emusonacid! legacy

the first time i chopped up an amen, it took me about four hours to do. and the bad part of it was, i didn't chop it so well. it sounded really bad, either i cut too early or too late. four or so attempts and a week later, i finally got the results that i liked.

so here is a thought that i got on the way home from work, what happens if i use the timestretching chord that i came up with a few months ago to chop up my breaks?

the theory goes this way. if you have a sampled break that is not cut up, you could, most likely "chop up" the break in real time. you would have to have a pad and pencil ready so you could write down the controller value for each hit. the first kick would be 0, the second hit would be say 25, (i am just making up values right now) and so on. an easy way to do this is take a measure of 8th notes or whatever and loop them and in the multimode window tweak the controller until you hear what you want, and how you want. once you have that, you could just program to your hearts content and then just set the controller value to reflect the location of each hit for each event (note). there would be of course no linear changes in the controller value, just step changes. this could work with vocals, guitar riffs that you "stoled" and everything else.

now, there maybe a problem with over hangs... you know were you might get some of the next hit in that note that is not intended because of the human drummer drumming "off time". you could either just cut the note length down a little, so that it stops the unwanted percussion from making an audio appearance. but this may cause problems like gaps and such. but then maybe not since we typically sample breaks at low speeds and speed them up quite a bit. so this maybe a worthless point to bring up but what can happen will. the other idea is a bit more complex... you cut down the event like the first option but then you find a space of the track's noise floor, and loop that in the dead space instead. if the resolution of the notes is small enough, you might get a smooth loop with out any clicks or anything. i have noticed that using the timestretching technique that you can almost replicate the sample perfectly if you reflect the movement of your controller to the duration of the orginal sample. this second technique may open the possiblity of a really clean sounding slow beat, say the amen at 90 beats per minute.. but this second idea is strickly just an idea, and hasn't been tested out..well actualy this whole thread is just and idea, but i am 99.9% certian that the first part will work. i will see if this is viable later on tonight or this weekend.

this idea, could speed up the entire beat chopping that we spend time doing.. so instead up chopping, and labouring over those sometimes hard to find zero crossings we could just do it on the fly, make adjustments by tweaking your controller setting instead of going back and chopping the sample again. that is time consuming. all you need to do is take the sample and figure out the pattern of it and then off you go.. and since we all chop we should be able to find the rythm fairly easily. so instead of an hour or two, it will only take maybe fifteen minutes at the worse. then you wouldn't have to worry about what key was what drum sound.. and this too could open up more keys for other stuff since you would have the drums on just one key. just an idea.. may work, maynot. i will mess with it this weekend.

smart idea, you could fully use the sstart and make some interesting edits and such
Nice one!

also, if the samples are running too short (ie: silence between hits) you could just pitch it down
boh!

I think i tried to do this the other day after reading the scratching and spinback thread. I may well be wrong but i came across a problem in that sstart goes from 0 to 127. It seemed cos the break i was working on was 2 bars i couldn't get the resolution required, ie say sstart at 20 was the snare i couldn't pick the exact start of the snare. Does this make sense or is it something else I'm trying to do!!!

no that totally make sense, The longer the break/sample the less resolution youd get
nicely said, very clear

if the sample is too long... then cut it into two, or cut it into measure long bits that work with the resolution... i wonder what the lenght would have to be for the resolution to start giving out.... the samples that i was thinking was like the amen, you only have a measure of that. but very true that the longer the sample the more difficult it is to hit the right spot...

well a good idea, just can't do it with large samples....

it was just an idea to make things go faster... because if the break is hard to cut, or difficult to hear were things are at, i thought this would work...

oh well