Ableton Forum

After years of slicing and re-slicing my collection of breakbeats from scratch (usually via "slice to drum rack") I thought I'd take advantage of the slicing and warping of Simpler to streamline my workflow. So, now I have a folder full of Simpler presets with sliced breaks, but they're all saved as Projects. I ended up with this for each break:

[Break 1234 Project]
-[Samples]
--[Processed]
---[Crop]
----Break_1234.wav
-Break 1234.adv

Now, repeat about 85 times.

In order to preview the break, I have to open Project->Samples->Processed->Crop to get to a wav I can click on. Yuck. It seems like in my quest to streamline, I've just created more work.

Is there a way I could approach this differently? My goal is to avoid a situation where I have to hot swap samples or do any slicing. I want to preview, select, and drop a sliced break on an empty MIDI channel in as few steps as possible.

Would I be better off just having all of the breaks in a folder and previewing them like any other sound file, then dropping the one(s) I want to Simpler instances?

Thanks.

sorry, i do not have an good answer for you. i was just hoping to hitch a ride here until you get one...

all my efforts to make samples from my records have ended up as a mess of one sort or another. if i don't use a sample on the spot, it goes into some far corner of my hard drive... and/or into a forest of folder trees to be lost and forgotten.

*bookmark*

The Slicing in simpler is a failed implementation. Slice to midi is superior. stick with that (slicing in clip view). My 2 cents.

Thanks for the comments so far. I agree that while the Simpler slicing feature was a good idea, the implementation leaves a bit to be desired. I'd still rather go with Simpler than slicing to MIDI, however.

For now it seems like the best way to deal is to put all of the wavs into a "Breaks" folder and just preview them through the browser, then drop them in to a Simpler instance as desired. The slicing sensitivity and fade outs might need a little tweaking, but that's less of a hassle than opening up subfolders under individually-set Simpler presets.

And I'm grateful for it being as easy as it is. Watching old footage of drum n bass producers slicing things up on hardware and also thinking back to how I did it with FastTracker II back in the 90s means I know how cumbersome it was back then. Makes me appreciate a chopped Amen tune from 1995 that much more.

I still favour Kontakt for slicing breaks. Unless I'm missing something obvious I don't think you can zoom into the waveform and move the slice markers as accurately with the built in slicing in Live........?

you could make a midi clip for the Simpler and store that? No folder hierarchy, and stores as a clip (simpler preset) ready to go.