14. Reworking beats with Regroover Pro

1 A great way to put your own stamp on a remix project is to do something new and exciting with the parts you’ve been given. Let’s do just that by using Accusonus Regroover Pro to dissect and rework some standard DnB drums into a fresh break. Import Backing.wav into a fresh 174bpm project, then add Regroover Pro to a fresh MIDI track. 2 Open Regroover, then import Break.wav. The drums will be analysed and spread over four Layers automatically. Hitting Preview alongside each Layer’s Solo button will let you audition them – notice that Layer 1 has the transient of the kick poking through. We can merge this into one sound, alongside the kick tail in Layer 2, by enabling the annotation tool (the eraser icon, top right). 3 Select every kick transient in Layer 1 by double-clicking on it; then, after locking Layers 1, 3 and 4, hit the Split button. This’ll reanalyse the sample and combine the kick transients with the kick weight. We’ll also separate the snare to Layer 1 by selecting the snare tails on Layer 4, locking Layers 2-4 and running another Split. Now, time to sequence a new break… 4 We can drag the snare and kick to individual pads in the Expansion Kit, to trigger independently, by disabling the annotation tool, then selecting one of each and Ctrl/Cmd-dragging them to two blank pads. Add a new region to the MIDI channel, then lay down a kick and snare groove of your choosing – we’ve gone for a lazy, half-tempo beat. 5 We’ll add some percussion to our new break by selecting a small loop of each layer in Regroover; you’ll see two green locators above each Layer’s waveform. We’ve looped a one-beat shuffle, but with Layer 4 set to a two-beat loop for rhythmic interest. Trigger the

D# percussion by adding notes from C3 to 3 to our existing MIDI region. 6 We can give our snare more presence by copying it to another Expansion Kit pad, opening the Edit tab and hitting Reverse (in the Waveform panel). Pull down the Volume to around -10dB, then sequence the reverse snare before every other snare in the break. To finish, route the snare to a separate output channel, then dial in reverb for ambience.