The Lost Art Of Looping

[Music] hi and welcome back I'm gonna talk about the lost art of looping today and I don't mean drum loops in a change from the usual program I'm using sound for insert reaper I work in reaper about 90% of the time these days but i was in fact the sound board user long before reaper even existed if you're wondering about the difference between an audio editor like sound Forge and a da w like Reaper I'll try to sum it up for you let's drag in a sample trim the start and fade-out the end if I now hit ctrl s to save most changes are written back to the file destructively and the next time I load that sample it'll be neatly trimmed as so let's try the same thing in Reaper I can drag the sample into the arrange page in much the same way trimming the starts and fading the end is easy now let's hit control s to save the project if I want to write this data to a web file I'll have to render and I'll have to render to a new file trying to overwrite the original will pop up an error warning that the file is in use while the feature set of an audio editor does indeed overlap with that of Addie aw this fundamental difference in workflow cascades down through the whole application and makes them suited for very different scenarios Addie aww is perfect for creating a song but if you're creating a sample library an editor might be more useful I'll illustrate this by dragging in another sample this time an acoustic guitar harmonic and noticed that the sample just stopped dead after little more than a second why would a sample like this be trimmed so short was no fade-out surely it makes it useless if we peek at the file properties as it clue as to the reason yes that's right I created this sample way back in 2001 and it was destined for my hardware sampler which in fact I still own though I can't remember when I must used it hello I pimped mine with extra RAM and even an internal hard drive the Yamaha a 3000 maxed out at 128 megabytes and couldn't stream samples directly from the hard drive so large sprawling sample libraries of the type we're used to today was simply not possible in those days large samples were a luxury most could not afford even if you'd maxed out your sampler with ramp you probably wouldn't want to fill that up with a single patch most people couldn't afford a rack full of samplers so hardware samplers were usually used for multi tymberlee to provide multiple parts all the samples for all the patches used would need to total less than 128 Meg in that case and that's assuming you upgraded the basic specs of the sampler many people had to work with much less if we take a look at the bar above the waveform display in sound Forge we can see that I've defined a sustaining loop if I press the special play as sample button at the bottom the sample plays from the start is normal but then loops around the sustaining loop until I press stop this allows your sampler to create long notes from a short sample a full-featured sampler would usually provide a few different options he could set it to loop around this region as long as the note is held down but then plate at the end when the note is released which could be useful if there's a distinctive note off behavior that you need to preserve or could set it a loop to the sustain stage and continue to loop during the release in which case the sample would never play beyond the end of the loop and he could safely trim off the end as I've done here however creating these loop regions was not always easy I can drag the start and end of the loop region around and I can zoom in to see the waveform better as I do it good clean loop points the don't click or pop or sound obviously cyclic can be really difficult more a matter of luck than anything else and if you think this is tricky try doing it on a hardware sampler with no proper waveform display this is where sound Ford is loop tuner is invaluable we can open this from the view menu but if you're creating a whole sample library you might want to memorize the hotkey now we're seeing the end of the loop section in the left half of the display and the start of the loop section in the right half of the display and in the middle we can see exactly what will happen to the wave form as it loops round from the end back to the start the buttons at the bottom allow you to play the region before the loop or the region after the loop if there is one but the middle button loops the sustain region indefinitely and I can now adjust the start and end points while hearing the results in real time these two buttons shifts the loop end point back or forward to the next or previous zero crossings while these two shift the loop start point to the next or previous a zero crossings and I can quickly and easily dial out the discontinuity and create a smooth transition that's not to say that it's always easy even with the loop tuner some samples are difficult or impossible to loop cleanly as they don't settle down into a nice simple waveform like this one tricky cases where you can't dial out the clicks or pops you may be able to rescue it by crossfading between the loop start and end but this isn't always a solution complex waveforms that evolve over time like a cymbal crash or a piano note can be very difficult to loop well but you're still about a hundred times more likely to pull it off in sound Forge than on a hardware sampler speaking of hardware samplers back in the day I could save the resulting samples onto a floppy disk and transfer that disk to the sampler but much slicker and cooler to just transfer it over directly using the sample of feature believe it or not it was actually possible to transfer samples via old-school five pinned in MIDI cables but this was pretty slow so I did at one point have a scuzzy card in my machine and I could fire results across the scuzzy bus instead which was an order of magnitude faster days of course it's much easier just drag the samples into modern software such as UV ifalcon and enjoy the convenient features to help you configure them and map them across the keyboard in about a tenth of the time required on an old-school hardware sampler of course these days we measure the RAM available in gigabytes instead of megabytes and we can stream our samples from lightning fast SSD drives if they're too big even for that so this kind of tight sample editing is full amount of fashion why spend all that time carefully looping samples when he can just preserve the entire note instead especially if the large size of the library is also useful for marketing of course there's no doubt that if your goal is to recreate the sound of an acoustic instrument as accurately as possible the best approach is to keep as much of the original sample as possible and preserve the natural decay of each note but this is not always the goal when creating samples in this case I wasn't trying to emulate a real guitarist playing harmonics I wanted to create an unusual new instrument instead taiked short looped samples can actually have a few advantages in this case the sustain release of each note can be defined solely by the envelopes used in the patch with no natural burnt in decay characteristics to complicate the issue each note can be much more consistent in its decay with no tendency for some notes to decay faster than others a notes can sustain or release for as long as you like regardless of the original length listen [Music] as a bonus and makes it easier to record some of it even in a really nice studio it can be difficult to avoid background noise creeping in during the decay of each note even a subtle rustle of clothing can become a problem if it happens every time you play a certain note short samples with a sustain loop are much less likely to suffer from these kinds of issues and finally small samples are still more efficient while it may not be the deal-breaker it used to be small samples will load quicker and leave you more of your resources free for other parts in this case I've created an instrument that is playable over a surprisingly wide keyboard range using only seven samples with a total file size of about one megabyte so let's not allow this technique to be lost in the mists of time just because we have the freedom to create multi-gigabyte libraries these days that doesn't mean there isn't still value in tightly edited and carefully looped samples especially when loaded into software like a falcon which is about a thousand times more powerful than my old hardware that's all for now thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Dan Worrall

Views: 159,173

Rating: 4.9387441 out of 5

Keywords: Sound Forge, Soundforge, Reaper, Audio Editor, DAW, sustaining loop, sound design, Magix, Cockos

Id: AnIpmDO0tyk

Length: 9min 39sec (579 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 24 2019