What are the best techniques to looping in ProTools?

Question

I've been doing this technique but I think its very "hacky".

I trim a region to the exact beginning and exact ending and use the loop trim tool to drag it out.

The reason why this is hacky is because eventually it will fall of the mark. I'm not looping by the bar/beat, I'm looping by the sample.

How do you loop?

Answer 1

I'm not a Pro Tools user but I've used a similar technique in other DAWs (GarageBand, Reaper, Live).

If the sample is not an even measure length:

1. Trim the recording (or add silence to it) until it's lined up exactly with whatever bar/beat division you want. In some DAWs this is pretty straightforward, in some you may have to resample. Turn on snap-to-grid if you have to.
2. Enable looping - it sounds like you have a loop trim tool for this.
3. Loop away - your loop is now matched to the tempo.

Now, this won't necessarily work for all samples - depending on what you're trying to do, it might be useful to use some time stretching algorithm to stretch the sample to a gridline, and then loop.

Answer 2

Command+D in Pro-Tools on a mac will let you duplicate a region as many times as you want (not sure about PC's, try control+D if you're a PC user!), each region will start at the exact point the previous one finished...Sounds like this is what you're trying to do!

Answer 3

I just copy and paste them, but as for how you are trimming:

make sure that it's set to "grid" in the top left hand corner. that way it will align everything to the grid automatically. You will also have to set your grid to samples instead of bars/beats and to what kind of beats you need to adjust to (1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, etc) if you haven't already. It's hard to explain where to go to do that, because it's so small, but it's over near the top right.

That should solve the problem and if not this might also be helpful seeing as you're using loops. (shame on you!) just kidding. If you hold-click over the tool that allows you to adjust the length of the audio clip (the middle one I believe near the pencil tool) it will give you more options. One of them is called TCE (time compression expansion) This allows you to change the speed/length of a clip without changing its tone. This is an extremely useful tool, but you probably won't know what I mean until you try it.