by sampleandhold » Sun Mar 21, 2004 4:27 am
i have actualy taken this to the extreme with the compton amen. I will explain more on this in a moment.
It sounds as if you are some what new at chopping breaks, sorry if i am assuming wrong. the amen is kind of a hard break to cut up as a starter, but it will afford you certian understandings in precussion and the use of ghost strokes and the like.
what you basically want to do is cut the break up so that each hit, kick, snare, cymbals, anything is by it's self. then you program the sampler to play the first kick on c1 or whatever you want, then the second kick on c#1, and so on until you have placed all the samples that you want to use on the keyboard. This will allow you to rearrange, edit, delete and change the break as you see fit. Some people will cut a break up into fourths, ie quarter notes and so on. some will just timestretch the break to fit the lenght of the measure of the destination bpm. I perfer the copper best.
if you are have issues with the fifth note, that should be one of the ghost stroked snares, and if it is infact the first one, there is actualy a bit of a double stop there. when i have listened to it there seems to be a kick underneath that snare. so cutting becomes crucial. and the nineth cut will more then likely be the first of the double kicker in the amen. that is a hard part of the break as well because the time is a bit off. so getting it to sound right is kind of a chore.
here is one thing i did in the begaining. take the amen as is right now, and send it to the beat munger and get the bpm. then go back and set your sequencer a bit faster. i beleive the amen is something like 109.6 or something bpm at it's original tempo. i would set the bpm at 110 or 111. then go and chop the first kick and then place it. then do the next kick and place that again. then push play on the sequencer and listen. i also test the cuts out an octave to two below the origin of the sample. if you dont' hear a pop there, then you will def not here a pop at higher frequencies. also quite pops will disappear so you don't have to worry quite so much about missed zero crossings. now, does it sound the same as the original? the goal here is to test each cut at the original bpm and try to make any gliches, pops or zero crossing misses as rare as possible. because once you have that set up and it plays almost perfectly at 110 bpm. it will sound sexy at 170 because the edits shrink down. instead of playing the full 0.28 seconds of each 8th note, your sampler will only play 0.17 seconds instead. and so if you have a missed zero or something, it will be covered up. here is a formula for calculating the duration of each hit.
x/y=d
x is the time, 60 seconds equals quarter notes, 30 8ths, 15 16ths, you get the point.
y is the bpm of the break at original tempo
d is the duration of each hit, so if the lenght of the hit you want to find out is a quarter note, you use sixty. and so on. but remember this was drummed by a human so there is going to be timing issues. so this should just give you a ruff idea of where to go.
You do have your break in mono right. and don't convert back to stereo it sounds bad especially on the short kicks. flanges actualy.
i hope this helps. once you get this break down, you can just go by feeling. so it will get easier. the really funny thing is once you see the lenght of the first not you can almost tell what the bpm was originally.
also remember that this is the order of the amen. 8th 8th 8th 16th 16th 16th 16th 16th 16th 8th 16th 16th. that might be the issue too. maybe you had one note that was in fact an 16th programmed as an 8th. i have done this before.
now if you have the compton amen, you have to chop that one up into sixteen pieces because the producer had layed a 16th note cymbal line on that one. you can get wierd programming with that. so once you get your amen set right, save it and start another bank and take all the 8th notes and divide them in half. it will sound really cool then.
my last bit is, don't cut an amen up that is already sped up to dnb speeds, you can't hide the mistakes very well. remember chopped breaks sound better faster because you are in a sense quantizing the break and you need to cover up the gaps that will show up. that is why you speed it up.
and my last tip, if you have your break bouncing at 170 or whatever and one of the hits seems a bit behind, go in and cut a little off the front, that will move the attack a bit ahead. the emu's screen is somewhat miss leading when it comes to where the actual attack starts. only worry about this if it sounds weird... and you don't like it. it will really become appearant if you layer another break over the first break. so you will have to make adjustments. but that isn't too hard to do.
"{jU$t-n3Rv0U$-N-+h3-@Ll3y-W@y}"
