practical examples of why to use lfo in sample based beats

can anyone give me some examples of where they use the LFO to modulate something in their sample based boom bap beats?

what do you use this for within your mpc? what is a good thing i could start off with to actually see what its doing? i have heard of people applying it to a hihat or something to make it more live sounding, does the mpc do this well? i guess i dont really know much about lfo's and modulation other than some abstract examples, ie, an lfo is a low frequency oscilator so it makes a sound "wobble" in tune with the frequency. i dont really know the first place to use this in my beats though.

please keep in mind that im exclusively making sample based beats, so no keyboards or anything like that for me, would i benefit from learning how to use the LFO?

does anyone have a beat they used it on that you could post so i could listen to it?

does anyone use this in every one of their beats, or is it more of a as its needed type thing?

LFO is good for giving a sound some motion/movement. Nice on strings or synths.

In samplebased hiphop you don't hear it very often.

And with a lot of people only using vst presets, most don't even know they using lfo.

One of the most important concepts of contemporary electronic music. You should definitely get to know it. Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-frequency_oscillation#Uses

there are even some examples on the right side of the page.

I use em quite often..

LFO is just an automatic modifying of some parameter, as if you manually were to tweak a setting at a specific rate.

controlling volume, it's often alternatively called tremolo. pitch, vibrato. (at least with a sine or triangle LFO shape)


I'd say it's useful to learn to use it, so just try it out in some beats, see what it can do.

I don't do sample-based stuff, so I can't talk in that respect, but I do use LFOs a lot in my music, mostly as a fundamental element of synthesizing.

I'm on a 2000 so no LFO inside the MPC for me bu I've used it on software samplers sometimes.


Use it on filter frequency for a kind of wahwah FX.
Use it on the volume for tremolo effect
Use it on pitch for a vibrato effect


example of LFO on a filter
http://www.divshare.com/download/10245674-9bc


peace

I often use LFO=>Pitch AND Filter on some of my chops, playing around with delay and rate tempo (quarter, 8th and so on are easy to calculate if you crack a bit your math).

It's a sort of tempo-synced brake effect I'm after so I stick to saw-down wave but a whole lot of interesting effects are achievable through the use of all the combinations of waveform, rate/delay and target parameters.

PEACE

you can modulate the A, D, S or R of an envelope with a linear LFO to produce curved ADSR sections (which might not otherwise be an option on your synth).
For example, if your synth does the Decay as a straight, linear decrease of volume, and you modulate that with an LFO.. when the note begins to decay it might have a short decay, but as the note contines to decay the decay itself gets longer, producing a curve. Very useful for tight control when creating kick drums, for example. You could do the same for pitch modulation if you also have pitch envelopes, or multiple linear lfos.
That said, i dunno if the mpc lets you modulate the ADSR values.. but if so, that's one thing to do with it..

You can get stuff to kinda sound like a tape... You can bring out the highhats in a way too... You can really mess up a sound too.. I used to use LFOs wuize exessivley a while back (MPC 2500) still do sometimes.. But way more subtile..

Yeah... Experiment.

great to use when layering a samples as well...

for example when layered a sample thats lowpassed with one thats high passed you can use the lfo do automatically adjust things like volume/pan/etc to give it more motion, like said earlier

Thanks for this thread damien
I too was experimenting with the LFO on samples since I got monotribe and its **** cool. Some will say motion, but to me its more like a still pic with motion lines like characters charging in a Manga book

lfo with pan and filter on long samples are pretty cool.. you can do some awkard stereo widening with subtle use of the depth and rate of lfos.. with the same sample layered twice but each pad/sample has slighty diff lfo settings..

You can use an LFO to create a faux gate.

i use it for muting the kick and snare of a sample, setting a square wave with 1/4 rate and level 100 or the same tremolo effect can be cool with a bass sample at different rate like 1/2