Recreating a Sampled Drum Loop

Working with sampled drum loops is a lot of fun, but some times you may find you want to change or enhance the individual sounds of the drums in ways that is not possible with a single wav file.  Another issue could be that you found the perfect beat but there is no clean drum break in the source so that you can just sample a clean drum back. What you can do is manually extract the beat into a midi clip then use what ever drum sounds you want to layer with the original sample or just use the midi file on its own.

Lets get Started

Load your source wav file on an audio track in Ableton’s arrangement view. Create a midi track underneath and insert a midi clip. Load the midi track with a drum kit instrument and then unfold both the midi track and the audio track so that you can see the wav file and empty midi clip. Listen to your source file while zoomed in to one bar. Take a good look at where the kick, snares, hats, and other elements are happening in time. Allot of times you will be able to see the event in the wav file especially since drums have very dominant transients.

Now go into your midi note editor of your midi clip and add notes that correspond with the events in the wav file, add a kick drum where the kick drum happens, snare where the snare happens….  Just do a few at a time for now.

If you have your midi track unfolded you will notice that you are able to view the midi notes on the track itself. This makes it really easy for us to line up the midi notes with the source audio.

Add some more notes. You will probably notice that the original drum loop may not be in perfect time. You could either warp the audio file or move the midi notes free of grid to line up with the original file, preserving the original groove.  This can be accomplished by turning off your grid in the midi note editor using  CTRL 4 (pc) or CMD 4 (mac).  Another good shortcut for moving notes free of grid is by clicking on the note and holding down the ALT (pc) or CMD (mac) key, This will allow you to move free of grid without turning off the grid.

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