Mick Rippon invited me to take just one drum loop sample and make something of it. I liked the challenge, and decided to stretch as much as I could to get something that resembled both ‘art’ and ‘music’. Whether or not I achieved that is open to debate, but for education purposes there is much on display here:
Using a combo of traditional tracking commands, native VST effects and (importantly) LFOs I’ve aimed to make something textural that can evolve and fold over a long time. This is a CPU heavy approach, so some of you may need to increase your latency for proper playback. Please feel free to use this or parts of this in your own music.
A good way to learn what is going on here is to solo each track and peel back the layers of effects by turning the off (and then on again). Also, the loop is beatsynced, so changing the bpm of the song will totally change the sound here.
Be sure that the file stored is a rns file
Some donwload manager download it is a zip, don’t know why but I had the same initial problem
Saying that it has to store it as a rns file solved the problem here
Thanks for the feedback everyone, I’m not sure what that error is all about? Works fine here on my 1.9? Anyone else? Could be a hosting issue.
Now for a quick explanation on the slicing techniques:
The break is beat-synced, which makes even slicing easy.
EX (in this case E1, E2, E3) is a retrigger pattern effect in the volume and/or pan column. This re-plays the sample every sub-beat (tick): E1 is every tick, E2 every second and so on.
As above with 0EXX in the effect column.
BX is backward: B0 is reverse sample audio, while B1 switches back the other way. Cool eh?
09XX is worth learning properly as a pattern effect, so go look it up in the wiki. You can use it to play the sample from different positions.
The above techniques achieve most of the sounds in the song, but to get them sounding great/magical you’ve really got to get into filtering, parameter automations, and dub-atmosphere techniques. So get into each channel and look at what I’ve done!
With drones if you repeat any sampling at a fast enough speed you get oscillation - to make that sound ‘useful’ get into filtering the tone. The narrower the better. You could render that drone down and use it as an instrument, or keep it slicing and change the speed to get pitch changes.
Mp3 is not as fun as XRNS in this case. There is a lot of RND LFO action to keep this interesting play after play. It’s only one pattern long, all native effects.
Well done.
win rar is opening the song up as an xml file then the sample data in a seperate folder