Sampler Power Tips Slicing, Stretching Production Techniques

[00:00:00] Hey folks, the sampler is the most powerful device
[00:00:03] in any environment, if you ask me.
[00:00:05] And if I had to limit myself to certain devices,
[00:00:08] I would say the sampler is on top of my list
[00:00:10] because you can do pretty much everything with it.
[00:00:13] You can do lead sounds, pad sounds, kick drums,
[00:00:16] you can slice, sample, just can do everything.
[00:00:20] So just a sample on EQ, maybe a reverb
[00:00:24] and you can produce whole songs in no time.
[00:00:27] And it makes you very creative to use just the sampler,
[00:00:31] if you ask me.
[00:00:32] So I want to give you a lot of ideas
[00:00:33] what you can do with the sampler
[00:00:35] because someone asked me in my Discord, so I won't do that.
[00:00:38] Also, I show you how to slice probably in the first example
[00:00:43] so you don't need to watch the whole video, okay?
[00:00:46] Okay, so in Bitwig, we can just use here a sampler.
[00:00:51] This is how it looks like, da-da.
[00:00:56] And we want to use a drum loop here.
[00:01:00] I just use this one.
[00:01:01] You can see already this is two bars, right?
[00:01:05] One and 70 BPM.
[00:01:08] But at the moment, we use one and 10 BPM here in the DAW.
[00:01:11] So when I lay down here, let's say a note clip two bars long
[00:01:16] and play it back, it probably, it doesn't fit.
[00:01:22] Okay, so let's play this.
[00:01:26] (upbeat music)
[00:01:28] Right, it just stops here because it's one and 10 BPM
[00:01:31] and this one plays exactly at a speed of one and 70 BPM.
[00:01:34] There's also key tracking here.
[00:01:36] So when we change the key,
[00:01:38] we change the pitch, we also change the playback speed.
[00:01:42] Right, it's not really useful.
[00:01:47] So of course it works if I just use your one and 70 BPM.
[00:01:54] (upbeat music)
[00:01:56] It works perfectly fine, it matches perfectly.
[00:02:02] So yeah, that's not always the use case.
[00:02:05] So what we can do with this kind of information here
[00:02:09] is we can say, oh, these are actually two bars, interesting.
[00:02:13] So why not use here the freeze mode?
[00:02:16] So the freeze mode actually changes the sampler into a mode
[00:02:20] where you have to change the position manually, right?
[00:02:23] If we just keep this here at this position,
[00:02:26] not really, nothing really happens.
[00:02:27] If you switch to the Texas mode,
[00:02:30] it just plays this kind of grain and this position here
[00:02:34] in a loop.
[00:02:35] Right, so what we can do with this information
[00:02:43] is we use your repitch mode, we use a classic LFO
[00:02:48] and we use this in timing mode
[00:02:51] and we switch this to two, one.
[00:02:54] So this is two bars and we use a ramp.
[00:02:58] What this does is it actually creates a ramp starting at zero
[00:03:02] going up to one in the timeframe of exactly two bars.
[00:03:07] And we also have to disable your bipolar mode.
[00:03:09] So we are just in the positive range.
[00:03:11] So from zero to one instead from minus one to plus one.
[00:03:14] So zero to one and this one plays it back
[00:03:17] exactly in the timeframe of two bars.
[00:03:20] This is two bars long.
[00:03:21] We have this in freeze mode.
[00:03:23] So all we have to do is modulate here
[00:03:25] the position knob by 100%.
[00:03:29] And yeah, if we play this back,
[00:03:31] the LFO is exactly time synced to the BPM of the project
[00:03:35] which is 170 BPM.
[00:03:38] And it gives us a ramp over two bars
[00:03:40] and we play this two bars back
[00:03:43] in exactly the right playback speed.
[00:03:47] (upbeat music)
[00:03:50] So now watch what happens when I go down here with the BPM.
[00:03:53] (upbeat music)
[00:03:56] Right, the loop still matches, but it changes pitch.
[00:04:11] So we pitch it down because we changed the playback speed
[00:04:15] because we changed the project BPM playback speed.
[00:04:19] So this is what happens.
[00:04:20] So this is my opinion, it's pretty fine to use it like this
[00:04:26] but you can switch this here also to textures mode.
[00:04:29] (upbeat music)
[00:04:31] So now it doesn't change the pitch.
[00:04:34] (upbeat music)
[00:04:44] So it works like every classical stretch algorithm.
[00:04:48] It just uses small little audio grains
[00:04:51] and just place these back in a loop.
[00:04:53] You can also change the grain size here, of course.
[00:04:56] (upbeat music)
[00:04:59] (upbeat music)
[00:05:01] But you can also hear that kind of the sound is smeared.
[00:05:21] You have like these small little phasing issues
[00:05:24] if the grain size is smaller than the wavelength
[00:05:27] of 20 hertz or whatever.
[00:05:30] And it feels like a sound or like a phase shift.
[00:05:33] So it's not always nice.
[00:05:35] But when you want to pitch down certain drum loops
[00:05:38] and you kind of like the sound of the early 90s,
[00:05:42] then this is perfectly fine in my opinion.
[00:05:45] (upbeat music)
[00:05:47] You can also switch this to cycles mode.
[00:05:52] It sounds a bit different.
[00:05:53] (upbeat music)
[00:05:56] (upbeat music)
[00:05:59] So if you just want to play back the first half here,
[00:06:10] you can of course go here with this position
[00:06:12] to get the beginning of the second bar
[00:06:15] inside of the strum loop.
