Skip to my loop

The use of sampled drum loops has been common in many styles of dance music since the arrival of affordable samplers in the 80s. In the early days of hip-hop and drum & bass, most tracks were based around chopped-up and repitched breakbeats from 60s and 70s funk records. Sampled breaks are particularly convenient in that they boast both ‘vintage’ sonic character and a funky groove played by a real drummer.

These days the producer’s palette is much wider, and most sample libraries include drum loops created with sequenced samples, studio recordings of session drummers, or drum machines. In this tutorial we’ve seen that by selecting a beat that already fits well with the other elements in your mix, you can get away without having to do too much to it.

However, in most situations you’ll find that at least light tweaking is required.

Like one-shot drum hits, drum loops contain pitch information, so you can improve their position in the context of the rest of your beats by tuning them correctly. Most DAWs and samplers enable you to pitchshift loops using granular processing, but this isn’t always the ideal solution, especially if your DAW’s pitchshifting algorithm isn’t great at dealing with transients (the fast attack at the start of percussive sounds).

One solution is to chop the loop up into a series of hits and retune them without pitchshifting. This potentially long-winded process can be done for you automatically by NI Kontakt’s Beat Machine mode or the Slice to New MIDI Track feature in Ableton Live. Both of these solutions also create MIDI parts for triggering the resulting sampler patches, and these are handy for rearranging the beats or just examining their timing.

Most DAWs feature sophisticated groove detection algorithms that can be used to analyse the swing timing of a piece of audio or MIDI. They can then use this information to adjust the timing of other audio or MIDI parts so that they all play with the same swing. If your beats sound messy when they play together, this is well worth investigating.

EQ is also useful when working with sampled loops: try putting a high-pass filter on a troublesome loop and tuning the cutoff until the lows of the kick and snare don’t clash with your one-shots.