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5. Tightening drum loops with Live’s Slice to MIDI function

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Using drum loops or breaks is a convenient way to give your beats extra rhythm and character, but if they’re too loose or have too much reverb, they’ll need tightening up. Doing this manually can be fiddly, so some DAWs have their own beat-slicing capabilities to make it easier. Drag Dub beat.wav onto an audio track in Live. 3

Right-click the clip and select Slice to New MIDI Track. A window appears, asking how you want it to slice the loop and which preset to use for the resulting instrument. The default settings of slice by Transient and Built-in slicing preset will be fine for our purposes. Click OK to slice the loop. 2

Live will automatically set the project tempo to 140bpm. Select the clip and press Cmd/Ctrl+L to set loop points around it. This loop is drenched in dubby reverb, but we can quickly get rid of that and tweak the loop in various interesting ways by slicing it to MIDI. 4

A new MIDI track with an Instrument Rack loaded appears below the audio track. Mute the audio track. Now we can tighten up the new version of the beat on the MIDI track by turning its Sustain down to -infdB. Turn the Decay down to 362ms for a super-tight version of the beat. (Audio: Tight dub.wav)