[Technique] REX loops and soft transients/long decay

[artotaku]

As we might know, the audio material to generate REX loops should have clear, hard transients to get the best results.

Now, let´s say our source material is less than ideal, e. g. an arpeggio or chord sequence where each note/chord has a long decay and rather soft transients.
And second, we want do it in Reason only since we don´t own Recycle.

In Reason, we have no possibility to fine tune any sensivity settings like in Recycle.

When the source material is converted to a REX loop Reason´s algorithm makes some best guesses regarding the transients which are sometimes slightly off the grid.

One way to fix that is to quantize the slice markers e. g. to the next 1/16th. However, this also stretches audio, introducing some unwanted artifacts.

The solution that worked best for me is to remove any off time slice markers and add them by hand with "snap to grid" 1/16th before converting it to a rex loop.

Here´s an example played in Dr. Octorex with manually corrected slices, snapped to grid.The Filter Cut Off Freq is modulated at the beginning and the Amp Env Decay at the end of the sequence.
You can nicely hear that the source material had a good amount of decay when a note was triggered.