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USING RECYCLE WITH REASON


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Right then, what we're gonna do here is make a simple hip hop beat using Reason & ReCycle by taking samples and chopping them up in ReCycle. I dunno how well this beat is gonna come out so don't blame me if it's crap.

 

 

The Samples

I'm gonna use 3 different samples for this, 2 drum breaks to show diffent ways to use chopped up samples in Reason (on with the Dr. Rex loop player and 1 with the ReDrum drum machine) and a sample taken from the beginning of a Fleetwood Mac track to use as the main sample in the beat. Anyway, here are the samples...

 

Drum loop 1 (Billy Squier - Big Beat)

Drum loop 2 (Commodores - Assembly Line)<br />

Fleetwood Mac Sample

 

Chopping Up the Samples

 

Right, the first sample I'm gonna chop up is the drum loop 1 so I open it up in ReCycle and see

something like this...

post-28-1207250989_thumb.jpg

The controls circled in red are the important controls (Arrow, Mute, Lock, Pen & Sensitivity).

 

At this point its probably worth typing in the length of the loop in bars & beats in the top right of ReCycle, always do this each time you chop up a loop.

 

What you need to do now is slide the sensitivity slider about until you see the sample chopped roughly the way you want it, with me 72 seems about right, only problems are the first snare hasn't been sliced and there are 3 slices we don't want...

post-28-1207251009_thumb.jpg

 

 

 

To remove the slices which we don't want simple select the mute tool (the button with the X) and click the triangle at the top of each slice line (the lines dissappear and the triangles go small). To slice the snare move the sensitivity slider up until you see a slice line appears at the beginning of the snare (77 seems good for me), now select the lock tool and click the triangle at the top of the snare slice line (the triangle should turn into a pad lock), once this is done move the slider back to where is was (72) an the snare slice will stay there. This is what is should look like now, you can click within each slice to hear it, ideally there should be one sound per slice...

post-28-1207251027_thumb.jpg

If you ever can't get the sensitivity slider to find the slice you are looking for you have to use the pencil tool to put it in manually. Now all we need to do is save it for this break choose File-<Export and choose somewhere to save the files (probably best to put it in it's own folder because it will create a file for each slice (in my case break1 001.wav, break1 002.wav, etc.). It may be worth also going File->Save As... just incase you want to make any changes later.

 

 

Slicing up the other 2 samples

 

The other samples are sliced up in the same way as shown below, only difference is that when I'm

finished I'm just going to choose Save As... and now Export, I choose export with the last

one for a reason you will see later.

 

Break 2

post-28-1207251052_thumb.jpg

 

Main Loop

post-28-1207251073_thumb.jpg

This last sample was hard because ReCycle was couldn't find the slices very easily, just had to draw them in with the pencil tool mostly.

 

 

Making the beat in Reason

 

Break 1

First thing I'm gonna do in Reason is setup a drum machine for the main loop, the samples I'm going to use for this are are 2 kicks and a snare from the first break we chopped up. So create a Redrum and for drum 1 load up break1 001.wav, for drum 2 load up break1 002.wav and for drum 3 load up break1 003.wav. Great, now off to program a simple [/i]boom boom bap b-boom bap[/i] beat.

 

Break 2

Now I'm going to add the second break, for this instead of using a ReDrum I'm going to use the Dr. Rex looper, so simply create a Dr. Rex and open up break2.rx2 (which we saved earlier from Recycle). Once we've loaded it set the loop locators (the R & L in the sequecer) to cover about 4 bars then press the TO TRACK button on the Dr. Rex and tada the drum loop is loaded into the track.

 

Now if you entered the the length of the loop in Recycle as 2 bars the loop will no be playing really slow and choppy, because the original loops was about 130bpm and now it's being played bit by bit at 70bpm. What you can do here to is select the beat in the sequencer, right click them and choose Change Events..., press the *2 button in the Scale Tempo section and click ok...booya - double time. The only other this I did with the loop was turn the bass right down in the mixer so you can mostly just hear the symbols.

 

The Main Sample

Finally load up the MainLoop.rx2 file into another Dr. Rex drum machine, set the loop locators to cover about 6 bars and press TO TRACK, now I just just edited (like you would editing a drum beat or melody) the sample to play the different bits out I want (basically by moving and copying & pasting what I already had there), hope the makes sense, here's a picture...

post-28-1207251103_thumb.jpg

The yellow lines indicate the slice which is triggered on each row, kinda just like the ReDrum drum machine really.

 

That was pretty much it apart from the synth which I added for a bassline but didn't spend enough time either making a decent sound or getting it in tune.

 

The Finished Beat

Ok, so it's nothing special, repetetive as fuck with an out of tune bass line, but here it is anyways...

 

All Day Beat (MP3)

All Day Beat (Reason File)

 

 

Have fun!

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