Generate new musical ideas in Ableton Live

How can we take short loops and keep them interesting for longer periods of time?

Loops are great. Working with loops gives you a quick way to create music, or form the foundations for a track, but loops can get boring quickly. Is there an easy way to keep short loops interesting every time?

Ableton Live’s Beat Repeat is an often overlooked tool, probably because it can sometimes create predictable results. With a little tweaking, however, we can turn it into a powerful tool for creating variation and interest in loops.

We’ll make use of Beat Repeat’s Chance control to automatically slice the beat up based on a set probability, so that each cycle of the loop ends up being slightly different. We’ll also set up some control over how often the effect will automatically rearrange the beat.

We’ll start by configuring some basic values for the Beat Repeat’s controls then create multiple copies to affect different parts of the bar. We’ll group everything into a Rack and map a Macro control to adjust the probability of slices occurring, then save it all as a preset to reuse in future sessions.

This technique works particularly well for drums, but can work equally well on all kinds of material.