The Best way ?

[Fellwalker]

Hi ALL,

Not used Daws that much so here's the question , what's the best way to turn a 4 bar midi loop into a 32 bar piece of continuous midi ? the DAW is Cakewalk,

All answer gratefully received, Brian

 

[Biggles]

Select it then copy and paste as many times as you want until you insert some form of turnaround

 

[b3maniac]

I have Sonar 7 and 8 and I would use the "piano roll" screen which shows you the midi data. It's easy to highlight the midi data and just copy it to the next section, etc until complete. Save the file before you start and again (with a new name) after you make sure it is what you want. Don

 

[Fellwalker]

Hi Biggles and Con,

Thanks or the info and that is what I will try and do,

All the best, Brian

 

[SeaGtGruff]

I think most DAWs let you work with MIDI clips which are short sections of a MIDI track. For example, a MIDI clip might be just 1 bar, or it might be 2 or more bars. If it's more than 1 bar then the bars don't repeat identically. For instance, if the clip is 4 bars long, then bars 1 and 3 might be identical to each other, but then bars 2 and 4 would not be identical, such that the entire 4-bar clip is unique, rather than simply being a 2-bar clip repeated twice.

Usually DAWs will let you use the mouse to grab the right edge of a clip and drag it to the right across the track. What this does is create a duplicate of the clip, or extend it to the right by however many bars or partial bars you choose. For example, if you have a 4-bar clip, you can grab the right edge of the clip and drag it for 12 more bars across the track, which would create 3 more copies of the clip (12 / 4 = 3), giving you 4 copies of the clip in all.

This is different from actually copying the clip and pasting it to itself to get an 8-bar clip, because if you create a new 8-bar clip then you can edit bars 5, 6, 7, and 8 so they're different than bars 1, 2, 3, and 4 if you want to. So which method you choose depends on whether you want exact repetitions (drag the right edge to make more additional repetitions) or whether you want to be able to edit the copied bars.

 

[Fellwalker]

Hi SeaGTgruff,

Cakewalk will let you do that with what is called Groveclip, not used it as yet , but will try it out on a drum track as it can be added to and altered so may be a good easy way to create breaks and fils in a drum track, time will tell,

All the best, Brian

 

[SeaGtGruff]

Note, when I said "work with MIDI clips," I didn't mean loading a saved MIDI clip, or saving a bar or more of MIDI data as a clip-- although you can certainly do that, too.

What I meant is that when you are looking at the track view where it shows your various audio and MIDI tracks, the tracks will initially be empty. On a MIDI track you usually have to add an empty clip-- a single bar or however long you want it to be (just part of a bar, or multiple bars)-- before you can select the empty clip and begin adding any notes to it in the piano roll editor. You can also load a saved MIDI clip, or record a new clip from MIDI input, but if you want to enter notes into a blank clip then you have to first add one to the MIDI track.

Once you have a MIDI clip defined as having a particular length, you can move it around on the track by grabbing it and dragging it. But you can also leave the clip at its current location on the track, grab its right edge, and drag its right edge to the right to "extend" it. This normally has the effect of creating another copy of the clip; it might look like part of the original clip but there are usually bevels created by the rounded corners of the clips. The additional copy will already have all of the notes from the original clip in it, since you aren't extending the original clip's length by adding more blank bars to it.