Audio snapping, groove clipping

[Starship Krupa]

I'm finally getting around to composing with musical samples and loops I've pulled myself from old records. I've used 3rd-party loops, and non-musical dialog samples in Cakewalk before, but this is my first crack at taking a couple of bars from an instrumental piece and looping them, adding other stuff, etc.

I've tried reading what the Reference Guide has to say about Audio Snap and Groove Clips and still am not sure what Cakewalk tools to apply to this and how. I've even poked around them experimentally just to check them out, and couldn't make sense of the Audio Snap Palette thing with dragging the beat markers around and all that. It always looked like the ratio of prep work to work saved by using the tool was unfavorable and even then, I couldn't get it to extract anything close to an accurate tempo, I did better by hitting play and tapping my foot and counting.

Since then, when I've wanted to put something together I've just continued to use Sound Forge to trim samples so that they loop rythmically and seamlessly, but if there are better ways to do it I'm up for checking them out.

My first task is: I have some 2-bar samples from different parts of an old song (same song, so same tempo). The audio in them isn't rhythmically complicated, it's just 4 guitar chord strums per bar, strum strum strum strum on the beat.

What I want to do is take those 2-bar sections and loop them and string them together, without changing their pitch. I want to keep them as close to the original tempo as possible, and I want them "on the grid" so I can add MIDI notes, beats, and even play live instruments.

So these clips must be able to loop smoothly and the project tempo must match theirs.

Using the tools in Cakewalk, what's the best way to go about this? I know how to do it by other means, but I want to try it the Cakewalk way.

[John Vere]

Watch the Creative Sauce videos. He's excellent at explaining this stuff. I watched the one on using audio snap to have a free form track be used to create a tempo map. 

 

[Starship Krupa]

4 hours ago, John Vere said:

Watch the Creative Sauce videos

Excellent. Thanks, John. I see Mike also has videos on "Audiosnap Tempo Mapping" and "Time and Tempo."

Something that disappointed me was that Cakewalk really missed the target on detecting the tempo of the clip. It's just 8 downstrokes right on the beat, quarter notes. Heavily reverbed, though, so the transients aren't as sharp as in Mike's video. There are other tools, like Hornet SongKey.

[730819]

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