Chopping techniques

[Sha-Skills]

Peace, My question is about the methods people are using to chop drumbreaks. Sometimes I chop each individual hit & sometimes I chop in chunks. Some breaks I sample into Logic & seperate the kick, hats, snare, etc. on seperate tracks & EQ & filter them seperately, while still keeping the break playing in its original order & running the tracks thru a bus channel where I run some slight EQ & compression & then bounce the track as "Title of break" followed by (WET) & then drop the file in my MPC to be chopped. I only chop them in Logic to seperate the sounds to different tracks so I can control the sounds seperately. I always bounce to a single .wav file. This is most def a complicated way of controlling a break, but it gives me alot of control. Anyways, I was just wondering if any users on here have other "wierd" methods to shaping & chopping breaks. 1

[bwest]

I almost always chop each hit separately. Rarely, if there is a cool ghost snare or light hi-hat after a hit I'll leave it in for the groove, if the tempo is right. I used to make beat or re-sample my drum sounds with my MPC but the data wheel and buttons are so messed up now that it's almost impossible. I filter and compress(rarely) everything as I am making a beat.

I do everything in software because it's so much quicker for me and I like the degree of control. Chopping on the MPC is kind of tedious. If I was doing it like you are Sha, I would probably export the chopped sounds as individual wavs and then put them in the MPC and then add bus compression after I'd arranged them or during the mix.

[GeeWiz86]

I do a preliminary chop of the parts i want from a song in Adobe Audition. Then once I have all the parts I need I build a skeleton beat in Fruity Loops with one of the parts I chopped serving as a loop so I can set my bpm and pitch. Once I have that set, I'll toss different pieces into fruity slicer and map them to 16 pads on my mpd or mpc and play with the chops until I have a basis of where I'm going with the beat. Once I've played out the patterns I wanna play I record it next.

[Shuriken]

I usually chop drum breaks into individual hits. I'm trying to keep as much as I can of the natural reverb, because I found that If you chop them without the reverb, some hits tend to sound unnatural, even if you add some reverb effect afterwards. Besides the loud hits, it's a good idea to sample some lower volume hits, so you can implement them into your drum pattern for more natural feel.

Recently, I'm into retaining the original vibe of the drum break, so I might chop in bigger chunks and then rearrange the break. DJ Premier used this technique and flipped the well-known Synthetic Substitution break for the song "DWYCK". It came out pretty dope.

As far as processing, I like to keep my drums raw. While I'm making the beat, I'll apply some low-pass filtering. When I'm mixing my finished beats, I usually add some EQ and compression on the drums, but I'm very cautious. Too much processing can make them lose their character.

[bwest]

I like to get at least 2 different hi hat hits out of a break. I'm not so worried about the snares and kicks cause I end up layering other sounds on those a lot of the time. Low pass filtering is almost a must on the kicks for me. I need to work more on retaining the character of the hits... because layering that take that away too.

[Sha-Skills]

I try my best to not layer. I found that Im better off isolating the different hits in the break & filtering and EQing them in Logic before the break goes to the mpc. I'll layer claps definitely & maybe kicks, but I always try to get the layer from the same source material.