DR BEAT
Benefit from offline processing by rendering groove shadows
In the last instalment of Dr Beat, I showed you how to create and process a live ‘groove shadow’ – ie, the reverb signal from one drum or percussion loop placed behind the dry signal of another, making it feel as if the dry loop has been placed in an alien space, and delivering interesting rhythmic and tonal interplay between the two.
This time round, we’re going to render the groove shadow as a discrete audio clip, opening up further creative processing, manipulating and editing possibilities that aren’t on the table when the reverb is generated in real time – obviously at the expense of being able to shape the reverb signal itself.
I’ll be picking up directly from where we left off in the previous tutorial, so if you missed that one, I recommend getting hold of 241 (at bit.ly/CMU241) and working through it first. You’ll learn how to set up the groove shadow reverb, and shape it with compression and gating. I’ve singled out one of the several groove shadows shown therein as the sole subject this time round.
You can get the Tutorial Files to follow along exactly, and you can grab a video version of the tutorial at vault.computermusic.co.uk. Readers of our iOS version can tap the first step to stream the video version. OK, so without further ado, let’s get started…