How do you move beyond the 8-bar loop?

[cron]

To be honest, the above is more the 'extreme edition' of how I work. I'm generally a bit more flexible with beaty stuff, but I do still like rendering parts to audio as quickly as possible so I can't fiddle with them.

My extreme edition method for transitions and FX is just recording live tweaking with filters and the like. Chop out the bits I like then start layering and synchronising the 'peaks' of whatever I've recorded. I've got a fairly big library of these sounds now and they tend to get reused a lot.

You mention ambient stuff - that's where I started working like this and where the 'extreme edition' is most useful to me. I started working like that because I wanted to get more abrupt transitions, add little incidental details, and generally avoid that kind of smeary 'one-track' ambient sound. Admittedly my recent ambient tunes are one-track wonders, but hey...

[cron]

[double post]

[ghettosynth]

To be honest, the above is more the 'extreme edition' of how I work. I'm generally a bit more flexible with beaty stuff, but I do still like rendering parts to audio as quickly as possible so I can't fiddle with them.

My extreme edition method for transitions and FX is just recording live tweaking with filters and the like. Chop out the bits I like then start layering and synchronising the 'peaks' of whatever I've recorded. I've got a fairly big library of these sounds now and they tend to get reused a lot.

Sure, I get you here. If I'm doing live tweaking I also work that way. What I've stopped doing is always trying to capture automation for some live tweaking because it often becomes an editing nightmare. But not all of my transitions are live tweaks and I find sometimes that I just prefer to ramp a few parameters of a synth/fx and that doesn't work as well with just audio clips.

You mention ambient stuff - that's where I started working like this and where the 'extreme edition' is most useful to me. I started working like that because I wanted to get more abrupt transitions, add little incidental details, and generally avoid that kind of smeary 'one-track' ambient sound. Admittedly my recent ambient tunes are one-track wonders, but hey...

Yeah, so I totally feel you here, that's also why I prefer to work this way. I use a lot of Reaktor ensembles and just capture their output in a jam session. I may then jam some more with that capture, but usually not.

Not that I avoid the smeary one-track ambient sound, but very little of my ambient output has just one track.