Mainly a question for @hyena who seems well versed in this exact thing.
I’m taking my first baby steps into breakbeat manipulation on the er-301. I’ve managed to get an amen chopped, looped and playing slices nicely by triggering the slice with CV from an external sequencer utilising the clocked player unit.
I have two questions.
How can I create ‘that gated sound’ so either the slice doesn’t play to the end on some hits a la photek/goldie or so I can manipulate the length of the slice played without slicing the break to shreds?
I was thinking of routing the gate to a lpg/lpf being triggered by the same gate positioned after the clocked player. How would you do it?
Is it possible to switch between samples so: amen into hot pants back to amen or similar or must I create two clocked player units and mix between them to switch breaks?
So I haven’t actually done this so these ideas might not work that well, but its the first thing that comes to mind. for a gated sound you could mix a clock signal in with your gate in. you could put a vca after the clock so the clock pulses only go through when it gets a gate in, so you have like a fill button. Then you can manipulate the sample start parameter so you can scan through the sample without needing tons of slices. You could also gate your sample start modulation with your fill button so when you release the fill button it goes back to playing right at the slices.
as usual with the 301 there are many solutions to your questions
my ideas:
you can put a vca after the clocked player and use the gate you use to trigger slices to directly modulate your vca. this can be useful if you have some kind of control on the length of the gate you use to trigger the clocked player. if instead you use simple triggers you can use the super useful “Timed Gate” unit (from @Joe’s Accents library) , this way you have perfect control of the length of the generated gate, you can modulate it with other units or use an external cv to manually control it.
2)you can create a wav file with all the different breaks you want to use in a single file keeping them at the same bpm and then chop the big file into slices. not what i’d choose sincerely.
you can build a selector\switch and then use multiple players.
if you are not familiar with the bump scanner you probably want to limit yourself to two players. then use a vca in front of the gate for each of them. then create an ui element (a toggle button) which will open one vca and close the other and vice-versa (set vca 1 to 0 and modulate it with the button with a gain of 1, set vca 2 to 1 and modulate it with the button with a gain of -1 so you have opposite behaviour on them).
or you can do the same thing but with vca’s AFTER the players, so you switch between the two audio signals instead of switching the gate from one to the other.
if you are familiar with the bump scanner you can use it to have a slider select which of multiple players will get the gate (or as said above which of the audio path is active). this has the benefit of allowing you more than two players.
pretty sure there are tons of other ways to do the two things tho
I had a play around last night triggering a vca with the same gate used for slice triggering positioned after the clocked player unit and I adjusted the attack and release with external cv (maths).
I got pretty close to what I was after. Almost like fader riding in a DJ mix.
To continue the discussion, in case someone is looking to create ‘that 90s jungle sound’ and for my own benefit - what is the best way to create a pitched (up or down) time stretched break with control over pitch?
well, using the clocked player alone the only way to control pitch is by changing the clock (i usually do a lot of divide by 2\multiply by 2 usually using makenoise Tempi to clock it, sometimes breaking it down with triplets and odd divisions…)
but you can place a grain delay right after the clocked player, use a 0 ms delay time and just mess with pitch!
or you can build your own granular sample player, i’m a bit in a hurry right now but if you search the forums for realtime time stretch or something like that you’ll find some example iirc.
if not i will post a unit i was experimenting with (Malefica) in the next days that does something like that.
