Looping
Looping is an art, and takes good practice and sometimes a good ear to accomplish. Looping is simply taking a sound and repeating or looping it over and over. Do you remember watching The Flintstones or Bugs Bunny and watching characters move in the same shot to a different place? The moving backgrounds or scenery is a loop as it's the same thing repeated over and over. Professional samplers have always had the ability to loop sounds and present the user with various types of loops. While samplers have the ability to start the loop at a particular point instead of only being able to repeat the sound from the very beginning, the AUSampler does not give you the ability to start a loop from any point and repeat it. With some patience, legwork, and creativity, you can bring out the power and usability of the AUSampler.
The first sample we tried was a bright piano sample called LA Piano. Because it's a percussive sound, there will always be decay to it. What if you wanted to use a long string sound, or a lengthy breathy sound where you could hold down the keys for as long as you like and the sound would continue playing? In these next steps, I'll demonstrate how to accomplish that and much more.
This next file is large in size; about 30 MB in size. While it loads, here's a breakdown of what to expect:
Looping is an art, and takes good practice and sometimes a good ear to accomplish. Looping is simply taking a sound and repeating or looping it over and over. Do you remember watching The Flintstones or Bugs Bunny and watching characters move in the same shot to a different place? The moving backgrounds or scenery is a loop as it's the same thing repeated over and over. Professional samplers have always had the ability to loop sounds and present the user with various types of loops. While samplers have the ability to start the loop at a particular point instead of only being able to repeat the sound from the very beginning, the AUSampler does not give you the ability to start a loop from any point and repeat it. With some patience, legwork, and creativity, you can bring out the power and usability of the AUSampler.
The first sample we tried was a bright piano sample called LA Piano. Because it's a percussive sound, there will always be decay to it. What if you wanted to use a long string sound, or a lengthy breathy sound where you could hold down the keys for as long as you like and the sound would continue playing? In these next steps, I'll demonstrate how to accomplish that and much more.
This next file is large in size; about 30 MB in size. While it loads, here's a breakdown of what to expect:
- (1:45) Take the waveform you want to loop, then go to Tracks → Stereo Track to Mono. This is a pad sound, so we can truncate the start and end (the parts that fade in and out), since we can use the envelope to achieve the same thing.
- (2:07) Next, you'll need to use your ears and eyes to listen to the loop and find a good point. It's not necessary to use the entire loop. Find a point that sounds audible where the end of the sound can be looped with the beginning of the sound. You'll need to zoom in and find a simple part of the wave that can be split. Click on that point, press Shift + End, then cut (not copy) the piece to the clipboard.
- (3:03) Use the Time Shift tool to move the first half of the sample to the end. Click the selection tool, hit the rewind button in Audacity to go to the very beginning, then paste the cut sample. Now the end of the sample is at the beginning, and the beginning part of the sample is at the end.
- (4:02) Next use the time shift tool to move the (now) end part of the sample to the end of the beginning part of the sample. When you move it, a vertical yellow line appears and stops where the two join up. When you hit play, you'll notice an audible click or bump, which is natural.
- (5:04) Zoom in repeatedly to the middle part of the sample where the two ends meet. Now you'll have to join the waves in such a way to create a seamless loop. In the video, I take the first half of the sample and delete the parts after a specific upswing in the sound wave after it joins in the middle. For the second part of the sample, I find the sample part where the upswing continues after it meets in the middle and delete the parts of the sound before that.
- (8:18) Instead of pressing play, you can hit Shift + Space to have the sound repeat over and over, and if the samples meet perfectly and you don't hear any bumps or hiccups, you have a seamless, professional sample!
Note: in order to omit and bumps or clicks when you first play the middle of the sample, it's a good practice to zoom in as close as you can, and select a dot that's exactly on the horizontal line. If the dot is anywhere but on this line, you're more likely to hear a bump or click. Also, when I was attempting to loop the sample for the next octave, I had a harder time getting it right. So as you see, it's not an easy task, but well worth the trouble.
Once the samples have been mapped across the keyboard, select the layer and choose "Parameters", and you can tailor the sound by adjusting the attack and release to have a slow, incremental introduction and a sustaining release.
Once the samples have been mapped across the keyboard, select the layer and choose "Parameters", and you can tailor the sound by adjusting the attack and release to have a slow, incremental introduction and a sustaining release.