Selling Gear, best Sample method before selling

Hello, I have a certain Drum Machine/Synth (that shall remain nameless, don’t look at my avatar,lol) and I am about to sell it because it doesn’t play so well with others. I recently got an Octatrack and I want to at least Sample some of my loops/beats that I made with it.
Should I sample directly into the Octatrack?
Should I sample into a DAW? I have mainly been working with Multitrack DAW on my iPad which I don’t think will be any good. I have Ableton but I am no master of it, at all. I could Sample into Maschine though.

IF I wanted to sample some synth sounds that I made how should I go about sampling single notes? Sample the note C4 and let the Octatrack pitch it? I may skip that part, I have an Analog Four and a modular so I can get good synth sounds.

Thanks for any help/advice

Hi i would suggest sampling different hits into the OT
if you have it slaved to the ot, then you could sample 64 hits into 4 bars and beable to slice them up

You could play with memory managment on your ot
and just record very long chunks of audio… and play with it.
Or setup your sequencer to make the other machine play 64 hits
and slice it up…

But, if you do have a computer (well u must, you are using machine)
Make your machine play seperate hits… and record it… beatchop it
export seperate samples… and use those for sample-chains.
its just that much more efficient to do… and you got tons
of sample-fodder when your done…

I like my ot… I like sampling on the ot… but I just wouldnt sample
10minute long samples to edit later on the OT… that sucks ass.
(its possible… but… .hmmm… ass + the sucking of it)

For example… If i want new snares… I just turn on recorder and machinedrum
play with snares for a good 5 minutes… change settigns radically
play again for a good 5 minutes…
take those recordings into renoise… beatchop it… (if i got more then i think 120 slices in renoise… I have to delete a few snares which I dont like… until its all nice and chopped…
build nice multisampled drum-libraries out of them… and go :slight_smile:

Then I create sample-chains with that drumlibrarie i just made.
and those go into octatrack… nice and small enough to be editable. but
big and diverse enough that I can actually do somethign with it.

Here’s what I did when I recently went through a similar exercise. I’m writing it here from memory and I don’t have Maschine. Also, I’m a bit of a synth nerd and TBH, sampled synth hits don’t sound usable to me, try as I might. They are, on the other hand, great raw material for further OT mangling. In my experience, the less good the source synth material is, the better it mangles. Naturally, YMMV. Same for drum loops coming off other gear Drum hits on the other hand, are another story.

The OT is my best audio recorder. I set a long Flex Recorder up at 24 bit and played individual hits into it from my other devices. In some cases I would do an octave by manipulating the transpose on the source device. The worst part about this decision is that there’s no input meter. You have to pick your battles. I used my loudest sound as a guide and played with the OT’s normalize feature to see how close I was getting. Then played with the gain until it was close enough.

You can split by hand on the OT but I didn’t.

Drag that file into Reaper, which supports 24 bit where Audacity does not.
Use Reaper’s Item Processing|Split at Transients (or select the clip, press tab, press S to split, and tab again) and adjust to the best result.
This will create individual sample clips. You may have to go in and ‘heal splits’ in some cases. Biggest gripe I had was that the very begining of some splits would be included in the end of the previous. I got this as close as I could with the settings and dealt with it later in trimming.

Select all and ctrl+alt lets you drag identical fade outs on all of the clips to get rid of the tailing artifact.

One of the items in the action menu lets you trim the silence. Search ‘silence’. This shortens the clip so that you save memory space and also makes reverses easier.

Select-All/Normalize. Or not.

Name the samples if you like - press F2. Or name the track and drag groups of like samples to dedicated tracks. This is a set-up for getting the names as close to useful as possible.

Select all (important) then Action|File:Batch Processing is the key last step. The include button adds ‘all selected clips’ to the to-do queue. There are wildcards for naming. trackName$ + clipNumber$ )or something like that) or just clipName$ if you put the time in, means that the individual files will be saved with meaningful names.

This process is designed to be efficient as much as anything. Some compromises are made in the interest of getting it done. I figured if I was too fanatical about the process, I’d never finish.

HTH,
CCQ

Thanks for the different methods and suggestions. I will let you guys know what I do.

I am going to suggest using a DAW to sample instead. Then you can edit the level of individual hits more easily, and prepare some sample chains right away.

This is what I did with my (nameless) drum box / synth. I haven’t sold it yet, but I did make some kits for my OT and my SparkLE.

I recommend panning your sounds to the left and using the individual voice outputs on your nameless drum box so you get the best levels and avoid the internal FX. Then record them in mono.

For entire loops/beats I play it through once, and stop it so I can record any decay at the end of the bar. I track it with the individual outs panned to the left on separate tracks in the DAW.

Still not sure if I will bring myself to sell it though!

Although, I´m not into selling anything (don´t think my drummer will like me selling his stuff). I´m soon about to fetch some samples out of his old Alesis DM Pro.

Planning to try to use some combined methods of MIDI stream of notes at certain intervals (in sync with MIDI clock ticks), the Octatrack setup with an flex recorder with specific lenght of recording time, divisible by 64 perhaps (what are you guys normally using as slice lenght: 1sec, 2sec or more?).

Theoretically, it would be all clear to then just slice that up in the Octatrack. Some trial and error will probably show if and what needs to be adjusted.
Otherwise, the backup plan is to use Reaper…

@Cleverconqueso, big thank you for the short Reaper walktrough!
I wasn´t able to fully follow your description just by reading it. Do you know if there is any kind of tutorial for this kind of things you mentioned?
I´ve looked around a bit at cockos place but haven´t been able to get thru the User Guide (over 400 pages), and the forum seems a bit scattered to me. Do you know any other sources you´ve found helpful for you?

I just put together a quick video - watch this space. It should be uploaded in an hour or so.

When it uploads it will be here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HlgaJN0ZMA&feature=youtu.be

WOW!!!

:+1:

Big thanks for that!

Now I´ve got a lot to try out and I am feeling confidence that I´ll actually may pull it off too. I haven´t been using any kind of DAW much, but started out with Reaper since a year ago or so. However, reading all kinds of tips and tricks in Sound On Sound and elsewhere every now and then within the past 2-3 years. I´ve realized that there´s so much than can be done in a far more efficient way than just doing things “manually” one by one. Problem is to figure out what kind of keywords one should search for when trying to learn new stuff… your use of the action list (silence) search was a bit of an eye-opener in that regard. Once again, thanks!

/Mike

Thank you so much for the Video, that is super helpful!

AWESOME! Best post of 2014 so far for me. Super detailed video, super helpful!

Great video! It has really turned me on to Reaper, if nothing else. Destructive wave editing looks much easier than what I’d been doing in either Ableton Live or Audacity.

Glad to help. I had other work I was putting off.
IIRC ‘destructive’ editing requires use of the ‘glue’ or ‘take’ features. The Reaper community has the enthusiasm of Open Source people for some reason. Underdog status, I guess. The scripts and add-ons are Audacity level.