Of Recordings

There are a whole bunch of Buzz tracker machines, but Fuzzpilz UnwieldyTracker is so good I pretty much stopped using all the others. Its features are well-suited to beat slicing, among other things. Beat slicing involves chopping a drum loop into individual sounds and rearranging them to make a new beat. This tutorial will show you how.

We want to take a drum loop, fit it to our song tempo, re-arrange it to make a new beat, and apply different effects to different sounds. This example starts with a drum loop trimmed to 8 beats. If you don’t have one handy, you can use this one (right-click to save):

Example drum loop

UnwieldyTracker may not be included with your Buzz install. If not, go to Fuzzpilz site and install it first. Then we’re ready to go.

1. Set your song tempo to 155 and your TPB to 8. Load the drum loop into the first sample slot. Then add an UnwieldyTracker to your song.

2. Make a pattern for UTrk and set it to 64 ticks long. (Remember we’re at 8 TPB: 8 beats * 8 TPB = 64 ticks.) Add a C-4 in the first row.

3. Start looping your pattern in the sequencer. Barring an amazing coincidence, you’ll notice that the length of your sample does not match the length of your pattern.

4. Look at your pattern and find the column to the left of your note. Put a 0040 in that column.

Your loop will magically fit your song’s tempo. This is the “stretch to fit” column– UTrk will stretch the sample to match the length you specify. In this case, 0040 hex = 64 ticks = 8 beats, so our loop is now 8 beats long. You can now change the song tempo and the UTrk will automatically stretch the loop to fit.

5. Find the column to the left of the stretch to fit column. Put a number in every fourth row: 0000 in row 0, 1000 in row 4, 2000 in row 3, and so on up to F000 in row 60. (Remember that A-F come after 0-9 in trackers.)

6. Watch the position line while you listen to your loop. When you hear a key beat that you want to steal, make a note of the number in that same row. In my example loop, there’s a crash on 0000, a snare on 2000 and 6000, a kick drum on 5000 and 8000, etc.

7. The numbers we just added are in the “offset” column. By rearranging the numbers in this column, we can rearrange the beats in the loop. Here I’ve made a simple pattern using the kick at 8000 and the snare at 6000. The note offs prevent the loop from continuing past the beat we want to extract.

8. In our example loop, the snare was a hair behind the beat, so it doesn’t sound quite right. We can fix that by replacing the 6000 with a slightly larger number, like 6200. (If the snare were ahead of the beat instead, we’d use a slightly smaller number, like 5E00.)

9. We can jazz up the pattern a little. I changed the kick pattern slightly and swapped in the kick at 5000 for variety.

10. We can add some cymbals to the pattern. Press Ctrl+Plus to add a new track. Use 1000 in the offset column to add rides. I used the velocity column to accentuate the beat.

11. Let’s now track a fill. Make a new 32 tick pattern and track a variation on your pattern.

Notice that I left the note column empty in a few places. If the previously note is still playing, you can put a new value in the offset column and leave the note column blank.

12. Finally, we want to route the ride and the kick/snare separately so we can use different effects and mix them separately. Add two Polac Out machines. Run the output of UTrk through both Outs in parallel. The sound from UTrk will be silent.

13. Right-click the first Out and select “Outputs…” Set “Channel L” to “Output 0 L” and set “Channel R” to “Output 0 R.” You’ll now hear the kick/snare track passing through.

14. Right-click Out2 and choose “Outputs…” Set “Channel L” to “Output 1 L” and “Channel R” to “Output 1 R.” The rides will now come through.

You can handle up to 16 separate tracks by adding more Polac Outs.

15. Your two tracks are now separate signals. We can process them separately. In this example, I put a compressor on the kick/snare track and added Joachim Temperature to warm up the ride track.

UnwieldyTracker has a lot of great features, and this tutorial just demonstrates a couple. Enter different values in the effect column and watch the status line to get a peek at its many capabilities.

Tags: beat slicing, breaks, buzz, sampling, unwieldy tracker

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 1:35 am and is filed under Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.