Samplyr tutorial: how to break beats?
Dec 6, 2023 9:18:48 GMT
admin, solipsistnation, and 4 more like this
Post by pt3r on Dec 6, 2023 9:18:48 GMT
Imagine this you are a grown up mammal and you just received a little box from Germany containing a little 1U module called Samplyr, you plug it in your rack and the first thing you do is connect some trigger to its gate input and connect the output to a mixer and for a while you listen to sounds being triggered from Samplyr.
Lo and behold, delicious 8bit sounds are hitting your ear drums (see what I did there?). Yay!
You twist the FREQ knob to change the pitch of the played sound an use the SELECT/EDIT button to select another of the prebaked sounds shipped on the sd card, like a mere peasant or you feed some sweet cvs into the CV and SELECT inputs to let your modular do that for you like the despot you are. Life is good for a moment.
And then your ears detect some drumbeats and you fancy to coax Samplyr into banging those drums to your beat. No matter how you twist those buttons or edit those settings the drums played by Samplyr still sound like the song of its people and nothing like that sweet breakbeat you can hear so clearly in your head. You drop on the floor roll in a fetal position and weep, for life is unbearable and cruel.
Ok enough with all the dramatic reenactment and let's stick to the program of this TED talk.
Imagine a drum break that sounds something like
KHSHK_SN
with K S H being your respective Kick, Snare and Hihat sounds and _ being silence.
No matter how you organize your trigger signals or frequency the Samplyr will always reproduce this, or parts of this, drum break in more or less the the same layout.
To really turn this break into you own thing you will need to cut the break up into individual sounds and reorganize those in a different order. This is, of course, very trivial in dedicated samplers, MPCs, and other DAWs with all their fancy controls but the same thing can be done on Samplyr through the magic of patching.
Let me show you.
Step 1:
Connect the out of Samplyr into a VCA that is controlled by an ENV with no Attack and a short(ish) decay mult your trigger so it triggers Samplyr and the ENV and the same time now you all of a sudden only hear the first (few) sounds of the drum break depending on the decay time set in the ENV. In no time you will be able to produce a relentless kick pattern depending on the speed of your trigger and the decay of your envelope.
Step 2:
Ok pt3r this is al fun and games but how can I isolate the Hihat or Snare sound in that drum break? Well you can set the start point from which Samplyr starts playing a sample by feeding a constant CV into the START input. Patch 5v into an attenuator and feed its output into the START input of Samplyr, by twisting your Attenuator know you will now hear how your Kick pattern gradually changes into a Hihat or Snare pattern.
You might notice that as you set the start point to the beginning of a new snippet in your drum break that it gets cut of to quickly (you can't hear the tail of the snare sound) or to late (you hear the snare but also the start of the Hihat after it). To sort this out you adjust the decay settings of your ENV.
Step 3:
Now I'm able to isolate different sounds within the drum break but you cannot expect me to twist that attenuator like a maniac to select different sounds at the right time? Well of course not, but that's where we use another module called a sequencer. The end trigger of our envelope will clock the sequencer and will make sure that once an isolated sound is played by Samplyr that the next step of your sequencer will trigger a sound with a (possibly) different start point set by the cv set in the selected sequencer step.
Step 4:
But, but, but, I don't want to have a drum sound played on every trigger from my LFO. Well I don't want to sound like an *ss but I'm sure you can figure what module you can plug in between the outputs of your LFO and the GATE inputs of Samplyr and ENV that will take care of that conundrum (he said drum).
Thank you for reading this far, and hopefully someone will find this information useful and or interesting enough to try for themselves and thus create one less patch with endlessly looping drum break samples.
Lo and behold, delicious 8bit sounds are hitting your ear drums (see what I did there?). Yay!
You twist the FREQ knob to change the pitch of the played sound an use the SELECT/EDIT button to select another of the prebaked sounds shipped on the sd card, like a mere peasant or you feed some sweet cvs into the CV and SELECT inputs to let your modular do that for you like the despot you are. Life is good for a moment.
And then your ears detect some drumbeats and you fancy to coax Samplyr into banging those drums to your beat. No matter how you twist those buttons or edit those settings the drums played by Samplyr still sound like the song of its people and nothing like that sweet breakbeat you can hear so clearly in your head. You drop on the floor roll in a fetal position and weep, for life is unbearable and cruel.
Ok enough with all the dramatic reenactment and let's stick to the program of this TED talk.
Imagine a drum break that sounds something like
KHSHK_SN
with K S H being your respective Kick, Snare and Hihat sounds and _ being silence.
No matter how you organize your trigger signals or frequency the Samplyr will always reproduce this, or parts of this, drum break in more or less the the same layout.
To really turn this break into you own thing you will need to cut the break up into individual sounds and reorganize those in a different order. This is, of course, very trivial in dedicated samplers, MPCs, and other DAWs with all their fancy controls but the same thing can be done on Samplyr through the magic of patching.
Let me show you.
Step 1:
Connect the out of Samplyr into a VCA that is controlled by an ENV with no Attack and a short(ish) decay mult your trigger so it triggers Samplyr and the ENV and the same time now you all of a sudden only hear the first (few) sounds of the drum break depending on the decay time set in the ENV. In no time you will be able to produce a relentless kick pattern depending on the speed of your trigger and the decay of your envelope.
Step 2:
Ok pt3r this is al fun and games but how can I isolate the Hihat or Snare sound in that drum break? Well you can set the start point from which Samplyr starts playing a sample by feeding a constant CV into the START input. Patch 5v into an attenuator and feed its output into the START input of Samplyr, by twisting your Attenuator know you will now hear how your Kick pattern gradually changes into a Hihat or Snare pattern.
You might notice that as you set the start point to the beginning of a new snippet in your drum break that it gets cut of to quickly (you can't hear the tail of the snare sound) or to late (you hear the snare but also the start of the Hihat after it). To sort this out you adjust the decay settings of your ENV.
Step 3:
Now I'm able to isolate different sounds within the drum break but you cannot expect me to twist that attenuator like a maniac to select different sounds at the right time? Well of course not, but that's where we use another module called a sequencer. The end trigger of our envelope will clock the sequencer and will make sure that once an isolated sound is played by Samplyr that the next step of your sequencer will trigger a sound with a (possibly) different start point set by the cv set in the selected sequencer step.
Step 4:
But, but, but, I don't want to have a drum sound played on every trigger from my LFO. Well I don't want to sound like an *ss but I'm sure you can figure what module you can plug in between the outputs of your LFO and the GATE inputs of Samplyr and ENV that will take care of that conundrum (he said drum).
Thank you for reading this far, and hopefully someone will find this information useful and or interesting enough to try for themselves and thus create one less patch with endlessly looping drum break samples.
