Byharlej
Wed Jan 23, 2008 7:31 am
This video is very popular online, if I'm thinking of the same one. Anyway...
As to the actual technique, what he did was to chop the samples in little pieces as he said. The smaller chops you use, the better results and control you get.
When you are about to chop something with ZONE mode, you can always leave a piece at the end of each chop, so they will overlap each other a little.
It all depends of the tempo your beat is and the tempo of samples you use. Sometimes, if sample in it's original form is slower than your beat, this is a simple situation. You will then cut it and have some additional space at the end of each chop. That way even if you speed up the beat by a few percent, the chops you use will use this extra space to fill in the gaps that may take place. Eventually if you speed up too much, these gaps will become audiable.
When the samples you use are faster than your beat, there is the place to use timestretching. Sometimes you will have stretch only a few chops, sometimes a whole loop, it all depends of the situation. Bare in mind, that in 2kxl timestretching is quite time-consuming, so you may want to use a software program and then put back redone samples into your mpc.