How to chop multiple samples more or less exactly the same?

Hi, new user here. I have a multi-track drum beat I’d like to chop and rearrange as if it was a single track. It’s a drum break and 2 drum machines, with the drum machine instruments each on their own tracks. I could render it as a single track, but I’d like to save the mixing for later. Not everything is precisely quantized, otherwise I could chop everything along the grid.

Here’s what I’ve been doing so far: I rendered the break and the main kick/snare from one of the drum machines into a stereo track, with the break and kick/snare hard panned, then I collapsed it to mono (so it’s not annoying to listen to), and I chopped/rearranged that. This way I can separate it back out to 2 mono tracks for mixing later. Works pretty well. But now I have the tom and hat tracks to chop the same as the break/kick/snare track. I’m thinking if I chop them the same, then I could just copy the sequence to the new tracks, then assign the relevant samples to those tracks.

I think what would work is if I could view the time length of each chopped sample, then I could apply that each new sample. So for example, say the first chopped sample is 1.023 seconds long, then I could import a new sample, slice it at 1.023 seconds, and so on. But I’m not seeing that view.

Does it make sense what I’m trying to do? Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

There’s a possible work-around that’s a but tedious.

  • Render everything to a new sample.
  • Go to that new sample and slice it up
  • Here’s the hack: For each of the individual tracks, select the sample, go back to that new rendered (and sliced) sample
  • Select the entire sample and set silence the selection (it’s an option in the sample editor
  • Now copy into the single-instrument sample you copied
  • The sample should have kept the slice points
  • render the slices to wavs or to a new instrument or something

It’s tedious but it’s so far the only way I’ve found to maintain a set of slice points for different samples.

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This tool might be useful for you

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Ah cool, thanks for the tip James. Tried it out real quick, seems to do the trick. I’ll have to give that tool a try too, thanks for pointing it out OopsIFly.

very cool.

That’s a cool trick! Didn’t know the slice markers could be copied in that fashion. Thanks

On a somewhat related note, I wish there was a good command line tool for slicing loops, because I want to do some large batches of breakbeat chopping.

Maybe sox would be a good alternative for batch splitting.

SoX - Sound eXchange | HomePage (sourceforge.net)