iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Splitting Regions

You don’t have to use a region in its entirety. Drum loops, in particular, are fun to split down the middle; the resulting half-loops or quarter-loops often serve as useful fills (drum riffs right before a musical moment).

All you have to do is position the Playhead precisely where you want the split to occur, click the region to select it, and then choose Edit → Split (or press

-T). You’ll see that the region is now in two separate pieces. You can manipulate, cut, copy, drag, shorten, repeat, or otherwise process each of these two pieces independently.

As noted earlier, what’s especially intriguing is that you can split off a snippet of a region, and then make that repeat over and over, creating a whole new effect.

And now, some important region-splitting tips:

• You can simultaneously split stacked regions—that is, parallel regions in several tracks at once. Just make sure that you’ve first selected the ones you want to split by Shift-clicking each one (Figure 25-5).

  

  Figure 25-5. Top: Zoom in, and then position the Playhead where you want to hack up the loop, or loops, since you can chop several simultaneously, as shown here. Just make sure they’re both selected. (Here, the middle track is not selected, so it won’t be split.)Bottom: After the split, the two loop pieces ...