Normalize after chops

so what you sayin bruh?

should you normalize chops?

rich_biatch wrote:so what you sayin bruh?

should you normalize chops?

In my personal opinion (assuming PC recording) you should normalise the entire sample once recorded, with a dry back-up made on your PC at 24bit. If you later import the break into the MPC and then chop it I would say leave the levels of the individual chops, as you will likely want the to fit together as they did in the original break. If you are chopping on the PC, with the aim to harvest individual hits, I would then likely normalise each hit after cutting it out of the main break.

There isn't really and right and wrong and sorry if my previous waffle confused people. It was more to correct that you will experience quantisation noise when changing the level of a sample if no oversampling/higher bit rate has been used.

well there you have it ladies and germs

kazakore wrote:
Not true. Assuming you have sampled and saved at 16bit then to increase or decrease a samples level it will have to interpolate where the value would fall between bit levels.

Okay, so "technically" was a bad word choice on my part and you are correct. Still, adjusting volume levels through normalize (DB +/-) or through velocity sensitivity or whatever is far less destructive than reducing your sample rate. Interpolation artifacts at 16-bit are hardly an issue when adjusting volume, but you hear people on the boards complaining about this issue when they use 16-level tune or pitch changes all the time.

NearTao wrote:

kazakore wrote:
Not true. Assuming you have sampled and saved at 16bit then to increase or decrease a samples level it will have to interpolate where the value would fall between bit levels.

Okay, so "technically" was a bad word choice on my part and you are correct. Still, adjusting volume levels through normalize (DB +/-) or through velocity sensitivity or whatever is far less destructive than reducing your sample rate. Interpolation artifacts at 16-bit are hardly an issue when adjusting volume, but you hear people on the boards complaining about this issue when they use 16-level tune or pitch changes all the time.

I agree, hence my closing paragraph starting with this sentence.

Of course I seriously doubt many people on here would be able to hear the difference, even if provided with an A+B test situation with ideal monitoring.

And by many people on here I really meant unlikely anybody in the world, ever Unless you did a large number of volume changes of large adjustments, or were very low in level. For every 6dB you are under maximum you are effectively sampling with one less bit.


You last comment I assume you are referring to pitch change with time stretch (pitch-shifting,) rather than simply pitching up and down by playing through the sample faster or slower. This is likely to be as much to do with the algorithm used as anything else and there are still very few people who have provided a really good timestretch solution. I'm still to find one for the PC that I'm happy with that isn't stupidly expensive and hardware generally falls a bit behind software.

kazakore wrote:You last comment I assume you are referring to pitch change with time stretch (pitch-shifting,) rather than simply pitching up and down by playing through the sample faster or slower. This is likely to be as much to do with the algorithm used as anything else and there are still very few people who have provided a really good timestretch solution. I'm still to find one for the PC that I'm happy with that isn't stupidly expensive and hardware generally falls a bit behind software.

Ableton Live isn't too bad at time stretching, but it really takes more effort than most people think to coax a good sound out of it. Plus they're still licensing an older 1.0 time stretching algorithm last I saw. I believe melodyn is up to the 2.0 or 3.0 version of the algorithm... and yes they are both really over priced. I like Ableton for ease of use and Melodyn for just how much it makes sound into sonic putty that you can mold... but lately I still prefer my hardware for the ease of use and hands on usage.

Yeah Melodyne has always seems to come across as the best out the but $200 (for the most basic version) is more than I'm willing to spend on a plug-in/audio tool personally.

Had a copy of Ableton Live Lite a while back (V4 I think) that came free with a controller but I couldn't get it to export the waves after playing about with the timestretching and it wasn't what I would call perfect (although I would of accepted it for free.)