I decided I need to get over my extreme disappointment that Strom has a bug that renders the beat chopping feature useless for Rytm.I am getting back into jungle-ish break chopping again after a decades. Back in the day I used to chop in an MPC2000 and Recycle>Akai1000 or Emu 6400.
Nowadays I have an MPC60 / SP1200 / Emu eMax which are all a pain in the ass to do chops on. I have a Elektron Rytm and I adore the sound of it so I thought exporting sample chops then doing p-locks could kick ass… only to be supremely disappointed by Strom.
So now if I want to chop and export to Rytm it seems I will have to either:
Chop and export in Ableton Live which is a pain in the ass.
Buy more software like Recycle or BeatCleaver.
Consider a newer MPC or Octatrack but would love to not spend $$$
Anything I am overlooking here??? What other options do I have???
You can of course just do it with plocks on a full sample, the main problem being the use of 120 divisions rather than 128, which means you can’t easily do 16th beats. Still, it’s a low-overhead approach and being able to copy and paste trigs means you can get pretty fast (you could set up a ‘scratch’ pattern to easily copy trigs from).
Generally I’d rather have the full sample at my disposal, keeping my options open. The trade off is a little extra work, but you get faster quite quickly.
For software, if you don’t like using Live, I’d recommend checking out Renoise - it’s cheaper than a lot of dedicated audio editors, and the sample editing is really well done.
Lastly, if you’re just after automatic regular slices - strict 16ths, 32nds etc. - I expect you could set up a sox script once and never have to worry about it again.
I’ve just been importing the whole sample and assigning it to a few different pads. Then I set the start and end points for each pad to get the section of the break that I want. It works pretty well as long as the sample isn’t terribly long. If it is too long, you will start to see that the 120 increments are not fine enough.
This is a bit less work than using the sample on one pad and using p-locks for the start and end points but, of course, you’re using extra voices.
But if I do have a rather long sample and it comes down to chopping it, I just roll my sleeves up, fire up Audacity and just keep reminding myself “Now, I’ll only have to do this once and then it’ll be done.”
Consider a newer MPC or Octatrack but would love to not spend $$$
Anything I am overlooking here??? What other options do I have???
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Oh, and I would mention that my trusty old MC-909 was very good for chopping samples and it had USB or Smartmedia for easy export. Definitely cheaper than an Octatrack but probably pretty close in price to all but the newest MPC’s.
I think if I was going to spend the time to manually chop breaks I would just stick with the SP1200 or MPC60.
I have tried chopping using stop start and it works about as well as the SP or MPC… but it takes up all 12 pads and makes 16th chops impossible (important in jungle).
The goal is to keep all the slices on 1 voice (so I can still use 7 analog voices) and cycle through slices using p-locks so I think I am going to check out Renoise.
One trick to do chops can also be using the velocity mod matrix with an external padcontroller. Assign velocity to samp start and assign fixed velocity values for each pad on your padcontroller. Naturally, this means that your padcontroller must be able to program the pad velocities in this manner… Known to be working at least with Korg Padcontrol and TRigger Finger Pro.
One benefit of this approach is, as long as you use the same amount of beats/bars with every sampleloop you import, it is already “chopped”
