Automatically. Alas, sometimes they don't fit perfectly, as we see in the screenshot. Right-click on the red Tempo mark (see Figure 2), select Edit, set the tempo to 110, and now the loops should fit perfectly to the measure. The pictured loops were recorded at 110 BPM, so we need to reset Ardour's tempo. By the way, pictures tell the story best here, so this article is a bit image-heavy.įigure 1: Adding existing audio files to Ardour In fact, Ardour itself isn't really a sequencer, but it happens to work nicely at the job.Īfter starting Ardour, we load a series of drum loops with the Session/Add Existing Audio dialog, assigning them to separate tracks (the default action). I've employed the latest Ardour 2.1 for this article, but the examples should be realizable on any modern sequencer. Tutorials and links to project demos are included, so warm up your headphones and let's get loopy.įirst up, a brief tutorial on using loops to create a track. In this second and final part I'll demonstrate some of the loop-specific tools I've found in Ardour, Reaper, and Audacity.
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