How do you all like to chop your drum breaks? Do you chop on every transient? Do you chop on the beat (8th notes or 16th notes etc.)? Do you warp the chops a little so when you resequence everything fits perfectly on the grid?
Just wondering what people prefer…
Sometimes.
Sometimes.
No. Warp is the groove killer.
I use octatrack. I sometimes use auto slice, sometimes manual slice. Most of the time I go in an edit the slices anyway, as Octatrack often gets it wrong. I always have timestretch off. I will repitch the sample if needed to fit the tempo.
I do big timestretches (100 BPM to 160BPM for example) in Reaper. While still in Reaper, I’ll play the loop against a metronome and fix any hits that seem really off.
From there I put everything in the octatrack and make any final tweaks there. I personally don’t like it when breaks are perfectly “on the grid,” so I try and keep timing adjustments to a minimum.
@Microtribe is hinting at this, but a lot of this is a question of personal taste! Try things a few different ways and you’ll find your favorite for sure.
Beat slice on polyend tracker! I like process them In bitwig and then chop em up. Lately I’ve been big on slow breaks at 150bpm
Being some sort of specialist on the subject here is a few tutorial I did about my technics:
if you want to apply your own feel add more slices
if you’re trying to maintain the feel of the original break add less slices
Ooh thanks, I will watch them all.
That’s a good way to think about it!
or if you want to maintain the original groove but change up the break alot you can add alot of slices but keep them even and precisely on the grid rather than the transients,
Generally I chop on the transients 8th and 16th notes and then slice to midi in Ableton or slice to a new pad group in beatmaker making sure to create events, I do warp the main hits like the kick and snare but I leave the shuffles and ghost notes alone to maintain the groove… this makes resequencing much easier imho…
Leaned a bunch from your tutorials!
There’s actualy more on the channel if you want to get deep geek about it 
And there’s even a “no talking” one on my label page for those who might not like my voice !
Some great advice, but I would like to add: Try everything.
Transients, longer chops, stretched, pitched, you name it.
For me all of those techniques have a place and time, depends a lot on the source sample, and taste obviously.
But you might miss out by not trying some goofy shit once in a while. There’s no such thing as right or wrong in my book, do’s how you feels. Best way to learn, too.
I’ll add to that some technic might work better on specific breaks, at specific tempo, and sometime why not use a few different of those in the same track if it make sens for you.
Any sequencing I deem complex enough to require chopping I just do in the box - from there I sample into elektrons and just plock start time if I want to shuffle it up. Bear in mind though I’ll resample say 4 or 5 variations in the same break. So plock start time and sample on a single track gets a lot of variation without needing the chops exposed to the sequencer directly, which I have always found too fiddly.
1010music blackbox has an auto chop that looks for transients. I usually treat the results as a starting point, and go in and tweak.
For speedy workflow - consider Koala Sampler with the samurai upgrade. It’s also very affordable.
If you have a well timed 1-bar or two-bar break - Koala sampler’s auto chop set to “equal” with 8 or 16 chops usually yields very workable results. Again, similar to on the blackbox, you can always manually review the chops and then adjust them to taste.
So what do you all do if after you chop and resequence there is too much air between the hits? Do you loop the tails or something?
Gert filth bass lines bruv
chop again and again, it just takes practice
if there is too much space between the slices then generally the bpm is to slow, try the original bpm…
if you want a different bpm that is alot slower anyway then try time stretching the break to the bpm you want first and then slice up the break
I mainly use a Digitakt. The Digitakt sadly does not have any kind of sample slicing. So if I’m using a drum break, I generally parameter lock the start and end points and copy and paste things around. I think I usually wind up just cutting up each individual drum hit. But I do it to taste.
Sometimes I like to using the LFO time stretch trick. What’s fun about that is that you can use the phase of the LFO to chop your sample. It winds up working as kind of a janky auto slice since. That can be a lot of fun. I made a couple of little jungle tracks that way.
Also, a little air in the chops isn’t the worse thing in the world. I don’t like my stuff to sound too rigid. I think that the little imperfections can make things feel more human.