Beat Comping in Logic

Tunnel vision can be a funny thing. Sometimes you get so focused on a tool's intended purpose, that you lose sight of other cool ways you could use it just because it might not be the 'traditional' use for it.

Take Logic's 'quick swipe' comping feature. This lets you quickly and easily composite a 'perfect' take of a vocal or instrument track by swiping over the best portions from multiple takes. It's almost always used on tracks where there is some human imperfection that might need cleaning up - vocals and live instrument tracks, mostly. I was so used to thinking of using it that way, that it never occurred to me that it would be a dead easy way to create 'broken beat' type drum loops and beats. Here's how to do it:

1. Launch Logic (this technique will work with any DAW that has a similar 'quick comp' mode).

2. You can do this trick with literally any audio, but for the sake of simplicity here, we'll just use some of the Apple Loops included with Logic. If the media browser isn't open, click on the MEDIA button at the top right side of the arrange window. Click on the 'LOOPS' tab to bring up Logic's Apple Loop Browser. Go ahead and select the 'BEATS' category to bring up a selection of drum beats we can choose from. For best results, you want to make sure the beats are fairly consistent in sound/production. So for the time being, just grab 4 loops from the same genre. Hip-hop is a good choice. Be sure you're selecting only the loops that are colored blue, as these are straight audio, whereas the green ones consist of MIDI driving a software instrument. We need audio only for this. Drag your loops to the arrange window and Logic will create new audio tracks for them. If all the loops aren't the same length, loop the shorter ones so all four tracks have the same length of audio.

3. SHIFT-CLICK on each of the four tracks until they are all selected. Go the the REGION menu and select FOLDER ->PACK TAKE FOLDER. This command lets you take multiple tracks of audio and pack them in a single 'take' folder, allowing you to easily make a new composite.

4. When you first create your take folder, the addition tracks will disappear and everything will get sucked up into the take folder track which will now have a disclosure triangle at the beginning. Click that triangle and the take folder expands to show you all four beats contained within. Now all you have to do is click and drag to select the different parts of each loop you want to be included in your composite loop. This is tons of fun to experiment with. Remember that you can use the bar and beat markers at the top of the timeline to ensure that your edits are rhythmically coherent.

This obviously works well with any audio, so you can create mutant melodies from comping several different synth tracks (so long as they're in the same key) and all manner of complicated-sounding rapid edits. Here's an example of the effect in action: