Some help with chopping

alright so im brand new to the sampling method. been composing original shit for bout a year now, decided to add sampling to my production arsenal. ive been filling my head with as much sampling info as i can for the last few days but theres one thing thats got me stumped. i have no idea what im doing chopping wise. let me explain. ill find a hot sample, and ill chop it up but it NEVER sounds smooth. also everytime i try to sample a track with drums im completely thrown off as to how to blend it with my track. another issue im having is time stretching, when i time stretch on my mpc1000, it says original tempo:"" to desired tempo:"". thing is i dont know wtf the original tempo is, is it something i just need to figure out on my own? im not one of those guys who wants to just find a loop and throw some drums over it, i want to compose using chops of samples. can anyone share any tips? ive searched and searched, checked out the stickies as well but im having a real hard time. thhanks for readin

to adjust your chops, just make sure to line up the start and end points, so that they'll easily flow from one to the next and then experiment with 'em.

i time stretch inside of sound forge, i can get the desired tempo because i hear the track already playing in my head, so i just keep fiddling with the tempo till it sounds like it does in my head. i used to use Magix Music Maker, and it had an option where it would find the original tempo for you and then it would show up as w/e the tempo was. idk about any other ways to figure that out.

it's always useful if you have some sort of loop function. If u can make a chop and then play it as a loop, you should be able to tell whether it sounds right.

Chop it at the startpoint of each count/ bar/note flat. check boon doc on youtube and u'll know what I mean.
If u don't know the original bpm u can fill in 100bpm, and set the newtempo as a percentage. (let's say I wont the sample to be 8% slower then u fill in 92bpm in the new tempo field)