Weird Artifacts in Home-Grown Apple Loops

[ski]

I created an Apple Loop of a reverb track (string pad in a reverb wash) for the purpose of being able to time-stretch (lengthen) that piece of audio merely by slowing down Logic. It was just an experiment, but it resulted in some strange behavior. I'd like to know if any of this is normal...

 

The tempo of my song is 67 BPM, and the piece of audio was 2 bars long. Those values were entered correctly automatically in the Apple Loop utility. But when I selected the Transients tab, the tempo was now 217 point something or other... Normal? Bug? OK, so I corrected this and set the transients to 16th's. Saved the file, added this new Apple Loop to my Arrange window.

 

When I listened to the audio (at the original tempo) I heard these 16th-note pulsations. The original loop and the original audio sounded smooth, as you might imagine a string pad in a reverb wash might. So then I put one out of phase and they cancelled almost completely except for pulsations every 16th. It was quite easy to hear.

 

When I slowed the track down to hear the effect on the Apple Loop, the pulsating became really apparent.

 

So it is normal for Apple Loops to impart some kind of rhythmic pattern into an audio file based on the resolution of the Transients tab?

 

Oh, and BTW, I just opened the Soundtrack Loop Utility to make sure I had my nomenclature right, and upon quitting it, it crashed. Great! Fantastic!

 

[edited by sKi]

[David Nahmani]

Have you experimented with various positions for the transient markers in the Apple Loop Utility? Sometimes on pads, you don't want to leave markers on every single 16th note or you will get that kind of pulsating 16th note sound.