DAN AGOSTO: Hi. I'm Dan and you're watching an instructional screencast presented by Gearwire.Com. This is going to be the second in the series on the ReWire device called DrumCore, and it's a loop library as well as a loop librarian or database and also instrument, but in this particular video, we're going to be taking a look at how to create sort of an eight-measure loop that doesn't necessarily repeat over and over again. We're going to be doing this in Sonar 6 Producer Edition.

So first of all, you know, It's easy to browse through different loops in DrumCore. This is the one I particularly like. It's Alan White is playing and it's called "Brownesque". Here's at 120.

[DAN AGOSTO STARTS PLAYING "BROWNESQUE" THROUGH DRUMCORE]

[SOUNDS LIKE] Get some volume just a little bit. All right, so as you can see, we have our base file loaded in here, and if we like, we can just drag that into Sonar. What I'd first like to do though is create it's own audio track. If we just drag that up to the audio track on DrumCore, that's actually return from the ReWire device so we won't necessarily or actually we won't hear the audio playback from the file. So, one thing we have to do is Alt-Tab back to DrumCore. If we're using a Macintosh, it'll be Apple-Tab. One thing I kind of don't like is when working with ReWire devices in Sonar is you can't float these windows so you have to keep on tabbing back and forth. I actually like to work on a multi-display but for the screencast we don't have that, so what I'm going to do is just drag our basic track into Sonar on the first beat, so if we play that back, it's going to be a little louder so what I'm going to do is actually bring down our master fader a little bit and press play.

[DAN AGOSTO STARTS PLAYING DRUMCORE THROUGH SONAR]

Okay. So I'm going to repeat that but like I said I wanted to sort of change things up, so for the fourth beat here, and I guess we'll just do a -- yeah, we'll just do four with a fill, is go back to DrumCore, and what we can do here is turn off certain types of files, so what I did is I turned up the -- turned off the MIDI files and turned off the regular loops, and so what we're going to be hearing is only fills.

[DAN AGOSTO STARTS SEARCHING FOR FILLS ON DRUMCORE]

So, we can just browse through until we find one that we like.

[DAN AGOSTO STARTS SEARCHING FOR FILLS ON DRUMCORE]

I kind of like this one, but as you can hear that's a two-measure loop so what we're going to do over here is just grab it and we're going to do some quick slip editing in Sonar. I'm going to zoom in, and we are locked to the grid, that's this button right here, I hope you can see that, and I'm going to take this fill file and just take out the first measure and then move it, an since we're snap to grid it just goes there, and let's listen to the file playing back from the third measure.

[DAN AGOSTO STARTS PLAYING A SELECTED FILL ON DRUMCORE]

Well that definitely doesn't sound right. One thing about these loops is that they're played by a human. I think that's a great thing, so as you can see this hit starts a little before the beat, so what I'm going to do is turn of our grid and do little freeform slip editing and also do the same to our second file.

Now, one thing in Sonar which is really nice, they do auto-crossfades whenever you have overlooping tracks. You can change that, you can also change the type of curve but this one works just fine for what we're doing right here, so listen back to the third measure. We'll turn our snap back on.

[DAN AGOSTO STARTS PLAYING DRUMCORE FILL ON SONAR]

Okay, that's still sounding a little weird so I'm going to turn our snap back off and go all the way over here, we're going to go in the other direction, and once again zoom in and do an auto-crossfade, and we'll see how that sounds with our grid back on.

[DAN AGOSTO STARTS PLAYING DRUMCORE FILL ON SONAR]

All right, that's a little more believable. So what I'm going to do is just grab the whole thing and repeat it, and now after eight measures I'd like to add a little tag so I'm gonna reopen DrumCore, and I hit this little more key, and as you can see we get some more options over here, and what I'm going to do is check out these single hits, and I want a cymbal, and I want a China, I want a crash. Let's see. [DAN AGOSTO SEARCHING AND AUDITIONING VARIOUS CYMBAL HITS] There we go, and I kind of like these grabs. Maybe I'll end it with a grab, so I'll just drag the file up here, and now we have our cymbal grab, and I also want a kick, so back up to the single hit drop down, kick. These are a little hard, a little soft. This medium one I think is the one we'll go with. So, what I'll need to do here is just create another audio file or audio track rather, and drag our medium kick up to that at the same time as a cymbal hit. So now we can listen to our entire file.

[DAN AGOSTO STARTS PLAYING DRUMCORE LOOP ON SONAR]

All right. Well, the transition into the fifth measure isn't perfect but I think we get the idea here. So thanks for checking out this instructional screencast presented on Gearwire.Com.