[00:06:17] But now you don't need to use two one, two bars
[00:06:20] because we only select your one bar.
[00:06:23] So what you do now is you play this back at halftime.
[00:06:26] (upbeat music)
[00:06:29] I hope this is clear because we use timeframe of two bars,
[00:06:33] but we only play back one bar.
[00:06:35] So the one bar is stretched out to two bars, okay?
[00:06:37] So we have halftime more or less.
[00:06:40] So we need to switch this here to one one,
[00:06:42] which is one bar and then it fits again.
[00:06:45] (upbeat music)
[00:06:48] (upbeat music)
[00:06:51] So perfectly fine.
[00:06:57] And you don't need to use the classic LFO here.
[00:07:00] You can also use the curve modulator for instance.
[00:07:04] With the curve modulator, you have a bit more options.
[00:07:07] You can just use this here, but it's more configuration.
[00:07:11] You have to reset.
[00:07:12] We don't want to use smooth linear probably.
[00:07:15] We don't use the bipolar setting.
[00:07:17] And we simulate here a ramp like this.
[00:07:21] And we want to go to bar and we have one bar here.
[00:07:24] So instead of this modulator, we use this one.
[00:07:28] But we do the same trick.
[00:07:31] (upbeat music)
[00:07:35] But now you can do maybe something like this here.
[00:07:44] So we halftice like this.
[00:07:47] (upbeat music)
[00:07:50] So now we play back basically at the first part two times.
[00:07:54] (upbeat music)
[00:07:57] Or we do it from here to here and we go back to that.
[00:08:03] This is actually right.
[00:08:04] Something like this.
[00:08:15] Something like this.
[00:08:16] Let's see how this sounds.
[00:08:18] (upbeat music)
[00:08:20] So with the curve modulator,
[00:08:23] you can jump to certain things here.
[00:08:25] You can change the playback speed.
[00:08:26] So you can make this here a bit faster.
[00:08:29] (upbeat music)
[00:08:32] Or slower.
[00:08:33] (upbeat music)
[00:08:35] (upbeat music)
[00:08:38] So you can influence the playback speed
[00:08:52] and you get different results.
[00:08:53] So the curve modulator is a bit more, yeah,
[00:08:56] it can make more effects.
[00:08:58] But if you just want to change the playback speed,
[00:09:00] the classic LFO is just enough or you need.
[00:09:05] Okay, so this is basically stretching
[00:09:07] and changing the playback speed automatically.
[00:09:10] I thought, or I remember a lot of people wanted to know
[00:09:15] how to do this, how to do stretching with a sampler.
[00:09:17] So you can influence here with the textures mode,
[00:09:20] the playback speed without changing the pitch.
[00:09:23] That's all you need sometimes.
[00:09:25] Okay, so the next trick or tip is to actually use slicing
[00:09:30] or some kind of simple form of slicing.
[00:09:34] And for some reason,
[00:09:37] the sampler doesn't have a slicing feature.
[00:09:40] And they revamped this in bitwig 2.0, I think,
[00:09:44] but they never really added a slicing mode.
[00:09:47] So what we can do with this is we can say,
[00:09:51] oh, this is actually one bar.
[00:09:53] And it's probably a drum loop that is on the beat grid.
[00:09:55] And the beat grid has 16 notes, eight notes,
[00:09:58] which is just a subdivision of one bar.
[00:10:01] Okay, so we have one bar here.
[00:10:04] There's a macro knob called as position, for instance.
[00:10:09] And then we use a quantizer.
[00:10:11] And we modulate here with the macro knob,
[00:10:15] the quantizer by exactly 100% then.
[00:10:19] And then we use the quantizer output to modulate here
[00:10:25] the position, the playback position.
[00:10:27] And 0% to 100% means always the range
[00:10:31] between the start and the end point here in the sampler, right?
[00:10:34] So this is now 100%.
[00:10:37] And then we can say we want to subdivide this
[00:10:40] into eight equal parts, which are more or less eight notes.
[00:10:45] You can see we switch now here to the different positions.
[00:10:49] And maybe I disable here the freeze mode to 100% speed.
[00:10:54] And you can see we switch here to the first kick drum,
[00:10:58] hi-hat kick, snare drum, hi-hat, right?
[00:11:02] Hi-hat, open hi-hat, kick drum, snare, and so on.
[00:11:05] And this only works because the drum loop
[00:11:09] is exactly on a beat grid, on a straight beat grid.
[00:11:12] So there's no swing.
[00:11:13] So none of these hi-hats or snares or kick drums
[00:11:17] are kind of off the grid.
[00:11:19] So it kind of works, right?
[00:11:21] Normally with the slicing mode you have a sensitivity knob
[00:11:24] and you pull down the sensitivity.
[00:11:27] And then you, yeah, get all the transients,
[00:11:31] even though they are not on the grid.
[00:11:33] So here it kind of works because it's straight.
[00:11:35] So this is just as a disclaimer.
[00:11:37] And you can start from a different position here
[00:11:48] inside of the drum sample.
[00:11:50] So this is kind of neat, but the first question is probably,
[00:11:53] how can I map this out to notes?
[00:11:57] So each note represents some kind of sample.
[00:12:00] This is kind of also possible here.
[00:12:02] We use a key track modulator
[00:12:04] and I use the relative key track modulator here.
[00:12:07] And I'll modulate the position by 100%
[00:12:10] with the key track modulator.
[00:12:12] And in the inspector we can change the key track modulator
[00:12:15] to a different spread range.
[00:12:17] So here it's plus minus 64 semitones,
[00:12:20] which is a bit too high.
