Drum rack/sampler "Release" setting vs note length?

[jsrobinson]

Hi all,

I have a question I'm trying to wrap my head around as I'm fairly new to production.

I have kick drum that's 263ms long in a 150BPM track. In this example my thought was to play the kickdrum on every quarter note. My note is drawn in as a 16th note which equals 100ms in this case. However, to avoid clipping the sound, my thought process was to set "Release" to 163ms. (100ms note + 163ms Release = 263ms clip length?)

However on doing this the note plays longer than 100ms but doesn't seem to play for the full 263ms.

Maybe I'm thinking about this the wrong way, what's the best way to handle this type of scenario with a clip of this length? Micromanaging the actual note length seems clumsy and probably wrong?

Thanks

[Der_Makrophag]

Unfortunately, your calculation does not work, because during the whole release time, the volume drops down. And I assume, you also want to have the full volume in the last ms of your sample?!

My first suggestion is, if you want to play the whole sample, just turn the release fully up. This will always play the whole sound (if there are still clicks, you might want to check, wether your sample has not been cut with care and add a small fade out in the end).

But if you want to keep some control over the length of the sample, you could set Release to a small value (choose one that does not "click") and increase your note lenght in the sequencer to the desired lenght. This way you can also make short notes, that play only half the sample (without "click", because of the Release time).

Look at this scheme to understand some envelope basics:

[steffensen]

When i used samplers for my drums, i used the midi note length plugin instead of release, and set the sampler to 1 voice. As you know the length of the sample, just set the note length plugin to that number, and ure set. Pretty much solved it for me anyway.

[Der_Makrophag]

This is also a good idea!

But when you want to have per note length of the sample, it becomes tricky

[sexface]

Good question, one I've dealt with a lot!

The answer really depends on your sample. If it just one kickdrum hit, I don't really think you have to worry about either jacking the release all the way up or making the note a full 1/4 note. This is because the sample itself will already have a "release" (volume decay) in the sample itself, so playing the full note will be fine.

If you dont' have this, say you are sampling from a track where another sound comes right after your hit, that is where you have to get tricky. I usually use a combo of release time (make sure there is some tail, even if it is the beginning of a new hit) and note length. Once I've got this perfect for one hit, I use the good-ole Cmd+D to duplicate it across all the hits. Voilá.

Hope that helps.