chopping

Help i need to learn some chopping techniques and also about timestretching(?) anyone out in the beautiful land of mpcer's can help me out, i'll greatly appreciate it! Also how can make dope basslines from samples? ex.(pete rock, premo, jaydee)

as far as basslines, try taking a sample, and filtering out everything but the bass, and then compressing the bass, and then re-normalize it.
Dj Premiere does this a lot, for a reference listen to Jay-Z's a million and 1 questions. the bassline is the Piano sample, just filtered so its bass, and then chopped and layered differently then the piano loop used as the :main: loop.

another is "feeling it" by jay z, the sample is from a song called "pastures" (by ahmad jamal I think) and its another example of this, he takes the main loop from the beginning and also filters the loop to bass and uses it as a bassline. I do it quite often, and it works better for some samples then others. horns dont work well, but a piano does. after a while you can figure out from the sample if it wil or wont work like this.

I actually do that sometimes also with my own pianos loops I create on my triton.

definitly the key to that old school sound- as doing this often means some of the original harmonics still remain in the bass sound giving it character...i mean ive tried to recreate similar sounds with just bass sounds and they never sound quite right which i believe is due to the bass being too pure and not having any/many harmonics above the root- using a piano sample for bass will bring in some nice overtones, guitars are cool too- just remember to reenvelope them...

greg

Foo,

I’m familiar with what you’re saying about compressing a sample so that its just the bassline…and I actually believe Pete Rock does this a lot…where his baselines are songs just compressed down….BUT to do this, don’t you need an external compressor? I don’t think these guys are just turning down the filter on the MPC to like 22 or something. So is that what you mean….using an external compressor to do this?. ..

"as far as basslines, try taking a sample, and filtering out everything but the bass, and then compressing the bass, and then re-normalize it."

Compression and normailzation are two different things. I think some of you try to make things harder than they really are. If you simply filter out the highs on the mpc and send it to the mixer, you can add more bass to the sample with the eq's.. need more volume, turn up the fader. Need even more bass, then turn up the bass on the turntable mixer before you sample it. If you start getting too much distortion on the low end then you can add the compression. If your not into searching vinyl for basslines, buy yourself a decent keyboard with some good bass sounds. There's no magical keyboard with the greatest bass sounds, so just buy one that you like and use it, or find a sine-wave sample, turn the 16 levels on, and enjoy yourself.
I have a gang of effects in my mixer, mpc, ASR etc, and I barely ever use em.. maybe the reverb in the MPC. I also have compression, gates, and I wish I knew then what I know now.. I would have saved a lot of money, so I'm just trying to save anyone else from making the same mistake.

Roxstar / . .dyrt.trax. .

the reason I say to use a compressor is cuz sometimes, when you've done a filter as I described the sound of the bass overpowers these subtle harmonics you can get with this technique, so compression forces the bass down so that the other harmonics are more pronounced and the bass is compressed, then I normalize it again so that the sample is loud like it used to be.

all normalization does (in a short description) is maximize the data so that the highest peak of it is just below clip, so if you have a sample that has some peaks and highs but the bass is much higher then the rest, the compression "shrinks" the bass sound down closer to the level of the sublte harmonics, then re-normalizing brings the whole sound back up.

I use software, or (when I can get my grimey hands on it) my friends hardware compressor.

Yeah, I use Sound Forge for the technique that Foo spoke about.
Works well for me and my samples so far.

Same here

dubmunkey wrote:remember to reenvelope them...

greg

Reenvelope?