[00:12:22] And I'm using here exactly eight
[00:12:26] because we are using inside of quantizer here,
[00:12:29] also an eight note subdivision, okay?
[00:12:32] So with this, we just modulate the position
[00:12:34] and the position is then quantized here
[00:12:37] to eight equal parts or equal subdivisions.
[00:12:41] And then we use the output of the quantizer
[00:12:43] to change the position inside here of this one bar.
[00:12:47] And yeah, with this, we can say here,
[00:12:51] C is actually the kick drum.
[00:12:54] This is the first hi-hat.
[00:12:56] This is the first snare.
[00:12:58] And we can subdivide also the other notes.
[00:13:01] All right, something like this.
[00:13:05] And it works better or the best
[00:13:07] if you have all these modulators on monophonic.
[00:13:10] So here the position macro is per voice is disabled.
[00:13:15] Also here per voice on quantize is disabled.
[00:13:18] And on the key track, we need to disable here per voice.
[00:13:21] And sometimes it's even nice to bring down the voices
[00:13:24] of the sampler itself, polyphonic 24 voices.
[00:13:28] We only want to use one voice.
[00:13:30] So each note chokes out the note or the sample before
[00:13:35] because sometimes you have a sample playing
[00:13:37] and then you start the new sample and it overlaps
[00:13:40] and it's on the right position and so on.
[00:13:42] So this works the best.
[00:13:43] (upbeat music)
[00:13:46] Right.
[00:13:47] And a problem here is that when you play,
[00:13:50] for instance here, the kick drum and the next sample,
[00:13:54] the next slice is not triggering fast enough.
[00:13:56] You play basically back the whole rest of the sample.
[00:14:00] (upbeat music)
[00:14:02] (upbeat music)
[00:14:05] But now we can change also to the playback speed
[00:14:26] but the triggering is still on time on the right position.
[00:14:30] (upbeat music)
[00:14:32] Maybe two hi-hats here.
[00:14:42] (upbeat music)
[00:14:45] Sadly, sadly, and I don't know why,
[00:14:51] but in the sampler you can't modulate the end point
[00:14:55] at the end position.
[00:14:56] I guess it's because of calculating here
[00:14:59] the percentages for the loops and for the position.
[00:15:03] But if you could modulate the end point of the sampler,
[00:15:08] we can say, oh, give me only one slice,
[00:15:11] start point, end point of the slice,
[00:15:13] right when you play it back once
[00:15:15] and then never place back the end of the rest of the sample.
[00:15:20] Would be nice.
[00:15:21] We can switch this here to loop mode
[00:15:24] and just use here the output quantizer
[00:15:26] for the loop position or the loop start position.
[00:15:30] And then maybe just duplicate here these two modulators,
[00:15:34] position and the quantizer call this end with the macro.
[00:15:38] And here we use the same eight thing
[00:15:41] and we use this for the length of the quantizer.
[00:15:44] The second quantizer goes out to the length
[00:15:47] and we don't want to modulate here the end position
[00:15:51] not put the key track.
[00:15:52] You only want to have your one slice.
[00:15:55] (upbeat music)
[00:15:58] Well, it's actually not, not right.
[00:16:06] Let me see.
[00:16:06] This should work, okay.
[00:16:11] End point is correct.
[00:16:13] Yeah, this should kind of, kind of work.
[00:16:18] (upbeat music)
[00:16:20] (upbeat music)
[00:16:23] Resolution is eight, resolution is eight.
[00:16:27] We can also use 16 notes here.
[00:16:29] 16, 16.
[00:16:32] (upbeat music)
[00:16:35] So like I said, this only works when you have
[00:16:45] a straight down loop and you know exactly,
[00:16:47] oh, this part of my sample is exactly one bar
[00:16:51] in the original timeframe.
[00:16:54] And then you can just subdivide it
[00:16:55] and when there's no groove or no swing
[00:16:59] inside of the sample, it works perfectly nice.
[00:17:02] And you don't need to use the transient detector
[00:17:04] or anything like this.
[00:17:05] I think you can also, let me try this here.
[00:17:11] (upbeat music)
[00:17:15] (upbeat music)
[00:17:18] Yeah, there's the end.
[00:17:25] (upbeat music)
[00:17:28] Let's loop this part here.
[00:17:32] (upbeat music)
[00:17:35] But here the loop is on, right?
[00:17:42] So when you hit the end of the slice,
[00:17:44] it starts from the beginning again.
[00:17:46] Yeah, it's not perfect.
[00:17:49] (upbeat music)
[00:17:52] Also interesting, we could just take here a random modulator.
[00:17:57] Switch this to hold, switch this to note.
[00:18:00] So every time we trigger with a new note,
[00:18:02] we generate a new value and then we hold the value
[00:18:05] for the rest of the gate.
[00:18:07] So we can change the playback speed at random.
[00:18:11] (upbeat music)
[00:18:14] (upbeat music)
[00:18:16] So for like this, we can also change at random
[00:18:24] the playback mode from repitch to cycles to textures
[00:18:29] at random on each note.
[00:18:32] (upbeat music)
[00:18:35] And then we can duplicate this here again.
[00:18:41] Maybe switch this here to textures mode
[00:18:43] and use this modulator, this random modulator
[00:18:46] for the playback, not the playback speed,
[00:18:48] maybe grain size.
[00:18:49] I don't know what's best there.
[00:18:52] Yeah, this is still modulated on the cycles mode.
[00:18:57] We want to maybe randomize the format here.
[00:19:01] Make this bipolar because we want to go
[00:19:02] also in the negative range.
