How I "chop" breaks on the AR/DT

I felt like documenting my approach for working with breaks on the Analog Rytm and Digitakt. It requires preparing the samples in a DAW before. It isn’t too difficult, but it can seem a bit strange at first, but it really makes things super easy to work with. It’s about p locking sample slot, but making it really easy and fast to set it properly. This was pieced together from other posts on here that I read, but I didn’t see anything that was exactly like this, so I hope this is at least helpful for some people

Sample preparation

The first step is to take a break sample and time stretch it to the grid. I use Ableton, but you should be able to use any DAW with warp/timestretch. This assumes you are using samples that are in 4/4 time (this is dance music after all). You are going to need to do some slightly different math if you want to sample other time signatures, but it shouldn’t be too different.

Here are the steps for prepping the sample:

  1. Timestretch your sample to whatever tempo makes sense. It doesn’t matter what tempo you pick, as long as you remember what it is (I put the BPM in the file name so I remember)
  2. Create an audio clip that is 120 1/16th notes long. 120 1/16th notes in 4/4 time is 7 and 1/2 measures.
    • If your sample is shorter, add silence to the end to bring it up to 120 1/16th notes
      • For example, If you have a 4 bar sample, add 3.5 bars of silence to the end
    • If your sample is longer, either “sacrifice” some of the sample by chopping time off of the end, or split the sample into smaller chunks and repeat for each of them.
  3. Bounce the audio file and bring it into your machine, with the BPM in the name of the file

Below is a screenshot of what a time stretched sample looks like. There is audio for about 5 bars, and then 2.5 bars of silence. The tempo doesn’t matter.

Screen Shot 2020-06-08 at 4.27.55 PM

Here is a folder that has a few samples that have been chopped with this technique. Let me know if you feel like prepping samples with this approach and adding them here! I haven’t done very many yet.

Using the samples

Now for the fun part! To “chop” your sample, parameter lock the sample start parameter. Normally, this is super annoying and tedious to do. However, because the DT and AR have sample start parameters that go from 0-120, any whole-number/integer value for sample start will line up exactly with the beginning of a 1/16th note in your sample!! This means that a value of 0 will be the very beginning of your sample, 4 will be the beginning of the second quarter note, and 32 will be the beginning of the third measure.

Changing the tempo

If you want to change the tempo of your sample, you can do that without time stretching by calculating a pitch change using something like this online calculator. This should sound fine for drum loops. For example, to change a loop of 135 BPM to 130 BPM, you apply a pitch change of - 0.65 semitones, which is super easy to set on the DT. It’s annoying on the AR since there is tune and fine tune instead of a single tune param, but it doesn’t need to be perfect to sound good.

These values are a bit annoying to dial in on the DT because there are decimal values for sample start, but you can use the press+turn combination to move in increments of 4, which is a quarter note. On the AR, this is a breeze, because the sample start parameter snaps to integer values.!

Video demo

Here is a video demo of playback.

Since I don’t say much, here’s what happens:

  • First, I start playing a sequence with a break sample where the sample start is parameter locked. Because of how the sample is prepared, every possible value of sample start lines up exactly with the beginning of a 1/16th note.
  • I then show that some of the trigs are indeed changing the sample start parameter.
  • Then, I switch the sample out but leave the sequence the same! This won’t always work, but it does in this case because the samples are prepared the same way and they are the same tempo.
  • At the end, I trigger some extra trigs with the fill mode (have fun with other conditional trigs!)

This isn’t anything revolutionary, but I think that it’s way more fun and way faster to “chop” breaks like this (as opposed to p locking sample slot) even though its not really “chopping”, just sample start manipulation with a little preparation to make it easier. I hope this helps some of you!!

18 Likes

It deserved a topic!
I did it similarly here :
Megabreak of Doom for Analog Rytm
Also mentioned it in that interesting topic. Timestretch

Instead of silence you can add a truncated loop, or several loops with different lengths (in steps)
64+56
64+32+16+8

You can also play loops with lfos, different speeds, placing trigs on all steps.
Velocity Mod can be used with start/end target, Velocity to Vol off.

7 Likes

Very well explained. I’ll try this out tonight :slight_smile:

This is great! thanks so much!