How to Warp Melodic Loops in Beat Repeat

Beat Repeat is a neat processor that comes with Ableton Live.  Essentially, it’s a repeater effect.  It reads an incoming audio signal and can repeat different parts of it in different ways.  While it’s most known for mangling percussive sounds and drum grooves, you can also use it to mangle melodic grooves as well.

Today, we’ll take a smooth keyboard loop from Platinum Keys and put it to work.

Take a listen to it:

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Getting started..

Drop in an audio loop and pull up its sample editor.

Highlight your Warp tab and set your warping to Beats.  Next, turn off your loop transient mode (noted by the mouse cursor).

Set your Preserve to 1/8 with a value of 33.

Take a listen to our keyboard loop now:

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Now that our loop has a percussive nature to it, we can spice it up with Beat Repeat.

We started with the preset Microfills and made some tweaks.

Change your Interval to 1/4th and your Chance to 100%.

Remove any Pitch Decay and Set your Variation to 2 or 3.

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Summary

If you want Beat Repeat to kick in more often then try increasing your Interval.  You can lower the pitch of the artifacts produced via the Pitch control.  Pitch Decay takes the incoming signal and decreases it in pitch as the signal decays, so it’s cool for creating quirky artifacts.  You can also switch Beat Repeat to Gate mode in the event that you only want to hear the repeated material.

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