Ok so here’s my question. In horizontal DAWs, we can position a sample in a way that a peak visually aligns with the start of a line in the grid. example:
and i want the slice to play exactly at say line 08 on my pattern. so i want the part that comes before that slice to trigger in a position that I dont know exactly where, but it’s the position that makes it possible that my slice is played exactly at line 8.
I know i can add 2 slices and make the first one be stretched to 8 lines and play the first one at line 1 and the second one (my desired one) at line 8. but that won’t do it for me. i want nothing to be stretched.
i don’t know if I made myself clear, but I hope so.
Instead of stretching the first slice or sample, just add some silence at the beginning, then trim it down to a known time or beat length. Sometimes it’s helpful to reverse the sample when calculating the length.
That’s what I often do with swells, risers, backwards percussion hits and transitional effects. Then it is trivially easy to place them on the correct line. The whole process is quite quick when you have the hot keys down.
I don’t typically work with slices, so it may be necessary to destructively render the slices to individual samples within a drum kit first. This generally gives more flexibility in any case
wow that’s quite a good workaround! thank you so much, i guess i’d never think of that myself, what a shame haha
anyways if anyone knows a tool that achieves that or another way of doing it, let me know
You know your songs LPB (lines per beat) setting so you can figure out where to place the sample so it lines up.
If that is to much trial and error for you, to calculate where to put on which line, with awkward length sounds, you can simply adjust the length of the sound so it starts and ends on a beat. You can set the snap settings in the sample editor to fit your needs;
Using a lpb of 4 in this particular song, the length equals to exactly 16 lines, so with a pattern length of 64, you can put the note event on 48 in the pattern before.
What I do lately is just render to sample the specific sound I want to reverse in the pattern editor to a set amount of pattern lines so the render already has the correct length for easy calculating the reverse.
Thanks for the detailed answer!
Actually, your approach is what I already do when I’m making my own risers by reversing crashes etc. The problem is when I have a riser + normal crash in the same sample, and I want to slice it exactly where the riser ends and the crash starts, and then play the whole sample (boths slices) in a way that the second slice is played exactly at a given beat.
Then I think I’ll have to use the solution @slujr cleverly pointed out, which is adding silence to the start of the sample until it reaches a length that I can then chop to the snapping grid.
