A certain audio/midi sequencing feature, does it exist?

Okay this is going to be a naive post because in all likelihood this exists and is really obvious, but my experience is limited to fl studio and a small dabbling with other tools. First some back story to explain my thought process on this:

In the last few months I started trying to cut up and sequence breakbeats for the first time. Nothing revolutionary, i just wanted to be able to do those kinds of drums if i wanted to. No need for anti-amen inflammation like that other thread thank you.

I saw some video tutorial about how to do it in the fruity slicer, followed the instructions, achieved decent results. That's fine.

Then one day last week I decided to just go it by hand in audacity, taking an Amen, actually one of the ones posted in that small zip file in the recent amen thread, and just copy and paste hits one after another in new combinations. I liked the way in audacity 2.6 (not the newer beta apprently) you can paste on any location of the track after the already-there audio and it will automatically place the pasted slice directly at the end of the track audio, to achieve easy seamlessness.

I liked this so much that I thought, well damn, wouldn't it be nice if instead of having to constantly copy-c and copy-v, if i could just assign each slice to a midi key and when i press that key it performs an 'insert slice at end of track' operation. Now audacity doesn't seem to support any midi so that was impossible. I then thought of the fruity slicer. It always bothered me how when you initially slice a beat and it spreads it across the keys, each hit is quantized precisely to its proper length to retain the rhythm of the break as a whole, but as soon as you erase and start drawing new notes you are limited to the grid selection or i guess groove files which i have no way to create.

So then my search was on to find a way in the slicer to have a 'retain note length for each hit' option, and could find nothing... so my request is basically... either or, a way to do this specifically in fl slicer, or even better an audio editor or some environment that allows me to assign slices to midi AND paste to end of an audio track upon pressing that key.

I looked on google, spent many hours searching a variety of word combinations that seemed promising and nothing seemed to do it. What i need are people who are experienced in other environments who would just plain know. The closest I found was some obscure reference in a really old version of cubase's manual that said it had a 'retain note length' option, but with no explanation or illustration of how this functions. Thanks in advance.

i don't know fruityloops

but look at:

ReCycle!

Liveslice

Well i've played with Recycle but as far as I can tell it's not a sequencer of any kind, it just cuts your breaks for you and does some transient shaping and filtering if you want? possibly you can rearrange the breaks within it but I haven't even figured that out, but I don't think you are meant to, whether it's possible or not. Either way it doesn't satisfy what I'm after. I've tried Liveslice before but found it pretty obtuse... I think it could only cut in 16 segments or multiples of 4? Maybe it was a limitation of the demo, but still it didn't seem like quite what I'm after. I will look more deeply into both though.. liveslice might just be it, possibly, and I don't know how to use it.. maaaybe. I will see. Thank you so far.

  Adjective said:

ReCycle!

boom.

also there is a drum sequencer in ableton which you can play the hits on keyboard.

i.e.

kick - c#2

snare - d#2

then when you've seuqenced the drums you can assign keyboard shortcuts ect;

nah I guess I wasn't being clear.. I know how to midi sequence slices in ableton and FL and so on. What I'm specifically after is a way to keep the relative length of each hit throughout the sequence, represented by the length of the drawn midi note in the piano roll.. a way to lock that note length for each separate note, for it to keep track of each separately, so when i press c4# and its a small hi hat, it only pastes in a tiny hi hat slice of midi, not, say, a quarter of a bar or whatever the piano roll resolution is set to. Or if we can somehow forgo midi completely and have a program where I can set up a command like "if I press c4, bd.wav is pasted at the end of the audio track"

i guess it's the equivalent of step recording, but on an audio arrange track? or just step recording in whatever midi program but where the midi note sizes are remembered. it seems so simple, it has to be possible...

  Polymershapes said:

nah I guess I wasn't being clear.. I know how to midi sequence slices in ableton and FL and so on. What I'm specifically after is a way to keep the relative length of each hit throughout the sequence, represented by the length of the drawn midi note in the piano roll.. a way to lock that note length for each separate note, for it to keep track of each separately, so when i press c4# and its a small hi hat, it only pastes in a tiny hi hat slice of midi, not, say, a quarter of a bar or whatever the piano roll resolution is set to. Or if we can somehow forgo midi completely and have a program where I can set up a command like "if I press c4, bd.wav is pasted at the end of the audio track"

 

i guess it's the equivalent of step recording, but on an audio arrange track? or just step recording in whatever midi program but where the midi note sizes are remembered. it seems so simple, it has to be possible...

its actually not simple... youd have to have your sampler sending length data to the DAW, and then the DAW would have to calculate the midi region length etc. and if its a 3rd party plugin, then its even more tricky.

if you absolutely want to see the length of a sample, than Id say sequence with audio files.

or, you could use your ear... make a long midi note, and start shortening it, until you hear the sound being chopped off at the end.

im not sure exactly why you want to see the length... do you plan on also shortening the midi note, so the drum can be more staccato and short? if not, and you just want to be sure that the entire hit is being played, then samplers have a feature called "one shot" triggering. when it receives a note on message... it will play the entire segment of the sample assigned to that note.

