QuickStart: Building Drum Tracks with Loops
Pages: 1, 2

Fixing

By now the little ringing noise in Effected Drum Kit 07 was starting to annoy the heck out of me, so I used a similar technique to get rid of it. First I located it in the Track Editor (Figure 5).

Fig. 5: Zooming in on the annoying ringing noise in preparation for deleting it.

A tap of the Delete key banished the noise (Figure 6).

Fig. 6: The noise is history.

Now I needed to fill the gap. But when I Option-dragged the first part of the loop to the right, GarageBand "obligingly" shortened the segment following it, because the first part of the loop was longer than the gap. That wasn't what I wanted, so I had to use the bracket tool twice more to adjust the lengths of the filler material and the segment that followed it. (See Figure 7.)

Fig. 7: More surgery: extending the filler material with the bracket tool.

I cut the ringing sound from every other repetition, which seemed about right. Then I copied my whole eight-bar phrase so that I had 16 bars of music:

• 16 Bars (565KB MP3)

Adding Punch

For the B section of my tune, I wanted to use the same basic beat (Club Dance Beat 009), but change it sonically. Why not layer it with a MIDI drum kit to add snap and crackle to the drum sounds? This technique works better with some loops than others: if the loop has a loose rhythmic feel, you may have trouble getting the MIDI notes to line up with the drum hits in the loop. But with the loop I was using, that wasn't an issue. Even so, adding a MIDI layer turned out to be a more interesting challenge than I expected.

I dragged the beat from the Loop Browser into a new track, so that it wouldn't be affected by the EQ I had applied to the first part of the song. (I could have accomplished the same thing by automating the Treble Reduction effect.) Then I created a Software Instrument, chose the Hip Hop Kit for it, and recorded two bars of kick and snare notes from my MIDI keyboard. To fix my sloppy keyboard playing, I quantized (time-corrected) the notes to an eighth-note grid. (See Figure 8.)

Fig. 8: Quantizing MIDI notes to the correct timing.

After copying and editing the notes to make a four-bar pattern that was the same as the notes in the Real Instrument loop, I wanted to add a hi-hat to my MIDI drums. But I was unable to find a way to overdub the hi-hat into the same MIDI part. (Searching for the word "overdub" in the Help file yielded no results.) GarageBand recorded the hi-hat part I played on the keyboard, but assumed I was trying out an alternate take for the Hip Hop Kit instrument. I could listen to either my hi-hat or my kick and snare, but not both at once.

I could have created the hi-hat part by hand-editing the MIDI notes in the kick/snare MIDI part, but how much fun would that be? Instead, I created a second Hip Hop Kit instrument. I then Option-dragged the part (which contained the two takes) into the new track and selected a different take for each track. (See Figure 9.)

Fig. 9: Alternating MIDI takes for variety.

Adding Echoes

As a final touch, I dragged Club Dance Beat 009 into yet another track and shortened it so that only the first kick was sounding. I dragged the left end of the main loop to the right, so that now the first kick was coming from one track and the rest of the loop from another.

I used GB's Pitch slider to transpose the first kick up 11 half-steps, which seriously messed with its tone color. Then I applied the Track Echo effect, set to quarter-notes (1/4), and moved the Repeat Color slider somewhat to the right so that the low frequencies would gradually be filtered out of the echoes.

I liked this so much that I did it with the snare sound from the same loop, transposing the pitch up by only three half-steps and using a dotted eighth-note delay time (represented in the GB interface as "1/4 ." — very misleading). That created the kind of echo pattern heard in reggae/dub music. (See Figure 10.)

Fig. 10: Enhancing the groove with a dotted-eighth echo.

A little lead synth (courtesy of GB's Arena Run preset) and I had a good solid sketch that I can turn into a finished tune:

• Both Sections (503KB MP3)

A professional-oriented program like Apple Logic or Ableton Live will give you additional tools beyond those described in this article — but if you roll up your sleeves and master these techniques, you'll be amazed at how much you can do with GarageBand.