Wonk Maid Ketchup
By ineff on February 11, 2024 11:57 pm
The tonal elements in this week's track were (mostly) made by chopping up bits from other Weeklybeats―many thanks to botanicus, theemeraldruby, and Jason Nijjer for releasing tracks under CC licenses that permit derivative works! And to Phil Harmonic and Mission Crossing for their percussion advice in the weeklybeats discord.
Sampled Weeklybeats tracks:
Other than those, drums are mostly chopped from CC0 freesound.org clips and I used the M8's FM and wavsynth for extra bass & chip arps.
› M8 Nerd Notes
‹ M8 Nerd Notes
High-precision sample chopping
My favorite way to "chop" samples on the M8 is to jump around locations using the SLI+STA fx―it's non-destructive and capable of precise microtiming. STA by itself can jump to one of 256 equal locations within a sample—but when slices are active, those division are relative to the active slice instead of the whole sample. Using the max SLICES, 128 SLI * 256 STA works out to 32768 jump locations per sample! Combine with DEL or tables to trigger with even finer-tuned timing.
TL:DR; When loading long samples like these weeklybeats tracks, I set the sampler instrument's SLICES to the max (128), then use SLI to pick a slice and STA to jump around within that slice.
General sampling notes
The DnB-sh beat's drum clips are chopped the same way, but pitched up to play at 160 bpm
But: re-pitching tonal elements (like the singers and flutes) usually sounds weird, so I hunt for bits that are already at the target pitch. This is where the precision of SLI+STA comes in handy, and why most "modulation" targets volume/cutoff and the PLY mode.
A cool thing about juggling the PLY mode back and forth while the sample is playing it reverses the playhead at its current position. This can be useful to extend a short tone without clicking, which I prefer over the so=called "LFO time-stretch" trick, which nearly always sounds janky (especially on tonal material).
To reduce the strain on the SD card, I convert higher bit-depth samples to 16-bit
› freesound.org Samples used
‹ freesound.org Samples used
99% made and mixed on a Dirtywave M8
Excellent bass throughout.