Steinberg WaveLab Essential 6 Operation Manual

171
Sampling and creating loops
Basic looping
Instrumental sounds in samplers rely heavily on looping. 
Looping a 
sound allows you to repeat a section of the 
sample indefinitely, to 
create a sustain of unlimited length. 
An example of this would be an organ sound. Without 
looping you will only be able to play notes as 
long as the 
original recording. With looping, notes can be of any length.
Finding a good loop point takes a bit of practice. Here is 
some advice:
 There are only two types of loops:...

172
Sampling and creating loops
Adding, moving and playing loop markers
Loop markers are added, moved and otherwise edited just 
as any other type of marker. This is described in the sec-
tion “Introduction” on page 98 and onwards.
Here is a brief description on how to create a basic loop:
1.Make a selection that corresponds to the area you 
want looped.
If you like, you can play back with “Loop selection” activated on the 
Transport bar and adjust the selection during playback.
2.Bring up the Marker...

173
Sampling and creating loops
Furthermore, each time you click Apply, the process starts 
out from the wave data as it was when you opened the 
Crossfade Looper (since you want to be able to try out 
various types of crossfading without re-processing the 
wave each time). This affects the undo function: there is 
only one step of undo and no redo in the Crossfade 
Looper.
Moving the loop points “manually”
Let’s assume you have set up a basic loop that you are 
happy with, except for glitches or “bumps”...

174
Sampling and creating loops
 Desired correspondence is a value for how well the found 
section must resemble the section to which it is compared, to 
be considered a match. WaveLab Essential uses two meth-
ods for comparison, “phase match” and “join match” (which 
provide much better matching than the simple zero crossing 
detection used by most other programs. Phase matching also 
ensures that no harmonic cancellation will occur when you 
crossfade, see later in this chapter). First phase matching...

175
Sampling and creating loops
Creating a crossfade
What is a crossfade and when do I need it?
Sometimes it is impossible to find a loop that doesn’t 
cause any glitches. This is especially true for stereo mate-
rial, where you might be able to find a perfect candidate 
for either channel, but not for both at the same time.
One solution to this problem is to use crossfading. This 
technique “smears” the material around the end loop point 
so that it loops perfectly. It does this by mixing material be-...

176
Sampling and creating loops
Creating a post-crossfade
The post-crossfade is accessed from its own tab.
This is identical to the regular crossfade, but it is applied 
to the area after the loop. This means that it is used to fade 
the material so that there will be no glitch when playback 
continues out of the loop.
The post-crossfade looks at the part of the waveform that 
occurs just after the loop start and processes a certain 
area beginning at the end of the loop. The Length param-
eter adjusts...

177
Sampling and creating loops
To use the Loop Tone Equalizer, proceed as follows:
1.Set up a basic loop of the length you desire.
This will probably not be a very good loop. If it was you wouldn’t need to 
use the Loop Tone Equalizer.
2.Select Loop Tone Equalizer from the Sampling menu 
and click on the Loop Tone Equalizer tab.
3.Make sure that either slice mixing or chorus smoothing 
is activated and make the desired settings.
For slice mixing, you need to determine the number of slices. Only exper-...

21
Customizing 

179
Customizing
What is customizing?
When we talk about customizing, we mean making set-
tings so that the program behaves and looks the way you 
want it to!
Preferences
In the Preferences dialog on the Options menu you will 
find a number of settings, collected on tabs, for tailoring 
the look and behavior of the program.
Saving the preferences
To make sure the preference settings “stick”, select the 
General tab and make sure “Save preferences on exit” is 
activated. When this is activated, all your...

180
Customizing
Document folders
For each WaveLab Essential document type, you can 
specify paths to open and save folders (given that the 
document can be saved). This is done in the following 
way:
1.Click on the plus sign for a document type in the tree 
list.
All document types will have Open and Save sub-items.
2.Select either Open or Save.
Now you can specify a path to a folder which will be automatically se-
lected when opening or saving a document of this type.
For each folder, you can specify...