"Slice to new MIDI track"

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tedlogan
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"Slice to new MIDI track"

Post by tedlogan » Tue May 05, 2015 8:36 pm

I really need to try new features more often. The "Slice to new MIDI track", which was introduced in Live 8 I think, is incredible. Yes yes - I know everyone knows about it and uses it all the time - but I ignored/forgot about it as my workflow did not require it til recently.

I make a lot of loops within u-he synths, the song-in-a-note-held-down variety, because I love doing it. It's impractical in certain aspects, but you tend to come up with musical snippets that automatically gel together due to how the audio is produced - it seldom sounds stitched together or disconnected. Plus I find it fun.

I especially like drumloops made in a synth, as each hit sounds slightly different due to random phase settings and so on, avoiding the machine-gun effect which I really don't like at all. Problem til now was each loop's rhythm was static, ironically, as a whole, trapped within the preset.

Slice to MIDI track - Transients mode(from a recorded drumloop of the preset) not only copies however many hits/transients I recorded, it also makes a new clip with exactly the same beat - just awesome. Very quick altering of static loops, or completely new ones, but with the same random phase hits...well, reduced to however many hits of the kick or snare etc I sampled.

I just needed to share my joy at finally using this feature.

BUT - if i want to do more than altering a loop - say making a proper kit to play out of this - now I need to find a quick way to round-robin this mess.

I don't want to play with 57 million drumcells all the time, so the alternative is to ignore the Slice to MIDI and drag the audio clip into a Sampler, duplicating the chains within each cell to however many variations I want per hit, choosing different regions in the sample, distributing ranges equally, assigning LFO2 to 100% modulating of the Sample Selector, set to high frequency. The end result is great, but is FUCKING tedious to set up.

I could house multiple instances of....Bazille....one per cell, with each instance playing a single hit - but that would cause thermonuclear destruction with the massive CPU hog it is.

empathy1
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Re: "Slice to new MIDI track"

Post by empathy1 » Tue May 05, 2015 9:14 pm

wait so...you want to figure out how to slice a marked audio loop into a drum kit that you can play out and sequence?

tedlogan
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Re: "Slice to new MIDI track"

Post by tedlogan » Tue May 05, 2015 9:32 pm

no, not at all. That's the easy, quick part.

I want to speed up the process of layering the same, for example, kickdrum hit that was generated by a synthesizer (with random phase), in a single drumcell, and set it up so that each time you punch the drumpad, a different variety/phase (sample) of this kickdrum plays, to avoid the static machine-gun effect single samples create.

The synth in question here is Bazille, which would destroy your computer if instanced per drumcell to each play a different role (kick/snare/hihat etc). Thus the sampling.

I know how to do all this very well, I just wondered out loud, in a post, if there is a speedier way of doing so, but then realised there is not.

It's not a big deal I've also realised - spend one evening building this drumrack which I will use forever probably.

yur2die4
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Re: "Slice to new MIDI track"

Post by yur2die4 » Wed May 06, 2015 2:49 am

I would slice a bunch of 'like-sounding' sounds to a Sampler, and then add the 'Random' midi effect device. Rack that up and then compile a few of those and put them into drum rack slots.

cyclicAMP
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Re: "Slice to new MIDI track"

Post by cyclicAMP » Wed May 06, 2015 3:45 am

Yeah. I use the 'Random' and 'Scale' midi effects with the Impulse instrument (remember that one?) for round robin type of effect. I like using Impulse because its so simple and...has time stretch!

tedlogan
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Re: "Slice to new MIDI track"

Post by tedlogan » Wed May 06, 2015 1:42 pm

Cheers guys, I've considered doing those also. I could simply reprogram the Bazille patches to only play one-shots of like-sounding samples at a time, sample a bunch of those to one audio clip, and quickly slice those to samplers as you say, eliminating the need to carefully select kickdrum-regions or snare-regions within a whole sampled loop etc.

tedlogan
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Re: "Slice to new MIDI track"

Post by tedlogan » Sun Jun 14, 2015 3:42 pm

cyclicAMP wrote:Yeah. I use the 'Random' and 'Scale' midi effects with the Impulse instrument (remember that one?) for round robin type of effect. I like using Impulse because its so simple and...has time stretch!
Loving this simple but extremely effective technique. Randomly stumbled upon this http://blog.dubspot.com/drumpulse/ (which is basically what you describe but with more details) today researching other stuff, and it works brilliantly. I then remembered this thread and the advice herein so thought I'd mention it. I prefer this over using Sampler. And yes - timestretch!

So easy to get really organic rolling electronic drumloops going as opposed to static samples that never change.

The simplicity really is a bonus too.

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