Using loops in PT8

[darrena]

This is my second thread. For background I'm a PC user who uses Acid today I'm looking at other potential DAWs. I am seriously considering Pro Tools 8 and Cubase 5.

I had the opportunity to visit for an hour today with a colleague who uses Pro Tools pretty regularly with his indie rock band. He's a tech savvy guy (is a programmer for a software company) and gave me a nice overveiw of Pro Tools 8.

However, we ran into a bit of a knowledge gap when it came to using loop content. I asked him to take me through recording some MIDI. Then I have him my USB stick with a new loop library I had just purchased and downloaded. I said, ok, let's preview some loops along with this MIDI content and see which ones sound good. (This is Acid's bread-and-butter but I was told that it has long since been emulated by every other DAW on the market.)

He paused. "I'm not sure how to do that. Maybe there's a plugin that does that?" I said that I wanted to have the audio as a track in PT so that I could cut it up, effect it, mix it, etc. just like everything else. The best we came up with is Import Audio, which loaded the loop in at its original tempo and then we stretched it and duplicated it to make it match tempo and loop under the MIDI passage.

Is this really what you need to do?

I looked this up on youtube and found that cubase basically does what Acid does (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC6st...eature=related) but is there really no way to do this in Pro Tools 8?

[KingFish]

Pro-Tools 8 has a whole "Workspace Window Workflow" that your friend may be missing out on.

You can audition all audio files, along with playback in the edit window "AT session tempo" - when you find one you like, you can either drag the loop into a Track, and It will drop it at the SESSION tempo, not the "Loop's native tempo" - OR, you can drop the Loop in the "Audio tracks window", (On the left of the edit window) and it'll instantly create a new track, with that loop, AT session tempo, and you can "Drag it out" using the TCE Loop tool" - slice n' dice - do anything you like to it.

Any time you change the session's tempo, that Loop / Elastic audio track will conform to the new tempo, or tempo changes in the session.

[darrena]

That's very helpful, thanks! I'll see if i can find a tutorial video showing this feature.

[darrena]

I found this--looks pretty much exactly like Acid. Perfect!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS4poK-yAjs

[frantik]

the workspace is cool for previewing audio .. alt-semi colon is the shortcut :)

[darrena]

One thing that I'm not 100% clear on is in this video the workspace shows only a handfull of loops. Is this because you must import specific audio files into the workspace or is this just because the demo computer only has 4 loops on it? In other words, will my whole loop library of thousands of loop be available in every song I work on without any special import process?

[frantik]

You can browse all drives and folders on your system in the workspace, so your entire library will be available.

[darrena]

cool! i wonder what all the fuss about ableton and loops is about, sounds like everybody's doin' it these days ;-)