Note that the end points of slices may not always work for a particular drum or cymbal. Now, with the click track going, record a new drum pattern or part and quantize it accordingly. Try triggering from your MIDI keyboard or another controller, and you should be able to find kick, snare and hi-hat or ride slices that sound good. Each resulting slice should represent a different drum hit. To do this, simply drop the loop (or section) into your sampler and slice it by transients. This allows you “deconstruct” drum recordings and access their individual hits, which you can then “reconstruct” into new patterns. Even if it’s at a much different tempo or in a different time signature, you can slice it into samples that you can trigger via MIDI. Let’s say you have a loop with really cool sounds, but the drum part is not right for your song. Here’s what the final track sounded like: On the BeatĪs mentioned earlier, Slice mode is also useful for cutting up drum loops or a section from a mixed drum track. Finally, I used Cubase’s Key Editor to quantize most of the notes. When I was happy with my performance, I recorded it. I then triggered the chops I wanted from my MIDI keyboard, adding some delay and distortion in the Cubase mixer. I opened up a Sampler Track and dragged the phrase in, then sliced it in Transient mode to create vocal chops for use as a melody on top of a simple bass and MIDI drum part I’d recorded. Let’s take a look at an example of Slice mode in action, applied to this vocal phrase: Samplers all have global transpose options, so you’ll just have to figure out how many steps up or down you need to go. If you want to use a vocal sample from outside your song, you’ll likely need to transpose it to match the key. It will feel more integrated, and the notes will be in the same key and scale as the song. You’ll have the most luck if you use a vocal sample from your song as the source material for your chops. It will then look something like the screenshot below: Each note represents a slice. The Drag MIDI Phrase to Project button (circled in red).įrom there, you can open the MIDI Key Editor to change the order and rhythm of the notes. The white keys represent notes with slices mapped to them.Ĭubase also creates a MIDI file of the notes corresponding to the slices - something that’s really helpful since you can drag and drop that file into the sampler’s MIDI track in the Project window. These are mapped to your MIDI keyboard in a linear order. In Cubase, the number of notes you have available after you slice a sample is equivalent to the number of slices created. Whichever method you choose, you end up with a finite group of slices, each triggered by its own MIDI note (these slices, by the way, don’t get transposed).
Piano sample chops manual#
If you select Manual mode, nothing gets automatically sliced - you have to click in the waveform to create slices. You can also manipulate the slices manually in any mode by dragging their start or end points. Choosing sixteenth notes often works well, but it depends on the source material. In Cubase, you can also choose Grid mode, which slices a sample based on the grid setting that you create for that track. A drum sample sliced up using Transient mode. A Threshold knob allows you to control the level at which transients are detected, which affects how many slices you get. The sampler turns each of the transients it finds into a separate note and maps it to the keyboard. Transients are the peaks at the beginning of sound waves where the attack of the sound begins. In Cubase Sampler Track and similar plug-ins for other DAWs, the default option is to slice samples by their transients.
Piano sample chops how to#
Ready to learn how to use Slice mode? Read on … Multi Chop Slice mode is also great for creating and manipulating drum loops. These can be more interesting than the same sound transposed up and down the keyboard. The advantage to making vocal chops with Slice mode is that, since you’re working with slices from a vocal recording, you end up with several that have different consonant sounds. This offers many creative possibilities but can be a little trickier to use than other modes. In the Cubase Sampler Track, it’s called Slice mode. They also usually have a mode that cuts your sample into smaller pieces based on user-selectable criteria. Most samplers of this type - the kind that only let you load one sample at a time - offer a similar mode. The idea was to isolate one note and transpose it across the MIDI keyboard. In Part 1 of this two-part article, we used AudioWarp mode in a Sampler Track in Steinberg Cubase.