I shared this on G+, but since at least Mats Bro hadn’t thought if it, I’ll share it here too, maybe others find it useful. We were discussing the 200 breakbeats from ripley, which is sliced in xrni:
I little trick I sometimes use is setting the loop to ping-pong for the slices. This means that if I play the beat at a lower tempo than the original, each slice will play the last (small) part backwards instead if just stopping and leaving a gap in the audio. Of course it starts to sound weird if the tempo is much lower, due to all that backwards playing.
I made an example of the idea here (there are a few problematic slices towards the end, that sound a little to backwards) of the first beat in the pack: ping_pong_breakbeat.xrns
But, yep, this is a great technique in general. I use it all the time when working with slices.
Here’s an old example by me (previously posted in a private area of the forum back in March 2011) where I compare this technique to Ableton Live’s own beat warping. Live is obviously doing a little bit of extra analysis when deciding on the loop points, but it’s essentially the exact same technique to just loop the tail portion of each slice. Best of all, since it’s not ‘real’ time stretching, you do not get any weird smearing or other artifacts, so the attack/transient portion of each slice remains sharp and crystal clear.
Indeed. This is an good old ancient tracker trickery thing, when you needed to save memory by shortening samples. Especially percussions, then using the vol envelope to compensate the volume changes.
Only problem can be some stereosamples where you clearly hear phasing effects switching sides when it ping pongs.