I really enjoy sampling and chopping on my Polyend Tracker, but sometimes I want to play with something a bit more powerful.
I have Bitwig and FL on my laptop.
As far as I can tell the sampler and drum machine on Bitwig don’t seem to support a really clean fast way to sample chop like you can on the Polyend.
I’ve tried Serato and that seems a bit better, but I’m not sure if there are any other decent VSTs which make sampling quick and fun?
I guess if I wanted to go hardware then an MPC or Octatrack is the only game in town?
Have you tried Renoise (or Redux if you didn’t want to use another daw)? Coming from the Polyend Tracker, you’re already familiar with a tracker workflow
Did someone say Renoise? I thought I heard Renoise.
If so, listen to that person. Renoise is great. I love renoise. Its the most hardware experience I’ve ever had with a DAW. Not just how quick and intuitive it is with samples, but it just makes track making make sense.
Its like electronic sheet music. You can see a massive amount of your track so you have a window view right into the entirety of your track.
Have you used redux? I’ve been looking at renoise over the last few weeks but I like using ableton and it’s max4l devices.
Plan would be to have ableton as main daw but use renoise also as a starting point then bounce into ableton but I was thinking is redux the better option? Keep it all contained in one daw or does renoise offer so much more it’s the better option?
Answering my own question for the benefit of anyone else who doesn’t know.
Looks like Redux essentially embeds a sampler + a Renoise Tracker style sequencer into a VST so you can use it in any DAW.
You can then trigger the Tracker patterns with MIDI from the DAW piano roll.
I really don’t find the piano roll a super creative place to be so this could be a nice workflow for me. I’ll have a play around this evening.
One thing I really miss from the Poyend Tracker that MPCs also have is the jog wheel for setting sample points. Are there any good controllers for this kind of integration?
Ryan and yourself already covered the core aspect of Redux, but you do also get the modulation and a lot of the Renoise built-in dsp effects in addition to the tracker phrase sequencer. I personally prefer to use Renoise, as it allows VSTs within the xrni effects chains, aswell as tempo, direction, position control of the track from the sequencer.
That’s one area where Serato is lacking.
The sample chopping seems very advanced (Although if it guesses the wrong BPM it seems impossible to fix)
Having got the chops the mangling seems quite limited compared to (for example) the Bitwig sampler which has pretty much infinite mangling capability.
In Serato Sample, if the detected BPM of the sample is wrong, you can click the ‘GRID’ icon (will appear when you mouse over the sample window), then set the BPM manually in the grid settings. Serato’s built-in tools are pretty limited as to what you can do with the chops, but you can send each slice to its own audio channel (there are 16 of them, click a sample pad, Output->Destination) which you can then route to an Ableton Live audio track (Audio from: Serato Sample -> then choose one of the 16 stereo audio channels) to add additional effects just for that slice.
But, that is nowhere near as nice as Redux/Renoise’s FX chain per sample slice that is all nicely contained in the Effects tab of the sampler, the Beatsync time-stretching works well, but requires some manual tweaking of the options to sound as good as Serato’s very good out-of-the-box stretching.
It seemed like (and I might be wrong) that if you switch to grid it just dumbly chops at intervals of an 1/8 note or whatever without actually finding the transitions.
