It's always the way: Someone discovers a new way to mess up a sound, and then everyone else follows suit.

In this particular case, I'm talking about sample slicing. Someone figured out that you could take a transient fragment of, say, a snare drum hit, and "roll" it at an impossibly fast speed, and it ceases to sound like a snare drum, it starts to sound like some glassy, otherworldly, razor-edged... thing.

The next thing you know.... we have a new genre...

There's a lot you can do with fragments of sound cut up really small and rearranged. One of the real masters of this is Trentemoller, and his name has become fairly synonymous with "the new sound" in many electronic dance music circles. He just seems to get it right.... and his in-depth production combined with a knowledge of melody and harmony has made his tracks popular worldwide. I think he might use cut-up vinyl crackles and pops as one of his sound sources but I'm not sure.

It's time consuming work. And there are a lot of ways which you can "over-use" this sort of thing and make gaudy results.

But done properly, you can create some incredible otherworldly textures... and transform an ordinary loop into something spicy and delicious. It can work really well for making cool drum fills and loop variations.

Why do I always seem to come up with cooking metaphors? I don't know.

Anyway, a few tips on the tech side of things:

1) when cutting up sounds its usually good to cut the waveform at the zero-crossing point. Unless of course you are deliberately playing with transient clicks. In Cubase, there's a facility to "snap to zero crossing"... I presume this is the case with other workstations although I don't use them so I don't know.

2) experiment with duplicating your fragments into miniature rolls and runs, and mess around with fade-in, fade-out, volume and pitch shift effects.

3) experiment with different rhythmical values for your cut-up fragments. You can set the snap to 1/32 or 1/32Triplet for example and move stuff around, deleting some of the fragments. For really extreme sounds, explore 1/64 and 1/128 snap values and micro slices. Break the rules and use a bit of "I wonder what will happen if". Do what you're not supposed to. Music-wise, that is.

4) try cutting the snare out of a loop and exporting it to another track with different effect settings.

I usually find this sort of stuff works well used a little sparingly. It's like hot sauce. See if you can find your own ways to extend these ideas and make your own signature sounds. Have fun!

Alex
PXR8