I’m so excited - I think I got this stuff nailed!!! I figured a way to get a little audio grain from any sound or sample and have it tuned correctly to play well in the Monomachine. It’s basically the same thing I’ve been doing, but short cutting the math and technical stuff using my ears and eyes.
Thanks Simon for your suggestion.
Here’s how: I sample whatever audio I want on the tape (synthesis, voice, noise, farts whatever) - copy a section to the drum sampler then I move start/end points extremely close together with the trig/hit type on loop. This allows me to hold down the key with one hand and cycle through the whole sample until I find something I like. This is similar to a granular method of sample synthesis using start/end points on the RYTM.
When I find a nice looped “cycle” I like the trick is to tune it so it’s playable. I go back to tape … make a looped track of lets say C3 (or 1 or 2 for bassey stuff) using a very basic sounding synth. IE: pulse playing a smooth sounding wave. I leave that playing and go back into my drum machine and play the key for my tiny little cycle looping and hold shift + turn the green encoder which controls the end point. This allows me to fine tune the “cycle length”. I keep shortening or lengthening the loop until the tune gets close. I just use my ears like tuning a guitar and listening to the harmonics until the looped cycle frequency lines up with the C3 playing on the tape. BINGO !
So up to this point this isn’t new information for me. How do I get just 1 cycle (the single grain) saved as a file. I can play my looping cycle tonally on the OP1 great, but I want a file I can upload to Monomachine.
Well here’s where Simon’s advice helped me…
I play a bar or so onto the tape - copy that into the Sampler Synth - save the snapshot - plug OP1 into my compie - grab the snapshot - load it in audacity (or whatever audio editor) ZOOM super far in until I can see the waveform and use my eyeballs to find the wave shape that appears to be repeating. Sometimes I can hit it perfect on the first try, but sometimes it takes a few tries . I try and grab a selection of what looks like the repeated wave at the zero crossings, then hit Z to snap to the actual zero crossings. You can preview what it sounds like by shift-spacebar. When it sounds right. copy that selection - paste to an empty file and BOOM I have my own single cycle tuned to C3 (or C1 C2 whatever I want).
HAZAAH MOFO ! I’m not at home so I can’t hear it yet, but next step is to upload these files tonight to Monomachine and see how she sounds.
I’ve never made a tutorial video before, but if anyone else finds this info interesting albeit confusing, let me know and I’ll try and throw something up on youtube showing how I did it. I’m pretty sure I could do this on the RYTM as well - perhaps using Overbridge to record the loop then audio editor to slice the cycles.