Hit Make
Oct 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Jason Scott Alexander
AS MUCH AS MUSICIANS TODAY ARE BLESSED with cool new audio tools such as Sony Acid, Ableton Live, Spectrasonics Stylus RMX and the like — all of which take the sweat out of working with audio and samples — there's still a huge following of old-school sample-hacks out there who prefer to roll up their sleeves and do some hands-on editing from time to time. Whether you're breaking out the old hardware monsters or using the latest editing applications, you can perform a number of very cool tricks at the sample level that even the fanciest of those newfangled performance-based audio blenders can't muster.
I'll be using the term sample throughout, but you can just as easily call it audio editing. In fact, many of you will probably be editing sections of audio within your DAW or stereo wave editor, not samples within a sampler at all. Whatever your axe of choice, the tips on display aim to resurrect the old-school art of sample editing with the modern tools at your disposal. The results are categorically custom-sounding, edgy and often distinctly quirky but always musical.
MEAN DRUMS
Nothing defines a killer custom beat more than killer custom drum and percussion sounds. Ever wonder where those hip-hop grooves, explosive club-anthem beats and massive trip-hop fusions get their drum fuel? The majority of the time, aside from the magic that's added at the mix process, producers will spend hours sourcing cool material (be it from gear, sample CDs, vinyl or their own samples of real-life percussive sounds) to be methodically layered, grafted, tweaked and torqued later into something whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The payoff? A sound unique to you and your productions.
Composite drum sampling is nothing new. In fact, it's how many of the coolest Akai MPC sounds were made. But how does it differ from stacking drum sounds in your sequencer? Simply, what you're attempting to do is identify several unique component sounds from which you'll design and construct the final sound, paying especially close attention to emphasize only their hallmark qualities, not create a muddy stack. The true art behind compositing drum hits is more akin to building a custom chopper or roadster than it is to layering a cake. Less is often more.
As an example, I recently constructed a custom bass-drum sound for a hip-hop — flavored pop track that was being remixed into a dance crossover with a summer-street-party vibe. I definitely wanted to keep the hip-hop feel, but the original low-keyed kit elements weren't “happy” enough for the new upbeat tempo and arrangement. So the first thing I did was sample three distinctive-sounding elements that I wanted for my composite kick: An original Roland TR-909 kick offered a dirty, aggressive club attack that was thumpy enough to lead the charge on the new four-on-the-floor beat; an old sample I had of a basket-ball hitting a control-room window provided a uniquely tight and boingy body and low end while its natural decay did a cool job of simulating a rap-style Roland TR-808 kick; and a tiny bit of acoustic snare rattle was attached to the end for a cool miked-kit sound. Naturally, stacking these as-is would sound more busy than interesting, so here's where the editing comes in.
First, I trimmed the 909's attack just into the body so that it retained enough of that familiar thud to be recognizable and do its job of punching up the ear. I did the opposite to the basketball, completely removing its attack as it hit the window, because it sounded wimpy and the high frequencies involved would interfere with the 909 attack. To keep everything short and progressive-sounding, I severely ramp-truncated the basketball's tail, making it sound as though I'd muted it with my hand. From there, I affixed the buzzing snare, which I then gave a hard-truncated ending.
The benefit of editing and saving this as a single sample is that you can further apply envelopes, time compression or expansion, and add special effects to the edit as a whole for retriggering. Incidentally, you should try performing similar edits to instrument sounds for cool hybrid basses and leads — perfect for creating those ear-catching hook line sounds in hip-hop.
NIP AND TUCK
Here's a cool quick trick for creating pillowy-sounding drums or swimming loops by carving strategically placed frequency notches into complementing elements and fusing them back together: Working with drum loops this time, I found a few that grooved well together but fought for air in places. Rather than EQ their tracks as a whole, I decided to do some creative cosmetic surgery and liven them up by providing frequency dynamics. In sample view mode, audio-frequency ranges can easily be spotted simply by looking at whether the wave cycle is spread out and loose (low frequency), compressed and fuzzy (mid), or tightly packed and solid-looking (high). Similarly, amplitudes are shown as peaks and valleys.