[00:19:04] (upbeat music)
[00:19:06] (upbeat music)
[00:19:09] Yeah, it could be something, I don't know.
[00:19:19] So you can slice it up and play it back
[00:19:22] in all kinds of different ways and colors
[00:19:25] just with a few bunch of modulators here.
[00:19:28] I hope this is clear.
[00:19:29] I'll probably make an extensive post
[00:19:33] about these features in a more step-by-step guide
[00:19:38] on my website.
[00:19:39] I think some people like this more
[00:19:42] instead of me having to ramble with my words, right?
[00:19:45] So they have a step-by-step guide,
[00:19:47] what they need to do to get a certain outcome.
[00:19:52] Okay, so this was the slicing, how I did the slicing.
[00:19:56] By the way, I also have an auto-slicer.
[00:19:59] This is not a kind of patch you can use
[00:20:04] on the native sampler.
[00:20:05] You have to use the grid for that.
[00:20:10] It's a bit more complicated,
[00:20:12] but there's also a video, I made a video about this, right?
[00:20:15] So what you can do with this here,
[00:20:16] you can load in a drum sample,
[00:20:21] like the same thing we used before here, right?
[00:20:24] And let me see, pull this down here.
[00:20:29] And there's a scan mode, so we put this on
[00:20:33] and you scan through the sample
[00:20:36] and just tries to find some transients with this.
[00:20:41] (upbeat music)
[00:20:44] Right, so we use here all these nodes
[00:20:49] to trigger certain things inside of the sample.
[00:20:53] (upbeat music)
[00:20:56] Yeah, and there's some transient detection here.
[00:21:01] So this also should work for drum sounds
[00:21:04] that are not on a straight grid.
[00:21:07] So here's a real transient detector in there.
[00:21:10] I basically scan through the whole thing.
[00:21:12] If there's a transient in there, I write it into the array
[00:21:16] and then I just recall it with certain nodes
[00:21:19] to play on the keyboard.
[00:21:20] So this is a separate video I made a few years ago
[00:21:23] and I think also the slicer is completely free
[00:21:26] if you want to try this out.
[00:21:27] Yeah, kind of works.
[00:21:31] Not the best solution, but it's fun nonetheless, okay?
[00:21:36] So yeah, let's switch this back here to the initial idea.
[00:21:42] So yeah, these are how to use slicing
[00:21:47] and stretching with drum sounds
[00:21:49] and playing back drum loops in certain type of tempos,
[00:21:53] match it to the BPM of the project, pretty easy.
[00:21:58] But you can also do some other things, right?
[00:22:00] So in here, there are some parts we can just use for looping.
[00:22:05] So let's say this part here, right?
[00:22:10] It's just actually just a sign.
[00:22:13] And you can use the loop.
[00:22:16] You have to loop, loop and loop start.
[00:22:20] And loop length is also what we need, okay?
[00:22:29] So when you just use here a small part of this sound,
[00:22:33] we have more or less like a synthesizer.
[00:22:36] And we have filters on top.
[00:22:40] So it's not a sampler anymore.
[00:22:43] It's actually a synthesizer or wave table synthesizer.
[00:22:46] But instead of using here the end point
[00:22:48] or the start or the end point of the loop,
[00:22:51] we can also switch to cycles mode, which is exactly that.
[00:22:55] And if you zoom in here,
[00:22:57] you can see all these model sections from the cycles mode.
[00:23:01] And it plays it back with a certain playback speed,
[00:23:06] but we can also switch frees on.
[00:23:08] We can go here to a certain point like here.
[00:23:11] And we get the sound out of it.
[00:23:16] (electronic music)
[00:23:18] So the cycles mode is actually just a wave table mode
[00:23:22] because it uses certain cycles of the sound
[00:23:27] or of the sample to play it back at audio rate.
[00:23:30] (electronic music)
[00:23:34] So we can make this better
[00:23:41] by just using maybe velocity here, expressions.
[00:23:46] And we say this is quite nice here,
[00:23:49] but when we hit the keyboard harder,
[00:23:52] we move the position up.
[00:23:54] (electronic music)
[00:23:57] Right, and then we use a bit of release.
[00:24:03] (electronic music)
[00:24:06] Then we can say we have your key tracking enabled,
[00:24:11] 100%. So when I change the key on the keyboard,
[00:24:13] the frequency changes here.
[00:24:15] So we center this to C3.
[00:24:18] C3 is exactly in the middle.
[00:24:21] So now when I play a key on the keyboard,
[00:24:23] this switches to exactly the position of the frequency
[00:24:27] of the note I am playing on the keyboard.
[00:24:30] And then I can use some maybe high pass,
[00:24:34] four pole high pass and a bit of resonance.
[00:24:37] (electronic music)
[00:24:40] And we have a tonal center for the sound.
[00:24:45] Let me pull up here, the spectrum analyzer.
[00:24:48] This is up.
[00:24:52] (electronic music)
[00:24:53] Right, this is here the resonance
[00:24:55] of our high pass filter.
[00:24:57] (electronic music)
[00:25:00] Pull this down, right, it goes down.
[00:25:02] (electronic music)
[00:25:05] So we make certain sounds tonal
[00:25:08] by just adding a low sign partial
[00:25:13] and just say to our brain,
[00:25:15] this is the fundamental, this is the sound, okay?
[00:25:18] And then everything on top from the sample
[00:25:20] is more or less like texture.
[00:25:22] (electronic music)
[00:25:24] Then we can switch this back here to polyphonic mode.
[00:25:26] (electronic music)
[00:25:29] Then we can search maybe positions here.