.rex files do this, the REX player for Reason automatically changes the note data based on the length of the region for you. I don't know of anything else that does though..

  Polymershapes said:

nah I guess I wasn't being clear.. What I'm specifically after is a way to keep the relative length of each hit throughout the sequence, represented by the length of the drawn midi note in the piano roll.. a way to lock that note length for each separate note, for it to keep track of each separately, so when i press c4# and its a small hi hat, it only pastes in a tiny hi hat slice of midi, not, say, a quarter of a bar or whatever the piano roll resolution is set to.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, Logic will do that with the EXS24. However long you hold the note for, that's how long it'll record for, regardless of what resolution you matrix editor (piano roll) is set to. The only thing you have to make sure is that when you created the sampler instrument you have each hit's "One Hit" deselected. When "One Hit" is selected, whenever a sample is triggered it will play the whole sample, regardless of how long the actual note length is.

  Kcinsu said:

its actually not simple... youd have to have your sampler sending length data to the DAW, and then the DAW would have to calculate the midi region length etc. and if its a 3rd party plugin, then its even more tricky.

 

if you absolutely want to see the length of a sample, than Id say sequence with audio files.

 

or, you could use your ear... make a long midi note, and start shortening it, until you hear the sound being chopped off at the end.

 

im not sure exactly why you want to see the length... do you plan on also shortening the midi note, so the drum can be more staccato and short? if not, and you just want to be sure that the entire hit is being played, then samplers have a feature called "one shot" triggering. when it receives a note on message... it will play the entire segment of the sample assigned to that note.

Fruity slicer, when it first slices and spread across the keys, "normal" slice mode, each midi note is the correct length for each individual hit. I don't know why the daw can't 'remember' that length throughout the sequence. Even when I turn the 'snap' to 'none', and try to step record a sequence, it makes each hit the smallest ppq size instead of the length of the original hit which it was at first able to calculate just fine.

I agree that audio files would be best for this. In that case is it at all possible to "step record" a digital audio file instead of real time record? Not sure why in the digital realm we have to keep pretending we're dealing with a running tape. From a sampler I want to be able to play one note, it records that into an audio track, immediately pauses the track, sample accurate, and waits for me to play another note for it to record again. Should be entirely possible in the digital realm unless I'm seriously misinformed, which I might in fact be. My imagination is my source of information.

I didn't plan on shortening or making the drums staccato, in fact that's precisely what I don't want to happen, I want the hit to play its full length and I don't want the next one to overlap its tail but to start at the very end of it to the original flow of the break in there.

The one-shot triggering is indeed what I want to happen, I just need a way to make sure that the next note won't overlap it or cut off the previous, but be placed exactly at the end.

  Quote

.rex files do this, the REX player for Reason automatically changes the note data based on the length of the region for you. I don't know of anything else that does though..

I understand it can generate an original midi file of the loop with the correct lengths. Fruity slicer can do this too, albeit a bit more crudely. However, once generated, unless I want to again just be limited to copying and pasting these exact lengths, I can't just "play in" the slices at these originally generated lengths... or can I? Is there something special about rex files that allows this? I will have to try it, I haven't yet.

  Quote

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, Logic will do that with the EXS24. However long you hold the note for, that's how long it'll record for, regardless of what resolution you matrix editor (piano roll) is set to. The only thing you have to make sure is that when you created the sampler instrument you have each hit's "One Hit" deselected. When "One Hit" is selected, whenever a sample is triggered it will play the whole sample, regardless of how long the actual note length is.

That is pretty much just what I want to happen. Unfortunately I am pc-only. But when you say "that's how long it will record for" do you mean real-time record, or step record? if step record then this may indeed be the answer. And it would be likely some pc-daw would have the same functionality. It just doesn't seem to work in fruity, but it might just be a limitation of the slicer. I need to try a sampler plugin with one shot mode.

