I was listening to some music the other day and I heard an amen break that was at the regular pitch but played at way higher speeds (breakcore go figure). I was wondering how this could be accomplished in Renoise. I would assume that slicing the breaks down into individual hits would make it easy, but I usually prefer to use the Sxx samples commands when doing drum breaks just because it feels tighter to me. Any clue?
My preferred method for working with breaks is to add slice markers to each individual hit, and then apply a loop to the tail end of each slice.
This gives me the freedom to play the break at pretty much any tempo without having silent gaps between the hits if I slow it down too much. You can then simply trigger each hit with the appropriate keyzone note (automatically mapped from C#4 and up by default), or by playing the base note C-4 plus 0S01 to play slice 1, 0S02 to play slice 2, and so on.
For an added bonus, when playing the slices via their mapped notes, you can also combine the regular 0Sxx sample offset command to offset within each slice.
Also, if you then take the sliced pattern and put it into a phrase instead of the main pattern editor, you can do even further weird stuff 
Dblue’s method is as good as it gets. I came up with something a bit different recently. I’m not sure if you are after the same effect but I’m a big fan of slicing looped breaks using 0Sxx command as opposed to sequencing one shot slices. Not sure why but there’s something jungley for me about loading up a loop, syncing it and chopping & resequencing using 0S10, 0S20, 0S30 etc. But obviously that way you are limited to a single pitch.
Well not anymore! With this method you can get the same chopping workflow and do some extra cool shit!
How it works: You get a break. Sync it but preferably use a high LPB so that your loop’s length equals to 256 or 512 lines. (In my example I needed to use 64 LPB.) This isn’t strictly necessary but makes chopping the loop more straightforward later. Anyhow, then add slice markers. After that use dblue’s slices to pattern tool. Copy that pattern into a phrase. Turn on autoseek for all slices. Finally get back your project’s LPB to whatever you are normally using and start chopping!
This sounds same as chopping a synced loop but you can do a lot more. You can pitch it up & down as you like, envelope slices individually, effect them individually, add extra one-shot layers over your hits and line them up nicely using volume & delay column, duck your break under your reinforcement kick etc. etc.
I realized I should probably do a blog post about this to illustrate all possibilities but here’s a very rough example that I’ve made on crappy speakers. Hope this helps!
hm. Use a hi-quality external timestretcher/pitchshifter on your breakbeat before starting to rock, and transform it into the pitch and speed you would actually like to use?
Dude, just use Live.
Dude, just use Live.
When you are working with breakbeats, the optimal way to stretch in Live (beats mode) is conceptually similar to the approach explained by dblue:
Usually, you don’t want to apply timestretching to a breatkbeat as you loose a lot of the transients along the way.
Instead, you want to slice it up and loop it - and the best results are always a result of doing this manually.
After some experimentation, I figured out a way to do it. This method is kind of lazy but it works fine for me. You basically create a phrase of your loop at the proper number of lines. Use offset (sxx) to get the sample to sync up with the lines. So if you had a 16 line (aka 1 bar) loop, you would do:
c-4 s00
c-4 s10
c-4 s20
c-4 s30
c-4 s40
c-4 s50
c-4 s60
c-4 s70
c-4 s80
c-4 s90
c-4 sa0
c-4 sb0
c-4 sc0
c-4 sd0
c-4 se0
c-4 sf0
Then when you play back the phrase, the phrase will play at the tempo of your track. Now of course you will get some skipping when you have much slower tempo samples with faster bpms. This will cut out transients to a degree if you aren’t very exact with your phrase offsetting. The higher the resolution (aka the more lines) you make the phrase, the more accuracy you will get.
Yea sorry dblue, I just do not like slices… 