[00:25:34] (electronic music)
[00:25:37] (electronic music)
[00:25:40] (electronic music)
[00:25:43] (electronic music)
[00:25:45] (electronic music)
[00:25:48] (electronic music)
[00:25:51] (electronic music)
[00:25:54] (electronic music)
[00:25:57] (electronic music)
[00:25:59] Maybe a reverb, like always.
[00:26:02] (electronic music)
[00:26:07] (eerie music)
[00:26:09] (eerie music)
[00:26:12] , (eerie music)
[00:26:39] So if you have the sampler, you can just load any sample.
[00:26:44] It doesn't matter.
[00:26:46] You can make sounds out of everything.
[00:26:48] If you have a really long sample here,
[00:26:50] it's just, you can see it as a very long wave table
[00:26:55] and you just loop small parts of it
[00:26:57] and you can make any sound out of it.
[00:26:59] So it doesn't really matter what kind of sound you use.
[00:27:03] I have no idea how these are actually just drum sounds here.
[00:27:09] (eerie music)
[00:27:12] Mone woman, okay.
[00:27:14] (eerie music)
[00:27:18] Yeah, maybe a render modulator here.
[00:27:28] Very slow.
[00:27:30] And you modulate of course here the position slightly.
[00:27:36] (eerie music)
[00:27:39] (eerie music)
[00:28:08] So I have no idea why people buy plug-ins.
[00:28:12] I have no idea.
[00:28:13] You just put some random shit into the sampler
[00:28:16] and you can make so many different sounds.
[00:28:19] It's endless, it's infinite.
[00:28:21] I have no idea why people buy granular synthesizers on mass
[00:28:26] and a lot of plug-in developers sell this like hotcakes
[00:28:31] and I have no idea why.
[00:28:33] You just use a random sample.
[00:28:35] You just sample something that's completely random
[00:28:39] and you put it into the sampler,
[00:28:41] put on cycles mode or textures mode
[00:28:43] and you can tweak this in all kinds of directions.
[00:28:47] It's impossible, infinite amounts of sounds, okay.
[00:28:51] Put a reverb on it, a nice reverb,
[00:28:53] Valhalla reverb is even, it's free.
[00:28:56] It's free, it's the best sounding ambient reverb
[00:29:00] and you get everything out of it that you can imagine.
[00:29:05] (laughs)
[00:29:07] So yeah, so this is basically how you make
[00:29:10] out of random things,
[00:29:11] nice tonal sounds you use with the key tracker.
[00:29:17] You use some kind of resonance on a nice low pass
[00:29:21] or high pass here or even a band pass.
[00:29:24] Band pass is nice, you can cut out some of the low end
[00:29:28] of the sound and some of the top end
[00:29:30] and then you just focus on the center frequency here.
[00:29:34] So it's a different sound, more tone down.
[00:29:37] So let's say we don't like this so high pitched
[00:29:48] why not go down one octave or even lower.
[00:29:54] Or even lower.
[00:29:55] Yeah, I know I have no peak limit on the master, I know it.
[00:30:22] Okay, I know it.
[00:30:24] Oh yeah.
[00:30:34] And this is just one sampler,
[00:30:43] you can switch this here to a voice stack,
[00:30:45] let's say three voice stacks and use a stack multilabor.
[00:30:51] Let's go minus one to plus one
[00:30:55] and we say we modulate here the panning with this by 100%
[00:31:00] which means stack one is on the left side,
[00:31:03] stack two is on the middle
[00:31:05] and stack three is on the right side, okay.
[00:31:08] And then we want to use maybe another stack modulator
[00:31:11] from zero to one.
[00:31:14] And then we use this to modulate here the position
[00:31:18] which means stack one, stack two and stack three
[00:31:21] get different playback positions within the sample.
[00:31:25] So you lay on multiple sounds,
[00:31:26] spread them out across the stereo field.
[00:31:30] See all the sounds, I need to turn up the volume.
[00:31:34] You can see here this is stack one, stack two
[00:31:38] or this is stack one, two, three.
[00:31:48] And you can see these are spread apart
[00:31:51] always in the same way.
[00:31:52] But we can now add here a macro
[00:31:57] and say this macro modifies the amount of the pan
[00:32:01] and also the amount of the play heads spread
[00:32:04] for each stack, right.
[00:32:05] So now we can define here with this knob
[00:32:07] how these stacks are spread apart.
[00:32:14] (ethereal music)
[00:32:16] And why not just modulate this stuff slowly, of course.
[00:32:29] (ethereal music)
[00:32:34] (ethereal music)
[00:32:37] So you get nice stereo fields.
[00:33:01] Also interesting for stacking
[00:33:06] if you want to make sounds dense
[00:33:08] or if you don't like the sound of the stretching
[00:33:13] then you can just double and use different settings
[00:33:17] and you smear it out, you make it more dense in a way.
[00:33:20] But I want to show you this on this drum sound here again
[00:33:23] because it's much clearer what I mean.
[00:33:25] So here we have the drum sound.
[00:33:29] So we want to switch off here maybe the key tracking.
[00:33:32] Okay, and then we want to use the classic LFO.
[00:33:39] We switch this to timing mode to one
[00:33:42] because these are two bars.
[00:33:44] We switch this to textures mode.
[00:33:47] We use the freeze knob and use your ramp.
[00:33:51] Use no tree trigger, we don't need bipolar.
[00:33:54] And we modulate here the position.
[00:33:56] (ethereal music)
[00:33:59] Right, and you can hear every kind of
[00:34:08] small little loop inside of the stretching.
