Reworking ready-rolled drum loops
Hear about a producer using a ready-rolled loop from a sample pack, and you'll probably emit a disapproving groan. Admittedly, it isn't that creative. So the question is this: how can you go beyond using the loop in its entirety? And – more importantly – why would you do this instead of making your own loops from scratch?
Well, there are many ways to use and customise stock loops. Often, it can be especially time-consuming to create organicsounding percussion loops from individual hits – after all, that's precious time you could be using to push the overall track forward – so by using a loop from a pack, then customising it to suit a different context, you'll create something you may not have thought of when using one-shots.
With this in mind, let's look at a few inventive ways of incorporating other sound designers' loops into your tracks without sacrificing creativity. Chopping and rearranging a loop – either by automatic slicing or via your DAW's scissor tool – lets you rearrange the pattern as you see fit. After that, timestretching and pitchshifting are ideal for not only shaping into a new context, but also for big transformations. Chop and transpose different sections of audio, or use extreme settings to transform toms into kicks, or snares into hats.
Alternatively, take a drum loop that you love, chop out the loop's main kick and snare, then sidechain-compress the rest against a fresh kick and snare to create new background grooves. Swamp that groove in pre-compression reverb to create pumping background ‘air'.
Vocoders are excellent for processing audio, too. Take a drum loop and use a melodic modulator signal to tonalise the loop; or add a short 'tonal' delay on your drum track, prevocoder, to change its flavour.
Finally, why not take four or five bongo and conga loops, chop out sections from each, then group them and process together? Again, you'll get a unique composite groove that you can reshuffle around to suit the rest of your drums.