Arranging Raw Audio Files

 

The combination of loops and a soft sampler often gives a nice workflow, and a lot of flexibility. However, you can pretty much achieve the same results importing the raw audio files into a sequencer.

Each instrument part should have it´s own track/channel. Now you can simply drag and drop, copy and paste the loops freely. The volume of the different parts is set by the faders on the channels rather than by a velocity value of the MIDI notes triggering the loops as described in some of the previous examples.

This way of working actually opens new creative posibilities, not nessecarily available when working with full lenght loops in a softsampler. For instance you can cut the loops into pieces, which gives you the advantage of not having to playback every loop from the beginning.

You can also add effects to the individual loops, and work with automation. Actually you can add effects to the individual loops in most soft samplers around. As long as it supports multi channel, which allows you to assign individual samples to seperate audio channels on the virtual mixer. Some can even add effects internally, but this way you are restricted to use the effects available within the soft sampler.

Of course, a combination of the different ways to work is the most flexible of all. Both ways has advantages and drawbacks, which is why we recommend that you try out both ways or to combine them. You will quickly find a way that suits you.

Beneath are screenshots of the same groove being triggered by MIDI notes assigned to loops in a soft sampler, and then as raw audio loops imported to the arrange page of an audio sequencer.    

The groove from the "LoopBox 1" construction kit is being triggered from these MIDI notes. Please click here to listen to the groove.
 

The same groove has been imported into an audio sequencer. As you can see the structure is identical to the way the MIDI notes are arranged. 

 

To make the two versions sound similar you have to do a little level adjusting first. If you take a close look at the MIDI file above, you will notice that the different notes has different colours. This is because the velocity values are set individually. On the screenshot above (the virtual mixer) you can see how we changed the levels for the different audio tracks.

As you can see it is absolutely possible to do the same things using the raw audio files, and an audio sequencer only!