Flore dabbles in time-stretching and texture

French producer Flore has recently returned with her second album, Rituals – a dark concoction of gritty and atmospheric dance music. For her Sample Challenge, she gets textural with some extreme time-stretching

01 >

Flore starts with the Vinyl Break sample “I’ve actually used something called Akaizer. It lets you load a sample and manipulate it as if it were in an Akai sampler. I really like it because when you heavily timestretch a sample, the texture is very different from the Warping in Ableton. You can find this really old school effect.”

02 >

She applies a huge 600% time-stretch and some pitch-shifting to the sample, to create a droning texture. She then creates a double of this and pitches it up 12 semitones. She shifts the position around a little too, so different sections of the two are playing at the same time. ValhallaShimmer reverb is applied to the pitched-up version too.

03 >

These two texture tracks are grouped and processed together, using Sonalksis’s Uber Compressor, along with reverb from FabFilter Pro-R along with some EQ both before and after the other effects. The whole group is fed sidechain compression from the sub bass part too.

04 >

The sub bass is created using a Live Instrument Rack from Flore’s own collection. “I didn’t make it myself, I found it on the internet but I don’t remember where. It emulates an 808 bass though, and it sounds quite good.” A second instance of the bass is processed with distortion and filter delay for crunch.

05 >

For her drums, Flore loads the one-shot samples from the pack into a Drum Rack. The 808 kick is used pretty much raw. Along with this, she loads slices from her stretched Vinyl Break texture to create some more unique percussive hits. These are sliced and programmed to land in a randomised order whenever the kick hits.

06

Live’s Erosion effect, along with filtering and reverb, add even more grit and texture to the drum parts. Over the top, Flore lays a short loop cut from the Drum Break loop. This is filtered heavily, then paired up with a distorted Shaker for some gritty high end. SoundToyEffect Rack is used across the whole group in order to create a metallic-sounding distortion.