Thanks all for the new advice.. lots of new stuff to try out. I hope I don't seem too obsessed.. it's just that conceptually it seems so simple to me that it's bothering me I can't get a straight solution. I have the itch of curiosity

  Polymershapes said:

I understand it can generate an original midi file of the loop with the correct lengths. Fruity slicer can do this too, albeit a bit more crudely. However, once generated, unless I want to again just be limited to copying and pasting these exact lengths, I can't just "play in" the slices at these originally generated lengths... or can I? Is there something special about rex files that allows this? I will have to try it, I haven't yet.

Yes, you can, you just play a midi keyboard into Reason with the REX player as the active instrument and it will play them at the assigned lengths.

  ten fingers ten toes said:

  Polymershapes said:

I understand it can generate an original midi file of the loop with the correct lengths. Fruity slicer can do this too, albeit a bit more crudely. However, once generated, unless I want to again just be limited to copying and pasting these exact lengths, I can't just "play in" the slices at these originally generated lengths... or can I? Is there something special about rex files that allows this? I will have to try it, I haven't yet.

 

Yes, you can, you just play a midi keyboard into Reason with the REX player as the active instrument and it will play them at the assigned lengths.

Well then... that solves that. The midi side anyway. Only in Reason, that you know of? Beautiful. Thank you very much...

I still want there to be a way to do this in just audio though. Maybe it could be done by writing macros for an editor or something? That would be shit to set up... eh, I search on.

Only in Reason that I know of, I don't even use Reason at all I just remember playing with a friends copy and liking the REX player at the time, and noting these very features. I would be surprised though if you can't do just this on some other DAW/Sampler combo.

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=144614

this guy at the liveslice forum has a very similar idea, but with an in depth plan for liveslice integration of it... too bad its old and no one replied to him.

it occurs to me that another way of saying what i want to happen in terms of midi is for snap to be set to the end of the previous slice, in liveslice

I don't understand why you don't just split up the waveform manually and save each hit to a different file and then sort those into a sampler with each note being a different hit sample.

I'm pretty sure there's easier ways, but if what you need is a go around, then there you go. Also this way will probably give you more flexibility with the sounds in the long run.

I wrote a program in max/msp to do this for me. Too bad it's rather illegible.

yeah, see.. i know that. i've done that. there's more to what i need if you read carefully. maybe it's just so obvious that it doesn't even register, i'm not sure how else to explain it.

let's say i wanted to do it in a sampler with individual hits like you suggest. map each hit to a different note. it's the sequencing of these hits that i have trouble with. i want to be able to retain the original groove of the drum loop, but on a hit by hit basis, not limited to snap points on a midi grid/piano roll.

if there is a daw with audio recording that can, in a way of speaking, 'step record' an audio track, that would be even better. i'd like to leave midi out of it as much as possible as it seems to make it more complicated.

so ideally, yes, i would load up each hit in a sampler and assign each to a different midi note key.

then i would press 'step record' on an audio track transport. it would wait for me to hit c-4 to record a bassdrum. it would pause recording immediately after that sample plays all the way through, one shot style. then when i press d-4, it'll record the snare from that position, then pause again. etc. that's my fantasy for audio recording. it's pretty much copy/paste functionality controlled by a midi keyboard. maybe there is some volume threshold recording feature that will accomplish this.

I don't see how keeping the relative lengths of the hits would retain any of the loop's "original groove." As soon as you start moving the individual hits around, the original rhythm of the track is oviously gonna go right out the window. Not to mention the cumulative timing errors that are bound to occur with your editing method, unless you're simply re-ordering the hits, and not duplicating any of them...

Why not just create a quantize template from the loop (it's quite easy in Cubase) and sequence the hits via MIDI, if you're concerned about retaining the "feel" of the original loop? Or I guess as Mr. Ten Toes so kindly pointed out, apparently REX does exactly what you are looking for...

Yeah I guess that is the way to go.. I think I didn't fully understand how quantize templates work.. If I make one out of a break, and then paint new notes in the piano roll, it will retain the note lengths for each hit if the template is applied? I always thought it was just for the initial loading of the hits which always seemed pretty pointless.. it would make more sense if it did remember the lengths.

yeah the original rhythm goes out the window, but if you place them in a rhythmically logical way, reordering sections and yes sometimes inserting individual hits, but as long as it comes out in 4x4 at the end of how many bars you're working on it flows okay... i'm not saying just randomly insert hits

in energyXT the sampler has an export button which exports the sliced loop to a midi track in the sequencer (Drag from the button into the sequencer). It retains the length of the slices in the notes so you just need to keep track and it should work out pretty well. I myself am a even slicing kind of guy (no transient detection) so it just works out for me.

just check this then......

http://youtube.com/watch?v=emvqsKsMNso

<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emvqsKsMNso"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emvqsKsMNso" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>