Here’s my method for cutting up breaks in Renoise, using Kontakt.
First of all load a nicely trimmed loop into Renoise.
Then put the ‘Beat Sync’ function on the loop to get it matching the BPM of your track and put the loop into your pattern.
You then want to highlight how ever many bars of this loop you want to cut up. Let’s say for example you are making a Drum’n’Bass track of 175bpm at speed 3 and the loop is a 4 bar loop.
So you’ve highlighted the whole 4 bar loop, and in this case that will be 64 lines.
Then right click on the highlighted section and choose 'Render Selection to Sample. This will record the 4 bar loop to a new sample slot and the new sample will obviously be at 175bpm (or whatever the speed of your song is). Make sure that when you render a selection like this you always diables any effects from the channel that you are dealing with and also the Master Channel. You want to record it dry so that you can then apply the effects afterwards.
Ok, so now you have a loop that is in the same speed of your song. Save this in the same directory as the original sample of you like and I usually just add on the BPM to the new version name when saving. For example, the original may have been called Amen.wav and I’ll save the new loop as Amen_175bpm.wav
Now that the new loop is saved, you want to bring up an instance of Kontakt. Onced loaded up, select ‘New Instrument’ to call up a blank instrument. Then clcik ‘Edit’ and then the ‘Mapping Editor’ button.
You then want to locate your new loop and drag it onto C1 on the keyboard.
Now click ‘Loop Editor’ and below the keyboard the loop will appear.
Select ‘Command’ and then ‘Slice Sample’.
This turns Kontakt into a Recycle style device.
Move the ‘Slicer Sens’ to adjust the sensitivity of your beat cuts.
You can click ‘Add’ to put some in or if you select ‘Rem’ you can then hover over the slice markers and remove them with a click.
In the bottom right corner of the sample window you cut zoom in and out, which is great for getting cuts exact.
Ok so when you are happy with your slices you can click ‘Close’ just above the sample window on the right to close the Slice Mode.
Then hit ‘Command’ again and choose ‘Expand Slices to Groups’.
In the pop up window that comes up you want to select C" as your ‘Mapping Base Key’ and personally I don’t touch anything else.
Then click ‘Expand’. A Save feature will come up allowing you to save the midi file, which is great for Cubas etc but currently isn’t much use in Renoise so I usually click Cancel straight away.
You have now cut up your loop and each hit is perfectly in time with your song’s BPM!!
And of course you can then apply all of Kontaks effects etc to each hit or the whole loop. Just pitching down the whole loop a little usually sounds great.
They don’t call me the Breakbeat Scientist for nothing!!!
ENJOY!!!