making a sample the right length...

hey heres my problem. I have a perfect sample i want to use. its a guitar loop. How can i make it so that its is exactly 2 bars long? Im guessing with time stretch right? I use sound forge can any one tell me how i can do this. Also how many secs is two bars??

Play the loop and tap tempo, get the tempo as close as you can get it. Then adjust it from there. Depending on how long the loop is, if it's too long, I don't think you can reduce it to only 2 bars. You just have to experiment. I have a great time stretch plugin called Serato Pitch N' Time, but I can't vouch for any others.

wait what is tap tempo? sorry but im not familiar with the term?? Also isnt there another way i can do it with out messing with the tempo of the sequence????

It's that little white button that says tap tempo/note repeat. When you play the loop, just tap the tempo button to the tempo of the loop. That will give you approximately the beats per minute. You need to adjust the beats per minute to match the beats per minute (tempo) of your loop. From there you can try to set the loop to 2 or 4 bars, or whatever.

timestretch in soundforge or cool edit. Thats probably the easiest way.

im confused as hell about this timestretch thing... i just ordered my mpc1000, and it hasnt actually arrived yet, but i know one of the features it doesnt have is the timestretch.

im making the jump from software (fruity loops) to hardware (the 1000 ofcourse) and i know in fruity loops the time stretch just fitted the tempo's together (so the snares hit at the same time). i just dont get how u would do this using cool edit or sound forge... someone put me on to save me the heartache when my machine gets here

If you have a perfect guitar loop just set the loop on the sequence and fool around with the tempo until you make the loop complete perfectly.

Summary:
1) if you don't have a tempo set already, change the tempo of the sequence to match the sample.
2) but if your tempo is fixed, you can either:
a) retune (transpose) the sample - but that will change the Tuning too.
b) Timestretch it. If you don't have a good audio editor already, I recommend Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) which is totally free. They call it "change tempo":
- find the Tempo of the original loop by changing the MPC1000 tempo (as in step 1). That's the "BPM From" figure
- enter your desired BPM in "To":
It won't work perfectly first time, but try, try again!