break chopping, ghost hits?

I am wondering how you guys chop breaks and deal with the small little hits.. For example, if a snare hit is quickly followed by a hi hat, the snare hasn't quite finished decaying. So just chopping the snare to the hihat produces a very truncated sound...

It occurred to me that if I sped the break up to the tempo I want to work at (I'm making jungle), then the hihat hit would fall on an 8th, more or less, and so the truncated snare sample would play out fully and be followed by another sample, leaving basically no silence in between, but the tail of the snare would still not be heard..

wondering how you guys go about dealing with this type of thing

If a snare tail gets clipped, the first option for me would be to dump it and use a different one, if available. Beyond (or in addition to) that, options include:

* chop it in Recycle or similar where you can add additional release

*splice the tail from another snare sample (preferably from the same break)

* create your own snare tail by chopping a very small segment off the end of your clipped snare, shave plenty of attack and decay from it and use the sequencer to play that small segment multiple times at gradually decreasing velocities (the attack and decay settings will help blend each instance of the chop). This is covered in my 'Beat Making on the MPC' book

Or just do something similar in an audio editor using copy/paste and various ADSR settings. Also use timestretching to help extend the chop in the first place.

Cop Eddie Bazil's book "the art of drum layering" for lots of useful tips on chopping, merging, joining and layering samples.

Frankenstein Snare sounds like a super idea, i got to a try that

Cheers for making jungle

Still waiting for a tutorial on how you're putting your programs together :p or even get my hands on one so I can study the chops, hint hint.

I'm hoping to someday do something similar, but at the moment it looks like I'll be playing the beats with my e-kit, rather than fingers. Between the time it'd take to improve my chops, and the growing rsi pains I get I can only dream of fingerdrumming this stuff. Using sticks is still an option tho.

When I do that, or chop the whole snare, the hihat is heard and isn't in time with the rest of the beat (why I was considering with speeding it up so the hihat lands in time)

innovine wrote:When I do that, or chop the whole snare, the hihat is heard and isn't in time with the rest of the beat (why I was considering with speeding it up so the hihat lands in time)

I'd suggest getting the break in time with sequence BEFORE actually chopping it. Time-stretch/Pitch it properly so that the drums loop together with your main sample, THEN go for the chopchop...

PEACE

Chop in smaller increments.. For example, if you are chopping in 1/4th and get a hi hat in the tail of the snare, chop in 1/8th to remove the hat.. Now like you said, the decay of the snare is not complete, and might sound truncated, so Layer it with another snare that has a complete decay and kind of use the Layered-Snare as a reverb decay. Hope that makes sense.

well I sometimes take a copy of the same snare and put it in reverse to play right when the snare ends.. but the reverse one you don't let it play all the way through... you need it to decay in volume.. but then if you put your high hat sound where it should actually be, you can sort of mask the joint you made between the snare sounds. I also like to pitch down a little bit to make it a little bit longer.


Another trick I use is I take another snare sound or even the same one, and I run it through a reverb but turn the dry clean sound off.. so you only have the result of the reverb.. and play that with the snare to make a fake tail.


Another thing that I do is I try if possible to find a gap between drum hits like for example between the high hat and the next kick, and use that "air" to fill in gaps.. use the attack and decay so it rolls smoothly.. then maybe turn it down a bit in volume... sometimes it can be cool to play that air like a rhythmic part of the drum pattern.


After all that stuff is done, I try to run all those sounds through some sort of compressor to smash it all together.



I did a dnb song once or twice:



that was a flip of the spy vs spy game on the nintendo.

I actually spun that at a set I did last year at comiccon

you just need to apply reverb to the snare