Chopping up really long loops?

[Steve44]

I have recently discovered that I love playing loops either by keys or with my synth's arpeggiator and doing crazy things with the knobs and filters and additive parameters. Now I want to chop them up and use them in other tracks, however I usually record this free-run for about ten minutes (!) and then search for good parts (When I'm recording, I usually play several bars in a row of the same thing if I like it) and then crop and fool around with them in Sound Forge. I then arrange in Logic.

 

I've thought about whether this might be easier if I did it all through Midi in Logic, but I'm worried that (a) the portamentos and knob movements won't work across the end and the beginning of the loop, & that (b) the initial settings of the patch won't be recorded, so it might have some "jump-to value" problems or missing controller info when I try to begin a loop with the middle of a large track. If you grab a portion of midi and send it to the beginning of a track, will Logic search the previous portion of the track for controller values and put them at the beginning of the new clip? Is it hard to get smooth changes from the end of theloop to the beginning?

 

I've also been thinking whether I could do this in Acid. Most people tell me that it's best for smaller loops and ones that you didn't make yourself.. but I know you can use your own loops. Can Acid take a really long track and chop it up easily into different loops? I wonder how hard it is to get the loop points right. Right now I'm used to an out-of-time context (non-dance music, actually it's "classical" electro-acoustic music), so the loop points haven't mattered very much.. I usually let the loops grow with effects that mask bad loop points.

 

I've never been terribly good with loops, as I have stayed away from samplers and also am just beginning to do loop based dance(ish) music, so I would appreciate any tips on how to grab portions of a long loop performance and get them to loop well as the basis for a song.