[00:34:11] So we can say we want to double this here with voice stacking.
[00:34:16] Let's say five voices.
[00:34:19] Use a stack modulator, stack spread,
[00:34:23] and we change some of the settings.
[00:34:25] So we say maybe we change the grain size here slightly
[00:34:29] on each stack.
[00:34:30] (ethereal music)
[00:34:33] Or maybe the position.
[00:34:41] So each stack has a slightly, slightly different position.
[00:34:45] (ethereal music)
[00:34:48] (microphone buzzing)
[00:34:51] Let's try out your different pitch.
[00:35:08] Maybe this is the way to go.
[00:35:10] Disable this, go to minus one to plus ones.
[00:35:14] We modulate up and down in pitch.
[00:35:18] (microphone buzzing)
[00:35:20] Oh, the sound is also nice.
[00:35:21] (microphone buzzing)
[00:35:24] It doesn't sound better, but it's kind of sound nice.
[00:35:30] (microphone buzzing)
[00:35:33] (microphone buzzing)
[00:35:36] Maybe we use more stacks.
[00:36:02] (microphone buzzing)
[00:36:32] So you can influence how this kind of stretching algorithm
[00:36:35] sounds like by just layering multiple stretch samples,
[00:36:40] or stretch samples and change some of the parameters,
[00:36:43] how the sample is stretched.
[00:36:46] And you get some different results as you can see here
[00:36:48] by just changing the pitch and grain and panorama or pen.
[00:36:53] And yeah, you get different results.
[00:36:55] So you can experiment with this
[00:36:57] if you are not happy with the very basic stretch sound here.
[00:37:02] (microphone buzzing)
[00:37:02] This one, right?
[00:37:03] (microphone buzzing)
[00:37:04] If it sounds too basic to you,
[00:37:06] then you can change and smear it out.
[00:37:08] And sometimes this works really great for pad sounds
[00:37:11] if you have like a very short lead sound
[00:37:14] or just a plug sound,
[00:37:16] but you want to make a pad sound out of it,
[00:37:18] so you make it longer, right?
[00:37:19] You stretch it out.
[00:37:21] And then you have all these artifacts
[00:37:22] and you can hide some of these artifacts
[00:37:25] by just smearing and using different parameters
[00:37:29] for different settings.
[00:37:31] And using voice stacking, of course.
[00:37:33] And like I said in the beginning,
[00:37:35] you should use the sampler like a real sampler.
[00:37:38] So maybe just sample some random stuff
[00:37:40] and make or try to make music with it
[00:37:42] because it gives you some unique opportunities,
[00:37:45] some unique sounds.
[00:37:47] I use the master record feature for that most of the times.
[00:37:50] So use an audio track here, select my microphone input
[00:37:54] and it doesn't matter.
[00:37:54] You don't need to use a very good microphone.
[00:37:57] Just use anything.
[00:37:59] You can tweak it in the process.
[00:38:01] So maybe we want to make a kick drum, right?
[00:38:04] So you make a kick drum noise.
[00:38:06] Something like this, very basic.
[00:38:09] So we have here the sample.
[00:38:12] Drag the sample in.
[00:38:14] We have a sampler.
[00:38:15] We disable here the key tracking.
[00:38:18] We single out here this kind of sound.
[00:38:21] Let's see how it sounds.
[00:38:22] Very basic, of course.
[00:38:25] And then we can use here the high pass filter,
[00:38:28] put this to a frequency around 70 hertz.
[00:38:33] A lot of resonance for the sine wave.
[00:38:37] So we get a lot of bass.
[00:38:40] Maybe a bit shorter from the envelope.
[00:38:45] And we need some kind of pitch drop.
[00:38:54] So use a segments envelope here.
[00:38:58] No looping, no smoothing, seconds.
[00:39:01] Make this very short, no polyphonic.
[00:39:04] We remove here the dots and create a nice pitch envelope.
[00:39:10] And we modulate here maybe, yeah, the frequency.
[00:39:16] Maybe we create here a pattern, a kick drum pattern.
[00:39:26] (drumming)
[00:39:29] Let's make some photo to the floor stuff here.
[00:39:32] So, yeah, 120 BPM, 24, 124.
[00:39:37] (drumming)
[00:39:41] Something like this, maybe a bit longer.
[00:39:45] (drumming)
[00:39:47] So we can use the segments for that.
[00:39:53] Just modify here the cutoff.
[00:39:55] But we don't modify actually the pitch of the sample.
[00:39:59] Which is okay, you can just do that here like I did it.
[00:40:02] But sometimes you just want to pitch both of them.
[00:40:10] And we can make use of the note feature here.
[00:40:14] So we can say pitch tracking is on.
[00:40:16] And this one uses also here key tracking.
[00:40:20] All right, let's go to 100%.
[00:40:24] And then you use a band device from Bitwig here
[00:40:27] where we can add MPE information.
[00:40:30] And we can create a pitch drop here
[00:40:34] that lasts around, I don't know, 20 milliseconds.
[00:40:38] (drumming)
[00:40:40] (drumming)
[00:40:42] Yeah, so this is more or less a nice kick drum.
[00:41:02] One okay kick drum.
[00:41:04] Okay, so then we use here to make some hi-hats.
[00:41:08] So we record that.
[00:41:10] Put this in.
[00:41:17] Maybe use this one here first.
[00:41:21] No key tracking.
[00:41:24] Small little pattern for the hi-hats.
[00:41:27] You can also use your velocity.
[00:41:32] We have to enable here the velocity sensitivity.
[00:41:36] So it's four to the floor.
