Propellerhead ReCycle
Initially, samplers allowed musicians and producers to capture short, single-shot or looped recordings of any sound and play it back from a keyboard or sequencer. Onboard memory was limited (and costly), so looping was added to provide sustain, allowing users to simulate lengthier sounds than those that could be held in memory. It didn’t take long before musicians were sampling and looping entire – if short – musical passages.
Soon, sound developers and sampler manufacturers were offering pre-fab (and possibly legal) beats and breaks for sampler owners to purchase and load into their machines. This was a godsend for bedroom producers and studio pros alike, giving them a vast well-spring of instantly available material.
Just one problem: pre-recorded loops were immutable. A 110bpm loop, for instance, couldn’t be used in a song with a BPM of 130 without increasing the playback speed, resulting in a coinciding increase in the loop’s pitch.
By the early 90s, there were some solutions in the form of software and hardware time- stretching algorithms, like those found on Akai’s S1000 sampler or in Passport’s Alchemy sample editing software. These algorithms could stretch or compress a bit of sampled audio by a given percentage. It was a reasonable (if destructive) solution, but the resultant audio file was still just a static sample clip.
Fortunately, a trio of Swedish codeheads had another idea. Marcus Zetterquist, Peter Jubel, and Ernst Nathorst-Böös had formed a little company called Propellerhead and their first product was released with help from Steinberg. Released in 1994, ReCycle was billed as a companion product for Cubase users, allowing them to alter a loop’s tempo without affecting its pitch. Rather than using any sort of time compression or expansion to destructively alter the audio file, ReCycle worked by detecting the various drumhits in the loop and chopping the loop into individual segments. These segments could then be moved around in time, retaining their original integrity. Furthermore, ReCycle could generate a MIDI file based on the slices’ original positions. Used in conjunction with the individual slices, this gave users the power to alter the timing of the project and/or rearrange the slices to create variations on the beat.
ReCycle supported many file types, but had its own, too. Called a REX file, it quickly became a standard format for beat-oriented hardware and software. Initially a monophonic format, REX2 added stereo support.
ReCycle was a resounding success and it’s still available today. Now a 64-bit application with built-in effects, it makes an ideal companion for the purpose-built REX players found in the company’s flagship DAW, Reason 10. Imitations abound, and despite widespread support for the REX format, most DAWs offer some sort of home-brew beat-slicing function.