With the loops all lined up in separately stacked sample-edit windows, I began looking for areas where regions of similar frequency lined up. Artfully, I went about region-selecting low-frequency hits in one loop and notched them down while leaving or emphasizing them in the other loops. For this, you can use either a gain-adjust tool or an offline (that is, AudioSuite) parametric EQ plug-in. Each will yield slightly different-sounding results that can be appealing. What you end up with is an interesting interplay in which elements from one loop weave in and out of another, sewing them together as one. There's no necessary rhyme or reason to what will sound good, so try some really off-the-wall cuts and boosts, and let your ears be the judge.
Using your editor's sample-merge tool, create a single sample from the layers. When you're working on layering individual sounds such as drum hits, Sony's SoundForge has a handy Paste Special > Mix function that allows you to move each element backward or forward in time, often creating further interesting frequency blends. Alternatively, set up various tracks in your DAW, and place the elements on each track. When you're happy, bounce them down to a single sample file that you can use there or import into your sampler.
SELECTIVE STEP REVERSES
Surely, everyone has done the famous Beatles trick on vocals or reversed the odd power chord for some drama. But what happens if you flip around short quantized segments of a continuous sample? Attack transients are typical starting points, though I find they can sound rather contrived. Some of the coolest results are obtained when you work within a sustained sound or just at the point that there's a sudden change in dynamics (on or just a 16th before the beat) and reverse the segment so that the loudest end falls on a downbeat.
With your sample-editor grid set to either eighth or 16th notes, select virtually any portion you like of a rhythmic sample (as if it were slice-quantized to grid size) and reverse it. In my example, I reversed a loop's kick decay so that the initial attack is followed by a very quick upward dynamic that butts into the oncoming upbeat (a beatbox side-stick sound). Somewhat akin to reverse tape delay, carefully picking and choosing where to apply this trick can be an effective way of creating accent. If you repeat this process many times in short steps, you can produce a cool pseudorewind effect on loops and guitars that's locked to the beat — the result sounds far cooler than simply reversing the entire passage as a whole.
EFFECTIVE MEASURES
Tired of all those pulse-width-modulation sweeps, oscillator drops or lowpass filter transitions? Sure, they do the trick nearly every time, but come on — be original! Capturing the wet portion of a processed sound and fiddling with it can provide the same trancey experience while not sounding so cliché.
One thing that I've done is capture long reverb tails and make loops out of them, sometimes beat-cycled and other times looped seamlessly. This can create nice atmospheric sounds that then can be gated in time to the beat. Also, playing around with an EQ setting to emphasize resonant harmonic points during the recording of the sample can add a real sense of tension. The nice thing about that is, the resonance points transpose with the sample. Experiment with other types of effects, also. I've often captured the wet portion of a soft flanged drum loop and manually chopped it up as a cool alternative to a drum break. Also, pitch-shifted down or time-expanded out, the wet portion of a phased groove can act as a dreamy, slow-moving backbeat to the main driving rhythm — ideal for pop-radio-style remixes.
SWING/SHUFFLE FAKE-OUT
This is a refreshing alternative to applying boring old time-based swing to a drum groove, and it's simple as pie to do. As an example, I have a one-bar disco loop in which the open hi-hats stereotypically fall squarely on the off beats. By selecting the first and third hats and changing their perceived dynamic placement, I can fake a pseudo-swing/shuffle. The dynamics tool of choice? A limiter.
On the first hat, I really hard-limit with a — 35dB threshold to squash the dynamic range while dialing in a pretty high attack that allows the “crack” of the hat opening up to be emphasized. A short release time ensures that the tail volume swells to match up with the next hit. I did the same with the third hi-hat, this time choosing slightly different threshold and attack times for variation to the groove. Gain-adjust each edit to suit, and apply fades if necessary to really make the groove lock and sound like it's meant to be.
CHECKSUM
At times, I think of sampling as being even more flexible than synthesis, as you're almost guaranteed the ability to extract whatever it is that you're hearing in your head, no matter how real or surreal, and duplicate it. I'm reminded of a pioneering electronic act I once saw interviewed on TV: When asked what happens to songs that don't make it to its albums, the group's response was (paraphrased, of course), “Every one of our songs makes our albums — those that rock, you dance to; those that suck, we speed up to the point of being noise and use it as a snare-drum sample.” I love that.
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