We’ll talk about these chords another day, because right now there are two things you need to understand about working with audio and working with loops. The first is that no matter your tempo, your loop needs to know about the beginning and the end of the measure. And that can be made a little extra crunchy, because when you cut your audio, you want to avoid cutting it at its loudest moments.
If you go from silence to not silence too quickly, you’ll get a click as your speaker tries to move instantaneously, which is effectively the highest frequency there is. Some DAWs will have a feature allowing you to automatically cut at the zero crossing, and I personally recommend you use it. But what you need to be aware of is that that little deviation between the cut point and the bar line can create an inaccuracy in your loop.
This concept is true actually anytime you have something that loops, even with MIDI. I’m in the habit of making a little safety cut at the beginning or the end of a region just to be sure everything is lining up where it’s supposed to be. That’s because, with a very slight inaccuracy, the cumulative effect will become a real problem later on in your song.
And while one method of safeguarding against this is to use the repeat function instead of a loop, I tend to be mistrustful anytime the machine makes a decision for me. Mousing around to get the repeat working correctly doesn’t really take much more time than option dragging this region, then these two regions, then these four regions, and so on. That’s 10 minutes worth right there.
And don’t worry, we’ll talk about this chord progression another day. That’s because Beat Kitchen is one of the only places you can go to learn all of this stuff on your own roof. And I kindly ask you to share this with someone who belongs in a Beat Kitchen class.
