Dirty beats tips?

It may sound strange, but I feel my rhythms are very clean in the 2000xl, at least for what I would like to achieve. While shopping for an s900 / 950, I'd like to know if you have any tips for making grittier, dirtier beats using only the 2000xl.


Something that has worked for me a bit is sampling faster, although I feel that my drums lose some power with it. Another tip is the machine's own 12-bit resample. Its processing is quite slow but it has its magic.

Do you know of any other ways to get closer to that gritty sound of the s950?

Greetings bros!

Honestly... chasing the S900/S950 "that sound" genie is probably not worth your time. If you're looking to learn it for what it is, cool... but most folks I see get an older sampler for "LoFi"... and then hate it. They are a lot of work to use, maintain, and keep fed with samples, and there are a lot of plugins and off board effects that can deliver you dirt without the headaches. At that point I'd just say check out something more modern like the Teenage Engineering PO-33 Knock Out, it's 8-bit, has a whole 40 seconds of sample time, and can deliver as much dirt as an S900 or S950 with much more modern workflow sensibilities and at a much more reasonable cost.

That said, if you really do want to chase that dragon, then I'd say start learning the art form for what it means to sample with restricted memory, pitching recordings in on the way up, and changing your sample frequency. Take what you've got today, and see how much of a full song you can make with 13 (26 even) seconds of sample time. If you can stand it, and like the restrictions, sure the sky is the limit on these beauties... but if you're just going to bounce a sample to an S900/S950, and play it back as is, you're really not going to get "that sound".

Agree there’s a lot of cheapish ways to get that sound. Maybe even try the rx950 vst when mixing your tracks in the daw. It’s like 20 bucks I think. Even a few 950 owners said it was close enough for them.

I know how the gear lust goes, but honestly most of the vintage gear I had I ended up selling besides a few effects racks.

1. Sample choice.
2. Use a relative high rec gain (find the sweetspot. depending on the samlple this is not always the same setting but the more you play with it the easier it gets to know how far you can go without completly distort the sample)
3. You already sampled in at higher pitch so thats nothing new. Don't stick with the 'well known 45 to 33' range. Try other pitches (for example +12 semitones) and see what it sound like.
4. Use the LoPass Filter on the 2000 to roll off some of the high frequencies. Sounds dull now? Then you went too far or didn't raise the Resonance slighty

peace

peterpiper wrote:1. Sample choice.
2. Use a relative high rec gain (find the sweetspot. depending on the samlple this is not always the same setting but the more you play with it the easier it gets to know how far you can go without completly distort the sample)
3. You already sampled in at higher pitch so thats nothing new. Don't stick with the 'well known 45 to 33' range. Try other pitches (for example +12 semitones) and see what it sound like.
4. Use the LoPass Filter on the 2000 to roll off some of the high frequencies. Sounds dull now? Then you went too far or didn't raise the Resonance slighty

peace

All of this...

record to cassette tape and resample

use an analog mixer for gain staging & eq

modulation pedals & compression



edit: my bad, i didn't see this was about getting that "950" sound, i thought it was getting dirtier beats in general. i got a few effects pieces that do things like bit crushing & a casio sk-1 that's not bad for dirtying up things, there's cheap alternatives out there.