Here’s my approach to creating new breaks from existing ones.
Sorry for the late reply man, works been keeping me busy.
Anyways, I haven’t gotten my hands on a copy of Ableton yet, hoping to soon.Some real great stuff here to work with. Especially the multiband expansion and compression, still in the process of learning about all that stuff but from what I’ve tried so far it’s beefed up the sound of the breaks real nice. I actually started pitching the breaks up in semitones not long before I read your post, before I’d been pitching them arbitrarily and it was screwing up the timings of the hits in the breaks, so they never matched. So I did the math and figured out how to speed up two different tempoed breaks so they match correctly.
My work flow was basically this:
~ Set the tempo
~ Set pattern length to 192 lines, LPB to 24
~Load a break
~ Choose a pitch in semitonesthat fits with the tempo as close as possible, creating an almost perfect loop,using the computer keyboard, [i.e original file played at C4 – play break one octave up at C5 {12 semitones}]
~ Find the corresponding beatsync value that matches that semitones pitch
~ Hit transpose
~ Deselect beatsync[now the break plays 12 semitones up but is positioned at C4]
~ Apply pitch shift plugin to sample effect chain, down pitching in semitones as close to the original pitch as possible without losing clarity particularly on the hi-hats
~ Auto slice
~ Remove slice markers if too many, move if off position[all slices are now transposed and will change in pitch to correspond to song tempo if editing needs to be done at slower tempos}
~ Find the corresponding beatsync value that matches each slices pitch
~ Round the beatsync value of each slice down to even numbers i.e if a snare has a pitch that matches a beatsync value of 7, round it down to 6. Even numbers add up better mathematical.
[I suppose this is like quantizing but I’m not sure]
~ EQ
~ Compress
~ Destructively render slices [each slice can now multilayered with new samples if necessary]
~ Create DSP effects chains
~ Create Modulation effects chains
And that’s pretty much what I’d been doing recently. I don’t know if the way I’m using beatsync would constitute as quantizing or not I just figured that because I’m working with 192 Lines at 24 LPB, that beatsync values which divide into 24 would result in perfect sync. So basically 24 = 1/4, 12 = 1/8, 6 = 1/16 and that way sliced phrases would transition smoothly into one and other.
As for Soul Pride, I’ve stayed away from it this far. May take a look at it and see what my sanity is like by the end :PI read your analysis of Beep Street and listened even closer and heard everything you described. He really is a gifted lad. His arrangement of slices are fantastic, I suppose having a trained background in jazz helps.
I’m pretty certain now I know what my issue is when it comes to constructing new rhythms from old breaks. It’s just inexperience basically. Back to practice I guess 
Heres a quick thing I made about a week or two back. Just some random patterns using mostly single hits chopped out of full breaks, some larger sliced phrases from breaks, and a 303 plugin render down to an instrument. I didn’t finish it or turn it into song, and it’s very kinda janky and unhinged because it’s mainly just noodling around and practicing using lots of different samples together in one track. Couldn’t upload the .xrns file cause it exceeds the upload limit sorry
I got stuck with doing this in Ableton just because I came to Renoise from using Live for about 7 years or so for all my timestretching and generally fucking-things-up needs (main DAW was and is and will be Cubase though, I love it hopelessly 
).
