Congas to go

I don't have a set of Conga drums, but it wasn't that hard to find an audio clip on the Internet of someone playing a set. The recording was good quality, but of course, not the correct tempo by a long shot. Could I make them work with my song?

My first step was to change the sound file format. The clip was the standard 16 bit wave file with a sample rate of 44.1Khz (just like what we get on a commercial CD of music). I am recording at 24 bit / 96Khz for my current project. Using a freeware program called "foobar" I was able to change the bit rate and sample rate to match my project. Making these changes does not make the clip sound like it was recorded at 24/96, but removes file incompatibilities. Of course, a clip recorded at the higher rate would be the best option, but "you can't always get what you want".

Dropping the newly converted clip into my digital audio software I see that the clip is running at a significantly faster tempo than my song. No problem - I will use my time-stretch function to slow the clip down and fit it into a single measure.

Wrong.

The stretch was so broad that the sound quality of the clip changed drastically - for the worse. Some of the hits sounded like they were stuttering!

Plan B. Slice the clip up into separate strikes of the conga, then line the strikes up with the drum loop to match the rhythmic timing. Much more labour, but then again, much less than finding a conga player who could come down for a session.

This was fairly straight forward. After slicing I took a look at the measure position of the drums, then moved the conga hits around to match (more or less...well, more actually). The beginnings and endings of the hits created clicking noises as they did not decay naturally but were 'snipped' from the clip. I used a very short fade-out operation on the end of each hit and fade-in where necessary on the beginning hits. No more clicks!

So, I have one nice measure that fits well with the drum loop. However, it will become obvious after a few repeats that the congas are a loop. Time to work on creating that "human" feel.

I re-recorded the newly positioned hits into a new clip, then made a copy of it and laid them end to end in my recording software. Now I am looking at two identical clips. On the second clip I select a hit of secondary importance and erase it. I don't "cut" it out, as that would change the position of the other hits in the loop - I just erase to preserve the timing. Now I have created a slight variation in the second copy of the loop and variation is what typifies the "human" feel.

I re-record these two copies end-to-end, then import the new two measure loop and make a copy of it, placing them end-to-end as before. In the new second copy I again pick a hit of secondary importance and erase it. Now I have four measures of the same loop with slight variation. I re-record this to get my final four measure loop.

There are other variations that I could have created while I was editing and re-recording, but I did not think of them until after I had already assembled my four measure loop, but, no matter...