> Step by step

6. Repeated resampling for inspirational results

1 Let’s take a leaf out of the old-school hip-hop producer’s book and come up with something totally unexpected using resampling techniques. Back in the day, memory came at a premium, so processing a sound and keeping the original wasn’t really an option – producers had limits, and that led to creativity. We’re going to tap into some of that in this walkthrough. 3 Set the sampler’s start and end points around a section of audio that loops well, at a consistent level. In Live’s Simpler, you can click and drag to zoom in and place a precise looping point, ensuring a decent crossfade. Experiment with the timestretching type and the notes you play, until you find a cool variation on the original sound. 5 Replace the Simpler with a completely new one, select the ‘resampled’ audio clip you just recorded, and drag it into the new Simpler. Delete the recorded items from the Arrangement View, and you can start the whole process over and over again, resampling the sound and committing to a new version each time. 2 Load some audio into a sampler in your DAW – it can be taken from practically anything. We’re using Ableton Live because of its Resampling facilities, which mean we only need to add a separate audio track to make this creative workflow complete. 4 On the empty audio track, change the Audio From selection to Resampling. Arm both this and the MIDI channel for recording. Now, when we hit record and play around with the sound, everything that comes out of the master bus will be recorded onto that audio track. You can find the track in the Arrangement View once recording has finished. 6 Load up effects like distortion, reverb and modulation, and tweak the effects, all the while sampling from different points and trying out different stretching and repitching types. By using this workflow, you never know what you’re going to get out the other end. Check out more resampling tricks in our Audio Adventures feature on p62.