[00:41:40] So we maybe want to accentuate here the off-beats.
[00:41:43] Like this.
[00:41:47] That's maybe not the right.
[00:41:54] Yeah, that's better.
[00:42:02] (drumming)
[00:42:04] So when we have here these expressions,
[00:42:24] when we have a lot of velocity,
[00:42:27] we maybe want to make this longer.
[00:42:31] Like this.
[00:42:32] We can also use here this part.
[00:42:33] (drumming)
[00:42:36] Yeah, so feel like this.
[00:42:48] So this is the hi-hats.
[00:42:50] Then we want to use maybe a clap sound here.
[00:42:55] (claps)
[00:42:59] (claps)
[00:43:01] Let's see what this sounds.
[00:43:04] Yeah, nice.
[00:43:05] So we just use the first one.
[00:43:13] So yeah, no key tracking again.
[00:43:19] (drumming)
[00:43:24] Yeah, nice.
[00:43:25] (drumming)
[00:43:28] (claps)
[00:43:31] So to make this a bit dense,
[00:43:32] we just clone this here,
[00:43:34] put this into an instrument layer, duplicate this,
[00:43:36] and yeah, here we use the second point.
[00:43:39] (drumming)
[00:43:42] And the third one.
[00:43:57] (drumming)
[00:43:59] And the fourth one.
[00:44:01] (drumming)
[00:44:05] So we can pan this here a bit in each direction.
[00:44:09] Or maybe we can use here the panning
[00:44:11] of the instrument layer device.
[00:44:15] I don't know if this fits.
[00:44:20] (drumming)
[00:44:26] Yeah, kinda.
[00:44:27] So yeah, this is a clap.
[00:44:31] We maybe put an EQ on that.
[00:44:33] (drumming)
[00:44:40] Maybe it's too loud.
[00:44:49] On the kick, we can also put you an EQ,
[00:44:54] EQ five.
[00:44:56] (drumming)
[00:44:57] Just focus on the frequencies that are important here
[00:45:01] for the kick drum.
[00:45:02] (drumming)
[00:45:04] Maybe it's not so much mids.
[00:45:07] (drumming)
[00:45:09] (drumming)
[00:45:12] (drumming)
[00:45:14] (drumming)
[00:45:16] Okay, so.
[00:45:44] So maybe we add some,
[00:45:46] some chords to it.
[00:45:52] So maybe use some sounds here.
[00:45:55] (drumming)
[00:45:57] Put this in a sampler.
[00:46:01] Can we detect a pitch?
[00:46:06] Right click, detect root.
[00:46:07] It's D sharp three, yes.
[00:46:09] (drumming)
[00:46:13] (drumming)
[00:46:16] So, okay, and then we put maybe a filter on it.
[00:46:24] Maybe high pass.
[00:46:30] That's better.
[00:46:33] (drumming)
[00:46:35] And look of delay.
[00:46:37] (upbeat music)
[00:46:41] (upbeat music)
[00:46:43] Yeah, we did the same thing and here maybe, I don't know.
[00:47:00] (upbeat music)
[00:47:05] Or.
[00:47:11] We go to.
[00:47:12] (upbeat music)
[00:47:14] And maybe a bit of free pop.
[00:47:23] (upbeat music)
[00:47:29] (upbeat music)
[00:47:31] Yeah, we can influence this a bit more with the EQer.
[00:47:50] O five.
[00:47:51] (upbeat music)
[00:47:57] (upbeat music)
[00:47:59] Chords.
[00:48:15] So we can add maybe also here a small little pad sound
[00:48:20] or drone sound or something like this.
[00:48:25] (upbeat music)
[00:48:27] Something toned down.
[00:48:32] Can we pitch track this?
[00:48:36] Detect the pitch.
[00:48:37] Wow, this is a C three?
[00:48:41] Okay, nice.
[00:48:43] (humming)
[00:48:49] Let's see if this fits.
[00:48:51] (humming)
[00:48:54] (humming)
[00:48:56] (upbeat music)
[00:49:00] We need to loop it, of course.
[00:49:05] (upbeat music)
[00:49:10] (upbeat music)
[00:49:13] A lot of bass, don't need that.
[00:49:36] (upbeat music)
[00:49:39] (upbeat music)
[00:49:42] Something like this.
[00:49:55] And we need some kind of bass.
[00:50:00] So.
[00:50:01] Whoa, let's do something like this.
[00:50:08] (upbeat music)
[00:50:10] Pitch track, hello.
[00:50:15] No, impossible that this is.
[00:50:23] Yeah, it's G one, okay.
[00:50:24] (beeping)
[00:50:28] (upbeat music)
[00:50:32] (upbeat music)
[00:50:34] Yeah, let's make it first.
[00:50:43] (upbeat music)
[00:50:46] (laughing)
[00:50:49] (upbeat music)
[00:50:53] Nice, okay.
[00:50:58] So here's also here a high pass with a lot of resonance.
[00:51:02] (upbeat music)
[00:51:04] A bit shorter.
[00:51:10] (upbeat music)
[00:51:12] And maybe an octave lower.
[00:51:19] (upbeat music)
[00:51:23] And we use a peak limiter.
[00:51:24] (upbeat music)
[00:51:27] (upbeat music)
[00:51:29] Hey, so we push the sample up by 12 semitones.
[00:51:55] So the pitch stays on the same thing, right?
[00:52:00] But the sample is pitched up.
[00:52:03] (upbeat music)
[00:52:06] It doesn't really work.
[00:52:09] (upbeat music)
[00:52:11] (upbeat music)
[00:52:14] Let's see if we can bring out here some overtones
[00:52:32] with an EQ five.
