The Separate Clip at Transients command provides an easy way to slice beats.
Who says you can’t create beats in Pro Tools? We show you how...
In music production circles, Pro Tools is often seen as the DAW of choice for people working in what might be called the traditional recording studio idiom, with the DAW being essentially a modern replacement for an analogue console and tape machine. While it’s clear that DAWs are far more than capable of assuming the role of a virtual multitrack and mixer, it’s also true that different DAWs enjoy followings with different users. In the same way that, broadly speaking, many composers favour Logic Pro, electronic music producers gravitate towards Ableton and people working in game audio like Reaper, Pro Tools has traditionally been seen by many as the first choice for people who track bands.
DAW choice has always been influenced by perception as much as by features, with second‑hand opinions being repeated online, often long after the missing features that inspired them have been addressed. Avid have been making a sustained effort to change the perception that Pro Tools is great for band recordings and singer‑songwriters but producers and beatmakers would be best served elsewhere.
One widespread way of working is for a composition to start life in Logic or Ableton before being migrated to Pro Tools for vocal production and mixing — but the idea that one single DAW can’t do it all is beginning to seem old‑fashioned. Rather than the finishing steps being completed in a different DAW, why shouldn’t the beat be created and completed all in Pro Tools?
An important part of changing the perception of Pro Tools among producers and beatmakers is to get them to try Pro Tools in the first place. This is why the introduction of Pro Tools Intro, a feature‑limited but upwards‑compatible and free version of Pro Tools was so important. Pro Tools First, introduced in 2017 and discontinued in 2022, wasn’t attractive to potential new users. Pro Tools Intro, introduced later in 2022, definitely is.
Creative Experimentation
A second step in attracting producers and beatmakers to Pro Tools is to offer the kind of creative environment that encourages experimentation that producers are accustomed to elsewhere. The non‑linear composition environment pioneered by Ableton’s Grid view has been co‑opted by Apple in the form of Logic’s Live Loops, and Pro Tools’ new Sketch feature offers something similar. A free iPad app mirrors the functionality of the Sketch window in Pro Tools, facilitating easy collaboration. Another feature, introduced in 2020 and which supports this creative phase of the production process, is Ableton Link, which lets you synchronise musical beat, tempo, and start/stop commands across multiple Link‑enabled applications.
Collaborative jamming between iOS devices is a long way from tracking a rock band but if you need that, Pro Tools supports it. Unfortunately there is no recipe for creating a killer beat, but as Picasso said, “inspiration exists, but it has to find you working,” and tools that facilitate the free flow of ideas put you in the best possible place to receive that elusive inspiration. So what Pro Tools‑specific techniques are there beyond the aforementioned Pro Tools Sketch that can assist beatmakers? And if Pro Tools is so good at editing audio, how can that help? One such area is in the creation and manipulation of loops.
Loops & Breakbeats
Breakbeats, originally samples of exposed drumming from ’70s funk and the like, are central to many styles of production and while entire genres have built up around manipulation of well known breaks (think ‘Funky Drummer’ or the Amen break), the Wild West days of consequence‑free sampling are behind us. But if you would rather not rely on third‑party content, creating your own can still be inspirational, and in Pro Tools we have the ideal platform for detailed audio editing and sample manipulation. Particularly as, unlike many DAW’s that use a separate sample editor, in Pro Tools sample editing happens in the familiar Edit page. Once a suitable piece of (legal) audio has been identified on an audio track, one of the most powerful tools available to us is Tab to Transients.
Tab To Transients changes the function of the Tab key from advancing the Insertion Point along the timeline from one clip boundary to the next into a key that advances between audio transients within audio clips. The threshold for this isn’t editable but the default works so well you might never notice. Adding Shift allows the creation of an Edit Selection and using these two keys enables the creation of fast and accurate loops. Once a loop selection is made, using the Trim command separates the loop and deletes the rest of the audio in a single operation (Command+T/Control+T). Useful if you don’t need the rest of the audio.
Loops are fundamental to many styles of production and while using third‑party loops is standard practice, creating your own feels far more authentic. But looping needs to be right. Making sure that the loop point doesn’t contain any sustained elements which will cause obvious discontinuities is important — crash cymbals are a typical culprit. Checking the loop point can be as simple as selecting the Loop Playback mode by right‑clicking the Play button or using the shortcut Command+Shift+L and playing through the entire loop, but a really useful function to try out if you work with loops a lot is Dynamic Transport. Select it from the Options menu or use the shortcut Command+Control+P. One of the advantages of Dynamic Transport for this kind of work is the blue triangle Playback Start marker in the timeline ruler. When selecting audio for a loop this can be placed just before the end of the Edit Selection to quickly audition the loop point without having to listen from the beginning.
The Dynamic Transport function in action.
Because audio clips are simply references to their parent audio files on disk, you can use the Trim tool to adjust the loop in and out points. Experimenting with loops can result in unexpected results and fun can be had by using Control (Start on a PC) with the standard +/‑ Nudge commands to nudge the clip’s content rather than the boundaries. This way you can experiment with offsets between layers of loops. This reminds me of the time a friend misinterpreted where the downbeat was in a loop and created a brilliant groove as a result. Using this technique can be used to create melodic offsets, or on duplicated layers of loops with different processing applied to each, which can make for interesting delay‑type effects.
Getting Creative
For instant unpredictability, something that was easy to stumble upon using hardware samplers but is more difficult to find with the easy GUI’s of DAWs, try using the Separate Clip at Transients command from the Edit menu. This command is an easy way to divide up loops into their constituent hits and on a tick‑based track a workflow similar to that found in REX files is possible. This method of manipulating the tempo of loops has been largely forgotten since the advent of good‑quality DAW‑based time‑streching, but it has a definite sound. Something I like to do to change things up when a bit of unpredictability is called for is to Separate at Transients and then go into Shuffle mode and to ‘stir’ the contents of a loop. Like anything unpredictable the results vary, but because you can reverse out of poor decisions using undo, and snap hits to specific locations in Grid Mode, the results can be anything from inspirational to intolerable, just like my modular patches! When loops have been fragmented and reassembled the results can need some smoothing out, and the Batch Fades command can be used to quickly remove the inevitable clicks and pops.
If you’re going for a more retro vibe GrooveCell might be just the ticket.
If this kind of mangling is too much for your needs, how about using the excellent GrooveCell instrument, which is available to ‘on plan’ Pro Tools users, to inject some old school charm into the proceedings? If you want to get the timbre but not necessarily the rhythm of a loop then you can disassemble it into its constituent hits using Separate at Transients, naming and exporting the clips as audio files by right‑clicking on them in the Clips sidebar, and then dragging and dropping them into GrooveCell. Create your beat using standard MIDI features and whatever MIDI controller you have. If you don’t own something with pads a keyboard is fine, and if you don’t have a keyboard, hit Shift+K to open the MIDI keyboard window in Pro Tools. While you’re in GrooveCell don’t overlook the pitch controls, and for old‑school flavour try the ‘Old Sampler’ or ‘Drum Machine 1200’ Drum Modes in Tab 2, or try Tab 3 for drive options from ‘Analog Warmth’ to ‘Burning Gear’!
There’s much more to the humble loop than just a drum break but it’s a great place to start to get properly acquainted with the ways Pro Tools can help a loop‑based workflow.
There’s much more to the humble loop than just a drum break, but it’s a great place to start to get properly acquainted with the ways Pro Tools can help a loop‑based workflow. Once your loops are created there’s the matter of how Pro Tools can help the quick creation of an arrangement, but that’s probably one for another article.