chopping related question

Say I've chopped a beat into eight parts, all of these parts vary in length, some of them being veryshort. I want to sequence these chops to play without any gaps. What I want to know is that is it possible to figure out how to do it using the amount of "samples" a chop consists of and the BPM the track plays at. And yes, I know I can speed it up, etc. but that doesn't work in this case because of the short chops and the sloppiness of the original recording.

Thanks.[/i]

Just experiment and play it different ways. The only way it will play without gaps is if you play it like that. Beats won't make themselves.

Beats won't make themselves? Yeah, buddy, I've noticed that in 5+ years.
However, I'm always looking for ways to improve my beatmaking skills and this is one of those times. Sure, I can spend x minutes to get it right, but IN THEORY what I asked should be possible and therefore I made my question.

If you sort out the bpm of the original loop & stick to that when you've chopped it up you should be ok......

However, you say the original is very sloppy & if you are quantizing it you will start putting spaces into it. Things might sound better if, rather than worring about the space, you used a noise gate or play with the envelope of each sound so they all have a bit of space after them & they sound more uniform?!?

This sounds like the kind of thing that would be easier to do in a computer partly because you are working on a big screen. You could even chop little bits of the ambient space in the sample to fill the gaps.

I've got a neat little Mac application called MusicMath OSX which calculates all kinds of things like tempo, delay times & length in samples. Don't know if there is a PC equivalent.

Thanks featherboy, some good tips there. I actually got it to work the old-fashioned way (not using some of the shortest chops though).

like featherboy said its always good to find the bpm of what ur choppin first.. i always loop it, check the bpm and chop next... a good way to stop the gaps i find is to make on chop stop the other, u can come up with crazy combinations..

If you chop it in Recycle, you get the MIDI file of the chops. Import that into your MPC and you have exact time within the loop when each chop should start.

Another method is this: Rather than chopping, write down the exact time of the chops (start and stop time of the chops, from the zone screen where it tells you Start and End point of each chop)

Then DONT chop it. Make 8 copies of the sample, and one at a time, silence out the loop for everything OTHER THAN those start and end times. What this will do (dont know if Im making sense), is it will give you the chop placed perfectly where it belongs in the loop, with silence for everything else. you can layer those on top of each other for perfect replaying of the loop.

Example: make a copy of Sample, call it Sample2. In sample2, silence everything except 0-36,442. Make another copy, Sample3. Silence everythign except 36,442-48,591. Make another copy, Sample 4, and silence everything except 48,591-52,369. When layered on top of each other, thse samples should line up perfectly, and then you can change it up and get funky, cutting out parts of the loop or whatever.

Etc.

Does that make sense?

turn the timing off and get funky with it, how simple can it be. Tic toc i have got to try that, it sounds intresting

The beat's finished (and it's rather funky might I add), so it wasn't a case of me being stuck because I can't chop or something, I just wanted another alternative to meticulously sequencing miniscule sound bits and weird artifacts, one by one, to sound good in the wee hours of the night. (Which I later successfully did.) Obviously I didn't try to get a 120BPM loop to sound fluid chopped at 68BPM. Tictoc, thanks for that. And yeah the note mute off function is integral to having chopped beats sound nice...

I use a similar, but simpler version of TicToc's method to add effects to just specific words or syllables in vocals.
Make a copy of the sample. On one you silence everything apart from the bits you want your reverb or delay on. On the other you just silence those bits. Then send them through different outputs with one going through the effects unit.