hperkins1 wrote:Well after having my 2500 for about 3 weeks now, I thought that I would share a experience with you guys as well as give a little feedback!! Well I am sorry to say that I am a bit dissappointed with the "Patch Phrase" part of the 2500... It is truly a ****-shoot, trying to get something to come out ok!
Example: I will take my Fantom X and make a 4 bar loop of lets say a guitar, and the BPM will be set at 80, well I then sample that 4 bar loop into the 2500. Next I go into the trim page and make sure everything is still looping tightly, then I go to chop-->Convert. While in that page it shows that my initial BPM is 164 which isnt right, no problem because I already know the tempo of the loop (80).. Once converted to a PP, the loop sounds choppy, and sometimes it don't even finish out the loop!! I think Akai needs to tweek that out a little bit more so that it can truly be effective. Oh and before I forget, not being able to convert a stero sample into a PP is also limiting, I did the same thing as mentioned above with another 4 bar loop made on the Fantom with panned toms and congas and lost the whole effect once I sampled it into the phantom and converted it to a PP!!
On last thing, I think the should do like my Fantom X and have more than on Continuous Sample track, now that would be fire. Well I hope I haven't rambled on to long, peace! :o
I've had my 2k5 for a few months now and just started messing wiht patched phrase this past week and I Agree, it isn't clean, but that is also a function of understanding how it works as LampDog stated. I'm not certain why Akai felt as though they needed to erinvent the wheel here. They should have just incoporated REX2 file support. Anyway, what I found, just like Recycle, is that percussive sample work best due to the detectable attacks. Choppiness can be handled by not using the Auto function when Choppping the loop and chopping the sample into a fixed number of slices equal to the length of the sample (if that makes sense). If the sample covers four bars at 4/4, chop it in to 16 slices (1 slice per beat). This may not work that great for samples with soft attacks though. This is no different than doing the manual chops. The only thing we get teh advantage of is the decay added when converting to PP. As for the tempo detection, I've had detection that have been dead on for 4/4 4 bars samples, and others that have been way off for the same length and time sig. What I've found to be the best pratice in mt experiementation is to just take whatever tempo the MP detects and adjust by ear. What I end up doing is chopping and converting again, but adjusting the detected tempo up or down depending how early or late the sample is looping when it's a PP. For example, I had a 4/4 4 bar samlpe that was detected at 116 BPM. I chopped into 16 parts (it was mainly percussive, so the chops where rhythmically correct), and then converted usign the detected tempo of 116. I recorded the PP sample in a 4/4/ 4 bar sequence and listened for the loop point. It was looping to early when converted to a patched phrase (the regular sample looped perfectly, so something was going on with the PP conversion). So I chopped again and reduced the tempo a tick and repeated the process. I ended up down to 115.7 BPM and had a perfect PP loop no choppiness and the loop withstood BPM increases up to 200BPM without sounding weird. After that it was garbage though.
I must have overlooked the 1 bar recommendation in the manual, I'll have to try that, although 1 bar ususally gives crazy BPM detection in ReCycle.