[00:52:34] (upbeat music)
[00:52:39] So we can record this here with automation.
[00:52:41] (upbeat music)
[00:52:44] Where is it?
[00:52:46] Yeah.
[00:52:46] (upbeat music)
[00:52:50] (upbeat music)
[00:52:53] (upbeat music)
[00:52:56] (upbeat music)
[00:52:59] (upbeat music)
[00:53:26] Yeah, I put this here in front, this is better.
[00:53:29] And then we also automate this a bit.
[00:53:34] (upbeat music)
[00:53:37] Yeah, so this is how we can build basically drums
[00:53:56] or songs or ideas just by sampling sounds
[00:54:00] and using a bit of filtering and pitch bending
[00:54:04] and adding modulators and so on.
[00:54:05] And you don't need to use any samples
[00:54:08] and it's very unique.
[00:54:09] And yeah, maybe also creative way of creating tracks.
[00:54:14] I don't know, I just want to give you some examples.
[00:54:17] It's probably not the best example here,
[00:54:19] but it kind of works.
[00:54:21] Okay, so that's that.
[00:54:23] So the last tip is also something I showed you
[00:54:25] in a video earlier this year
[00:54:28] where you want to use a sound inside of the sampler
[00:54:33] like a normal instrument, but it's not possible
[00:54:36] because the sound consists of multiple different notes
[00:54:39] inside of a scale.
[00:54:40] And when you transpose it around,
[00:54:42] you push certain notes in the sample outside of the scale
[00:54:46] because you just transpose it up or down.
[00:54:48] It's basically like planing or however this is called.
[00:54:52] So I fake here creating a sample with multiple notes
[00:54:57] by just...
[00:54:58] So this is now some kind of sample here.
[00:55:11] And you put this into the sampler, right?
[00:55:16] And you have like, you want to play this in a scale.
[00:55:21] You can say here, this is a note, this is a note.
[00:55:23] So all of these notes are kind of in a certain note range,
[00:55:28] but you...
[00:55:30] You can't play it like a real instrument
[00:55:36] because you have all these notes that are outside of scale.
[00:55:39] You basically want only one note in here,
[00:55:41] but it's not possible.
[00:55:43] So what you can do then, or what I do is I prepare the sample
[00:55:47] before I put it into the sampler.
[00:55:50] And I use on top of that here,
[00:55:52] maybe something like a comp filter.
[00:55:54] A comp filter gives you the response
[00:55:58] or the frequency response of the harmonic series.
[00:56:01] It's actually exactly what you have when you have a sound
[00:56:05] and you build up basically on top of that.
[00:56:07] So it filters out or gives you more the feeling of,
[00:56:10] this is actually just one sound instead of multiple notes.
[00:56:14] Sounds like this.
[00:56:15] You put this here maybe on C3.
[00:56:20] And add some resonance.
[00:56:22] So some of the sounds resonate more with the comp filter
[00:56:30] and some of them less.
[00:56:32] And the comp filter here in Bitwig is,
[00:56:34] it doesn't sound really nice.
[00:56:37] The one in the FX grid sounds much nicer.
[00:56:40] FX nice, no.
[00:56:43] FX grid.
[00:56:48] So here we can use the comp filter
[00:56:50] and it also features nice pitch tracking of course.
[00:56:53] So we put this here on C3, nice.
[00:56:56] And then we just make the same or do the same thing.
[00:56:59] Right, so it's more like,
[00:57:14] it sounds of course more digital or more processed,
[00:57:19] but it gives you a much better, yeah.
[00:57:25] Much better feel of this is only one sound.
[00:57:32] And you can play it then basically in a polyphonic way.
[00:57:39] You can play multiple notes in there, kind of add up.
[00:57:42] So it's maybe not working here,
[00:57:45] but maybe a slow this down.
[00:57:48] Reburb on that.
[00:57:56] (gentle music)
[00:58:23] You can also always go here to some kind of filter,
[00:58:26] a bandpass filter, right?
[00:58:28] And just amplify the fundamental frequency
[00:58:32] of the grand playing note.
[00:58:33] But sometimes you want to keep all the overtones
[00:58:42] and that's why I prefer sometimes using the comp filter
[00:58:47] and having then here the center frequency of C3,
[00:58:50] then you put it into the sampler here.
[00:58:52] It's then C3, and when you play multiple notes,
[00:58:56] you can combine them and it sounds kind of better
[00:58:59] than just using the regular piano
[00:59:02] because of the problems I just told you.
[00:59:06] So here when I used the original one.
[00:59:10] (gentle music)
[00:59:12] Right, you can hear then some of these notes go out of scale
[00:59:28] because you play a scale
[00:59:30] and you transpose the complete scale around.
[00:59:33] So it doesn't make any sense.
[00:59:34] So yeah, that's the comp filter.
[00:59:37] I made a video about this a while ago,
[00:59:39] maybe you want to watch this,
[00:59:40] maybe I had some better explanations back there back then.
[00:59:44] But yeah, that's it basically.
[00:59:47] Okay, I hope everything is clear,
[00:59:52] clear as water, clear as ice, I don't know.
[00:59:57] Let me know what you think, leave a thumbs up,
[01:00:00] ask me questions, maybe I'll do another one, a better one.
[01:00:04] This one was also right from the top of my head,
[01:00:06] some tips maybe there are more things to explain,
[01:00:10] but that's it.
[01:00:12] Okay, thanks for watching, see you next time, bye.
[01:00:14] [BLANK_AUDIO]