Newbie help - How can I use LS effectively?

[heinzy2003]

Im a newbie to Liveslice so please be gentle…

I bought LS to bring some variation to some percussion loops and to create some interesting fills.

I must be slow because its taken me a day just to work out whats going on within the gui....
So Ive loaded in a 2 bar loop and found that it doesn't playback too well unless you set the sensitivity quite high.- I guess this is because the congas etc don't fall directly on the markers a lot of the time?
Its created 16 beats & 11 events in the arranger and I started to play with the dice - not very musical as it jumbles the audio up too much.
I decreased the beats to create larger chunks of audio events which randomised better, but now im not hearing the whole loop- only a portion
OK, so now im trying move beats around - ive create another track and used this aswell to put in extra beats from the slicer + move their positions around - still finding it hard to come up with something groovy. ( also, how can you' undo' a change ? ).

I really like this plug but need some basic direction / better work practise on how to achieve some fills/variation to mainly the end of my percussion loops.
Many thanks

[R.A.W.]

1. you should set the arranger beats to a higher number when you got a loop that's more than 4 beats (1 bar). 4 beats is the default in the arranger and you can change that by clicking the box, holding left mouse button and dragging up (increase) or down (decrease). alternatively use rmb (right mouse buton) to set to 8, 16, 32 beats (that's 2, 4, and 8 bars when working with 4/4)

2. use the sens-slider to get some slice-points, activate "lock to loop" to get a copy of the original loop into one track. then you should manually adjust every slice startpoint that seems to be off.

3. use the dice to get some variations fast. you should try the two different random-modes, "swap" just swaps the sounds while keeping the original groove (mostly get's more musical results when you have many slices of different length), "reseq" shifts the events around, keeping their length but changing the groove along.

i hope that get's you started a bit. but you really should read the manual as it explains many things already and a look into DarkStar's guide (sticky on top of this forum) can't be wrong, too.

[heinzy2003]

Great, thanks for that.

I spent a few more hours today playing....Im sort of at this level already - I had a thought though - Is it possible to randomise just a group of slices. ?
I tried to select a few adjacent slices at the end of the loop ( becuase i want to vary the end of the loop )but it still jumbled up the whole loop.

It seems to me that when you got a lot of elements in the arranger - the swap randomisation is way too much - it just recreates a loop that sounds completely disjointed. Maybe with a 4 4 loop this may be less forgiving but Ive got some conga loops loaded

Yeah of course I can move things around ,move and delete slices and maybe I'll get something cool - but apart from the nice graphical waveform shapes, couldn't I moving around midi notes on a piano roll style editor in cubase ?( Like rearranging a midi notes from phatmatik for example ).

I know LS can do much more but its just that Im struggling !

[R.A.W.]

Is it possible to randomise just a group of slices. ?

a feature to lock events so that they aren't moved is on the list afaik.

couldn't I moving around midi notes on a piano roll style editor in cubase ?( Like rearranging a midi notes from phatmatik for example ).

you can also do that with LS, you can use several midi notes to trigger individual slices (default C4 and upwards, manual page 7).
but tbh the strength of LS is that you can visually arrange loops in the gui without the need to trigger individual slices with midi like in conventional slicers.

[ohm]

try using additional tracks to randomize only part of the loop.

Also - don't be afraid of spending a little time with some manual arranging - you'll find it's much easier than a piano-roll because the colors identify the different sounds.

Another way to get good results fast is to make use of the arrangement polyphony. Create a simple basic beat on one arrangement, and some variations / fills in other arrangements - then you can layer the arrangements by holding down several keys at once.

hope this helps - if not, just post again.