Another Weekend Burnt…By Looping Mistakes

There goes another weekend gone way too fast. I did get a chance to do some recording of a song I have had for along time. I had two lines on a verse that I could just never seem to finish so I sat on it for couple of years. Friday I just happened to be playing my guitar and started playing the verse potion and boom, it’s now done. So I have been working on getting the basics of it recorded and hope to have it up online soon. But it may take another couple of fast weekends.

One lesson I did learn this weekend is about looping. In the past I would always, record track by track live, but I was also recording on a cassette 4-track. So with this song I have been working on I decided to use the full power of Cubase and utilize looping. So there I am, I have my EZDrummer drum track all setup, I have recorded my clean guitar rhythm parts, I’ve got the bass recorded, some overdriven guitar parts. And it sounds really good so far. I decide to listen to some of the track solo. This is when I start to hear this little chirp. What the hell is that?

So I went to some of my Cubase Tutorials and other resources and I guess it is pretty common to have happen when you cut a track in the middle of a wave. This I did not know. I could have saved some of the project but I decided to scrap the whole thing and start out fresh and this time added a bridge to the song. Further more I realized how great Cubase really is! Now that I realize there are these artifacts in the audio file when you cut the tracks I really began to appreciate how good Cubase is and allows you to zoom way down into the file. I also see that as long as snap Is turned off Cubase is really responsive to your changes. There really is a lot I still have to learn about the program.

Details.....

So here is our simple bass line










With Snap on Just cut it at the start of the Measure.










Every thing looks good until we zoom in and look really close. Notice that our cut is just a tiny bit past the middle line. if we looped the two files it would sound fine but when we would loop just one over and over you would hear a little chirp, or click. usualy if you have drums they would cover it up, but not allways.






Now, to fix this problem is we will take the same file and zoom in to the area we want to cut at, but first we want to take off the snap function. then you want to cut as close to where we were going to but this time but when the wavy line meets at the center line.






Now when we loop this file there will be no chirp or click. make usre to turn snap back on and have fun with you new loop.