Granular and resample mining

Through the following steps, we’ll look for little sonic characteristics which we can use to enhance our track, using resampling and granular processing techniques

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We’re starting with a track consisting of five elements. A chopped up vocal provides our melody, whilst this is supported by a kick drum and ‘top loop’. Harmony is provided by a pad from Absynth 5 and a thick bassline from Monark. A little delay and reverb have been added to the vocal.

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The top loop sounds a little too energetic, so we’ll start by sampling that, so it can be triggered at half speed. We transfer it into Logic’s EXS24 sampler and trigger it an octave below the key note. We run the slower, lower version in the first half and both loops in the second.

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We insert Output’s Portal on the vocal loop and create a granular treatment which breaks the vocal up, adds effects and introduces time and pitch variations. We tweak envelopes to modulate these parameters and render the result as a new audio file. Here it is under the original vocal.

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We can then select which of Portal’s vocal effects we want to include. We chop up the file, selecting the bits we like. At the end, we select a long reverb tail (from the final chop) and glue it to the previous slice, crossfading across the gap.

05 >

We duplicate the Vox Chops track and copy the rapid vocal section in bar 3 down to the duplicate. We use a ‘classic’ time-stretching algorithm to drop the pitch by an octave, which doubles the length of the file. We then reverse the result and move the resulting file to bar nine, panning it slightly left.

06 We duplicate the vocal again, adding a pitch processor which forces every note to play as ‘C’, an octave lower than the original. We add heavy ping-pong delay and render the result as a new audio file, before selecting a slice. Send this to Unfiltered Audio’s BYOME, using a slow granular process. This creates a bed under the track which you can hear right at the beginning.