One of my favourite tricks when getting creative with drum loops is to use the Separate At Transients command and slice up loops in much the same way as I used to with tools like Propellerheads Recycle but using the stock Pro Tools editing facilities.
While manual editing gives you the most control, sometimes you want to speed things up and for this the clever tech behind SoundRadix’s Drum Leveler comes into its own. While I most often use this in preference over a compressor as a less artefact-prone way to even out the differences in level between kicks or snares, usually bringing them up in level, Drum Leveler is just as capable of pulling sounds down in level or even all the way down, becoming a very flexible gate or “inverse gate”.
In this short video demonstration from Sound Radix, producer Emre Ramazanoglu demonstrates just how effective Drum Leveler can be at, in this case, pulling the snare out of one loop and isolating the snare from another to combine the two as if he had access to a multitrack. Nice!
This video is embedded from Facebook so you might have to un-mute the sound to hear the loops.