By now you've probably made an Audio track, and you've probably imported some of your favorite samples onto that track. But what's next? How can we turn these standalone samples into awesome beats?
Ardour offers a number of ways to work with and manipulate audio samples, from simply moving them, to Combining them, to Shortening/Lengthening, Cutting, Stretching, and much more. There's a lot to unpack here, so let's dive right in.
Let's say we have some samples imported onto our tracks that look something like this.
How can we turn those unconnected samples into something that sounds like a beat? The "Grab Mode" selector tool on our toolbar is the first step. It looks like a little pointer, shown below.
With this tool, your possibilities are endless. You can click and drag audio regions, you can draw boxes around regions or CTRL + click them to select multiple regions and drag them around together. Move your mouse towards the front or back bottom corners of a region, and you can even Lengthen or Shorten the region, all with this one tool!
There are a couple other useful tools on this toolbar as well. The Cut tool, which looks like a pair of scissors, allows you to cut audio regions with ease. The Stretch tool (directly to its right), allows you to time stretch audio regions to make them line up with your BMP, or just make them longer or shorter temporally. Stretched regions can start to sound strange sometimes, but it's an invaluable tool for manipulating audio in Ardour.
But before you move anything around, you want to make sure you have your Magnetic Grid turned on. You can find this option, shown below, in the top bar, to the right of the playhead.
The magnetic grid will force your audio regions to snap to the rhythmic grid as you move them, to ensure nothing goes out of time (unless that's the sound you're going for, in which case, you should turn this feature off!)
So now that we know how to move stuff around, let's turn what we had above into something that looks more like a beat. Something like...
That! That's starting to look like a more cohesive musical idea. But, it still looks pretty messy. There are overlapping audio regions and there's lots of white space. Now some producers prefer to keep the white space and do a lot of manual moving of tiny audio regions as they mix their tracks. If that's your style, then keep it that way, but I'm going to Combine my tracks. You can do this by selecting any number of regions on the same track, then clicking Selected Regions > Edit > Combine. (Note: if you've only selected one region, you must click 'Region Name' > Edit > Combine where 'Region Name' is the actual name of your region.)
Now if we do that on all our audio regions above we go from what we had before to...
This, which is much cleaner looking and far easier to manipulate later in the mixing process. To make this happen, I Combined many of the audio regions, Trimmed some of them manually, and made sure they were all lined up the way I want them to be.
Now we're starting to have something that looks like a beat! But the beat can't be five seconds long! Luckily, Ardour has an easy solution to that problem: Duplication. Ardour allows you, the producer, to easily duplicate single tracks or multiple tracks with the click of your mouse. To do this, just select the tracks you want to duplicate, right click on one of the tracks and click Selected Regions > Edit > Duplicate. You'll then be presented with a number of options. Duplicate will duplicate the tracks once. Multi-duplicate allows you to duplicate the tracks as many times as you would like. Fill Track, the most powerful tool of the duplication tools, allows you to duplicate the audio regions as many times as it takes until the entire song is full, all the way to the end! This allows you to populate your project with your beat in seconds.
Let's try duplicating the above section of our beat once....
And with a bit of editing on the end, we've got something that's really starting to look like the start of a dope record! For reference, here's what it sounds like (after a bit more editing).
As you probably noticed, there are so many options when you right click an Audio region to edit it. You can add Fades to fade your region in or out. You can Trim and Split the region to just work with smaller portions. You can Pitch Shift the region to change its frequencies. You can even Reverse a region if you're going for an other-worldly sound. It would be impossible to explain all these features in-depth right here and now, but they're there, in Ardour, waiting for you to use them on your tracks. The best way to discover them is to dive right in and give them all a try. With this base knowledge on how to work with Audio samples, you'll be manipulating a masterpiece in no time.
Ardour offers a number of ways to work with and manipulate audio samples, from simply moving them, to Combining them, to Shortening/Lengthening, Cutting, Stretching, and much more. There's a lot to unpack here, so let's dive right in.
Let's say we have some samples imported onto our tracks that look something like this.
How can we turn those unconnected samples into something that sounds like a beat? The "Grab Mode" selector tool on our toolbar is the first step. It looks like a little pointer, shown below.
With this tool, your possibilities are endless. You can click and drag audio regions, you can draw boxes around regions or CTRL + click them to select multiple regions and drag them around together. Move your mouse towards the front or back bottom corners of a region, and you can even Lengthen or Shorten the region, all with this one tool!
There are a couple other useful tools on this toolbar as well. The Cut tool, which looks like a pair of scissors, allows you to cut audio regions with ease. The Stretch tool (directly to its right), allows you to time stretch audio regions to make them line up with your BMP, or just make them longer or shorter temporally. Stretched regions can start to sound strange sometimes, but it's an invaluable tool for manipulating audio in Ardour.
But before you move anything around, you want to make sure you have your Magnetic Grid turned on. You can find this option, shown below, in the top bar, to the right of the playhead.
The magnetic grid will force your audio regions to snap to the rhythmic grid as you move them, to ensure nothing goes out of time (unless that's the sound you're going for, in which case, you should turn this feature off!)
So now that we know how to move stuff around, let's turn what we had above into something that looks more like a beat. Something like...
That! That's starting to look like a more cohesive musical idea. But, it still looks pretty messy. There are overlapping audio regions and there's lots of white space. Now some producers prefer to keep the white space and do a lot of manual moving of tiny audio regions as they mix their tracks. If that's your style, then keep it that way, but I'm going to Combine my tracks. You can do this by selecting any number of regions on the same track, then clicking Selected Regions > Edit > Combine. (Note: if you've only selected one region, you must click 'Region Name' > Edit > Combine where 'Region Name' is the actual name of your region.)
Now if we do that on all our audio regions above we go from what we had before to...
This, which is much cleaner looking and far easier to manipulate later in the mixing process. To make this happen, I Combined many of the audio regions, Trimmed some of them manually, and made sure they were all lined up the way I want them to be.
Now we're starting to have something that looks like a beat! But the beat can't be five seconds long! Luckily, Ardour has an easy solution to that problem: Duplication. Ardour allows you, the producer, to easily duplicate single tracks or multiple tracks with the click of your mouse. To do this, just select the tracks you want to duplicate, right click on one of the tracks and click Selected Regions > Edit > Duplicate. You'll then be presented with a number of options. Duplicate will duplicate the tracks once. Multi-duplicate allows you to duplicate the tracks as many times as you would like. Fill Track, the most powerful tool of the duplication tools, allows you to duplicate the audio regions as many times as it takes until the entire song is full, all the way to the end! This allows you to populate your project with your beat in seconds.
Let's try duplicating the above section of our beat once....
And with a bit of editing on the end, we've got something that's really starting to look like the start of a dope record! For reference, here's what it sounds like (after a bit more editing).
As you probably noticed, there are so many options when you right click an Audio region to edit it. You can add Fades to fade your region in or out. You can Trim and Split the region to just work with smaller portions. You can Pitch Shift the region to change its frequencies. You can even Reverse a region if you're going for an other-worldly sound. It would be impossible to explain all these features in-depth right here and now, but they're there, in Ardour, waiting for you to use them on your tracks. The best way to discover them is to dive right in and give them all a try. With this base knowledge on how to work with Audio samples, you'll be manipulating a masterpiece in no time.
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