Syncopation serendipity

Some DJ/producer bloke named Paul Woolford spoke to Resident Advisor, and the interviewer pressed him for the 'secret' to how he made his breakbeats:

"Yeah, fuck it. I'll tell you the secret to it all. Say you've got a breakbeat and you chop it up into loads of different permutations and different start points. Then you map out all those variations onto your keyboard so that each key is a different version of the same break. You need to make sure they're all the same tempo and play at the same pitch, even though you're playing higher and lower notes on the keyboard. Some samplers call this non-transpose mode. Then you trigger all the different breaks with the same MIDI channel so that every sample cuts off the other note.

This is how you get things to roll. Remarc used to do all his drums like that, with this mono-triggering technique. Once you do that, you mess about with pitches and the effects on each slice of the break. It's like opening the gates of Valhalla."

Being a talentless and lazy semi-musician, I'm always looking for semi-automatic ways of generating riffs, beats, musical ideas, so Mr Woolford's revelation above appealed to me. Seems simple enough, how hard could that be to re-create with modern DAWs?

So I tried a few things:

• I've kept a copy of my old Ableton Live (version 8) on an old iMac for mainly one reason: the “Slice To Midi” function. Take a piece of audio, warp it, then hit 'Slice to Midi' and bang, one sample per warp marker assigned per key, with a whole bunch of cool looping functions available, no fuss. (It reminds me of Recycle) It works great for mangling vocal phrases , especially when you slide the loop points around mid-playback….
But for some reason with a breakbeat I couldn’t get a rhythmic feel going. Plus, it’s a pain to set it up for the staggered sample start points described, the editing is tedious. Too much mousing and I'm out.

• My current DAW is Cubase Artist 8.5 (life's too short for unnecessary upgrades). Cubase has an emulation of a sampling drum machine called Groove Agent SE. Generally, it is fabulous. Super easy sample trimming and layering, filters, effects.
It has a thing called the Pattern Player where you can drop a sliced loop onto the pads and get a bunch of patterns to trigger the slices according to the midi file pattern. I thought it might be a neat way to do the breaks thing, to generate permutations from a single loop by "playing" the pattern pads somewhere off the downbeat … it sorta works but there isn't that groove, and I think it is because of the lag between key on and pattern trigger start. Even just triggering a loop at different start points per pad, didn’t really groove. The Pattern Player always follows the beat number relative to the song/bar position - this is pretty cool for most purposes, but rather limiting when you’re looking for, shall we say, syncopation serendipity.

• Bored after a few days of trying to get software to play ball, I thought it was time to try some old hardware I had lying around - the once-mighty Akai S3000XL sampler.

While I love hardware, the menus are deep in these machines and the big display is getting darker each year, so a 2001 model Powermac G4 733 Mhz Quicksilver was connected to it via a SCSI-to-USB adapter, using the old macOS9 versions of Recycle and MESA to talk to it.

At last! Some groove, and some fun. There is still a little lag over midi, but it is small and more importantly it is consistent - at least then you can adjust your timing to accomodate it. And the converters in these old Akais just sound fantastic, especially on drums.

You have to choose your audio loops, and the Recycle cut points, carefully. To get that “rolling” effect he mentions, you need to set the sample program in the Akai (via MESA) to play monophonically, and have a maximum release time on all the envelopes, so that when you release a key it plays the sample to the end. The loop should be 2 bars long or more so you can start at different points in the groove. Also it helps to have a few samples of just a single hit, or even silence, to be able to 'shut it down', as it were (due to mono mode, only the last triggered sample plays back). Don’t forget that the ‘keygroup’ can be spread over a couple of adjacent keys to help with rolls and riffs.

In the DAW, you create a midi part with just a single PB (midi pitchbend) value, and while the track loops, you trigger samples from the midi keyboard while carefully adjusting this pitch bend value to find a tempo where the break works with the track... et voila! The magic starts to happen… if you tend to be late or early with your key triggering, it doesn’t matter, you can find a sweet spot using the precise adjustment of the pitch bend amount while you jam along.

Of course, no one these days is crazy enough to be faffing around with this temperamental old technology. When the SCSI connection is lost or corrupted, and MESA hangs, because it didn't like the shirt you were wearing or something, then often the only way to restore it is to reboot everything and unplug then re-plug the SCSI. Then start reloading all those samples and programs. Yes, a mighty PITA. But the groove.. and the sound.. they're quite compelling arguments for taking all that trouble.