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Tuesday, 6 January 2004

Making loops in Logic ::

Old dog, new tricks; I thought I didn’t have the tools to make good smooth loops quickly (Peak can do it, but I’ve found it painstaking; maybe I have something to learn there). It turns out that it’s pretty easy in Logic if one is extracting a loop out of an audio file that is at least just a little longer than the desired loop length:

1. In the Arrange window, make an audio region that’s approximately the desired length.
2. Open the audio region in the sample editor to fine-tune the start and end points. It’s OK if the loop point is less than smooth; just get it as close as possible.
3. The next steps are much simpler if the desired loop is at the song’s tempo; if it’s not, copy the region to a new song, or use the Time and Pitch Machine to adjust the loop.
4. Use “Adjust tempo using object & locators” so that the audio region is exactly some number of beats long. This will change the tempo of your song, which is why you should do it in a new document, or have all your events SMPTE-locked before doing this.
5. Make a copy of the region by option-dragging to the right--place the copy immediately following the original.
6. Being sure that only the original is selected, drag its right corner to lengthen it by a 16th or 8th note, so that it “underlaps” the copy.
7. Set the original region to crossfade; choose a crossfade type and length.
8. Do a digital mixdown of the two regions. You should now have a new audio file that is twice the length of your loop. Listen, and see how smooth the crossfade is.
9. Now shorten the beginning and endpoints of the region so that it is only 1 loop length. For example, if the loop length is 1 bar, and your crossfade of the two loops is 2 bars, you might drag the left corner to remove the first two beats, and the right corner to remove the last two, leaving you with 1 bar that should seamlessly loop.
10. Instead of simply shortening the two-bar region, you can instead divide those two beats at the beginning and 2 beats at the end--you may want to use those regions for the first and last iterations of the loop.
11. (added 12 Jan) Or, to obtain a 1 bar loop that starts on beat 1 instead of on beat 3, repeat steps 5-9 on the loop that starts at beat 3--this will give you a loop that begins on beat 1.

There may be easier ways for less extreme situations; in my case my loop had an unpleasant change in volume at the loop point, and crossfading it smoothed it out nicely. And while this may be old news for many it’s a discovery for me—in the mid-90's I spent many hours tweaking loop points by hand.

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