Pros & Cons of Loops/Chains vs One Shots?

It’s all subjective, of course. But one con of chains could be the time and mental overhead needed to create the chains. It can get a little overwhelming if for example, you want to create a chain library using hundreds of different kits. Or if you are trying to select 128 of your best kicks out of 10,000 kicks. This is why I tend to not worry about it too much and just make one chain at a time and use that for a while. The usefulness of chains cannot be denied.

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odds are there’s really only 5 good kicks in that 10,000 though. I think a lot of people get caught up in what they can do rather than what they should do ya know?

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I also feel like making chains of loops is kind of pointless, since the timestretch on the OT is meh. What’s the point of making loop chains to give yourself flexibility, when you just end up limiting yourself to a small tempo range where things sound good? (Being able to work at any tempo is crucial for me, personally) If anyone has a differing opinion on this, I’d love to hear how you make loop chains work for you.

I’m giving you examples of how I work. If you keep at it, you will end up using it in your own way. Anyways, keep practicing recorders…and start using chains for a bit. Download Octachain…Lately, I’ve been recording live keyboard playing in bitwig, transfering into OT ,slicing the different parts, and then getting amazing results. Rememebr, filters are you friends (and the filters on the OT are amazing once you get there)-record mode, turn knobs. Good luck.
Edit: I’ll leave these here-


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Thanks man, it really means a lot! I’ve been on this box for almost 48 hours straight! Shame work is going to get in the way tomorrow ;( … maybe I should get something to do field recordings with! :smiley:

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Yup. Haha, but you sound like you are in the right path, realising that the OT can morph into different roles and have different workflows for each is a big one already.

I think you are grasping it much quicker than I did! :stuck_out_tongue:

I posted this before…
But he said it wasn’t inspired by it…:content:
:loopy: :elot: Comb Comp Contest!

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Im struggling with loops and you’re making saxaphones out of input noise. OT going up for sale today. Joking, LOL! very inspiring, thanks for the link!

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Compared to DT, for sure! Coming from DT, maybe that why you really enjoy that? :content:
You can do both…

With OT you can record up to 8 stereo loops with different lengths at a time without editing. Isn’t that great?

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@Unifono did. :wink:
I made bass and flutes…

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Sorry I don’t understand what you mean (my english limits maybe). Slice a loop? I think it can be used at a slower tempo without timestretch…
Or make a chain with different loops? Can be funny.

Ah and @eight_trax, in case if you don’t know it, ultimate level of OT slice / matrixed loops :

@wascal’s great crazy idea.

I’ve seen it. I’ve done neat things with breaks using kontakt and I know OT will be a treat in that regard - holding off for now :slight_smile: In regards to the sliced loops and timestretch - if you slice the loops and leave timestretch on then the playback isnt good at all. My advice is to chop into slices, turn off time stretch and use pitch to tune the sample to the project you’re working with. you’d be surprise how much more you can get out of breaks just by pitching them up/down.

Simple, great idea. Probably best for stuff that doesn’t need to be tuned to a specific frequency. Thank you!

For information, if a sample or a slice is too short, it cannot be timestretched (less than 6100 samples IIRC).
Edit : a short sample, or trimed / sliced below 6143 samples (139 ms), is not timestretched.
I don’t like timestretch in general, but with OT it can be creative with RATE set to TSTR imho.

6400% timestretch, rate to crossfader…

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Nope, or better: not necessarily. IMHO it’s a newcomer thing. Until you know how to keep the music flowing while at the same time configure and reconfigure stuff it looks like preparation and performing is separated. But when you become accustomed to the machine stages start to blend into each other until there aren’t any different stages anymore.

Just watch Cenk doing a live demo with nothing than the factory stuff. Or watch others experienced enough. It will become immediate gratification, when you put in the hours to learn it properly.

The same goes for the FX. The default settings are meh, but when you start to combine them in the right way (even do some parallel processing using more tracks) and modulate them carefully with LFOs, you can expect some great stuff coming out.

The OT is simply not a preset machine (and isn’t meant to be one). That’s all.

Or just make that chain on the OT itself. It also just takes a few seconds to lay down some trigs in a temporary pattern with different sound locks and record it. Mission accomplished.

This. There is a great difference between mindlessly collecting terabytes of samples or carefully selecting good ones. I mean it’s not bad to collected terabytes of samples (I’ve done it, too), but then you need to put in the effort to filter out the (subjectively) good ones if you want to get up to speed using them.

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It could be argued that none of this matters in the context of the OT. A single short uninteresting sound can be endlessly morphed into any number of useful kick drums :grin:. For the record, I don’t collect samples. The only sample pack I’ve ever purchased in my life is the SFM all samples pack, which I barely use anyway. My 10,000 kicks example was just because i know many struggle with this.

Well, I do, but not 10.000 kicks or something like this, but field recordings, movie quotes, historical speeches, samples from NASA, animal sounds and all kinds of bits and bytes from the real world not easily producible by synths or sample manipulations.

The only sample library (if you can call it that) I’ve ever bought was Albion One from Spitfire Audio to silence my orchestrial composing needs.

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Ah, yes - me too. It’s probably more accurate to say that I don’t hoard commercial collections of drum hits. I loooove collecting field recordings, resamples, prepared instruments, voices, etc., though.

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No fear of losing fidelity due to resampling (rather than splicing audio files directly)?

As long as there’s not a huge drop in recording level from the original there’s basically no loss of fidelity when resampling from internal sources. I’ve had a pickup track recording from and overwriting itself for half an hour before and it sounded the same as it did in the first pass.

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