Learning Falcon 109: Make a Drum Kit From a Loop

Drum loops often provide great source material for building a drum kit, especially if the loop has distinct hits where the different kit elements are not overlapped. By slicing and mapping the hits in the loop, we can easily take a single loop and turn it into a full kit:

1. Let’s start by loading a drum loop into an empty part. In this case we use Falcon’s search engine to find a Loop from our Mayhem Of Loops soundbank and double-click to load it. If Mayhem Of Loops is not available for you, choose a drum loop from your soundbanks or your own loop libraries.
2. You will see that the sample is loaded within the Slice oscillator, with slices marked at each transient. Press Play in Falcon, and the slices are played back in sync with Falcon’s tempo.
3. You can convert these slices to separate keygroups, in order that each slice can be triggered independently. Press the Map button, and a new layer will be created with the slices mapped to individual keys.
4. The original keygroup containing the loop will still be present in a muted layer. To hide it, open the Tree view and select only the “Mapped” layer.
   Play a few notes on your keyboard to trigger the new sliced keygroups. You can now easily rearrange the slices to the mapping of your choice, such as a standard drum mapping.
   Each slice from the mapped loop is actually referring back to the original sample, with custom start and end markers to define the slice within the larger sample.
5. To adjust the slice boundaries, select a Keygroup to toggle the Sample oscillator view and then grab the “S” (start) or “E” (end) markers and drag them as desired.
6. Double-click the sample waveform between the start and end markers to select it, from here you can right-click to reveal a number of common wave editor commands such as reverse, normalize, fade in/out and silence. Changes made here still reference the original file so they will effect all slices.
   Slices can be tweaked and tuned in limitless ways. Try changing the sample oscillator type to Stretch and adjusting the Tempo Factor, or adding effects to a specific keygroup to effect only one slice, or at the layer level to effect them all.