Production Tips – NITELIFE Audio

These ‘PROTIPS’ have appeared across our socials over the last few months. We thought it might be helpful to have them collated into a single digestible article – so here’s part one, which consists of the first five. We’ll be continuing to release these regularly, providing tips, tricks, and valuable advice across a range of production, workflow, creative, mindset, and mix-related questions.

Whilst hi-hats add a lot of energy and groove, if proper consideration isn’t given to de-essing and minimising resonant frequencies, they will end up sounding overly harsh when your record is played at high volumes and/or mastered. You can solve this problem in various ways:

1. Apply some generous subtractive EQ to remove un-needed high and low frequencies. Tape saturation also does a great job of smoothing the high end.

2. Play with the envelope of your hi-hats to create a tighter, more precise sound. Sometimes a transient shaper can be useful here, too. You don’t need as ‘much’ hi-hat as you think you do, especially on club systems.

3. Use a de-esser plugin, or preferably a specialist tool like Oeksound’s Soothe to control & dynamically suppress harsh, fatiguing resonances. Your mastering engineer, and your ears, will thank you.

It’s a problem that’s been around virtually as long as we’ve been mixing audio: how to get that coherent, pleasant-sounding low-end with a kick and bass that ‘sit’ together nicely. Here’s our advice:

1. It might sound obvious, but choosing the right sounds to begin with is going to make your life a lot easier. If you have a kick drum that’s got the sub-heavy, low-end characteristics of an 808, then you’re going to struggle to get a coherent, pleasant balance with almost any other kind of bass sound that plays at the same time. You can navigate this by a) not having a bassline and making the kick even heavier (common in a lot of techno productions) or b) programming/playing the bass to be in spaces where the kick isn’t. However, keep in kind that offbeat basslines which are too busy or too sparse may not best suit the genre you’re making.

2. If you’re happy that you’ve got the best possible sounds, the next step is to tidy up what you have. Be diligent with your EQ, being sure to make a low-cut as high as you can go on every instrument and then on every bus channel too. It’s not uncommon in specific genres to go as high as 30/40/50hz with the kick drum to leave room for the bass. You should also remove any ‘flabbiness’ from both the kick and bass using the envelopes or a transient shaper to tighten up the notes and create space. Using something like a Subpac can help you to measure the interaction between the kick and bass, and also alert you to any other instruments which have rumbles that your ears can’t pick up.

3. Lastly, some good old-fashioned classic side-chaining may actually be all you need. We’ve placed it last as a recommendation because it shouldn’t take precedence over choosing the right sounds and tidying up your low-end elements – you should be doing those things anyway. Still, it’s a helpful method which not only can improve your mixes but also works as a stylistic sound design tool that you can apply to vocals, pads, textures or anything else to add a dimension of rhythm and movement. Productions by artists like Kaytranada and Disclosure are great examples of this.

Making records as an electronic artist or dance music producer is very often a solo pursuit, and after the initial burst of creativity and ‘fun’, we can spend many hours ‘in a loop’ feeling frustrated, doubting ourselves, and procrastinating over the arrangement and anything that we find tedious. Collaborating with somebody else can really help you in this situation because the other person is very likely to approach the music or stems that you send them in a refreshed way. They won’t be fatigued by repetition and they will be able to hear things that you’ve missed – both good and bad.

Finishing music is absolutely crucial but it’s also one of the processes that requires the most discipline. Try reaching out to someone you’re friends with, or on the same label, or perhaps have worked with before, and propose that you swap stems and finish each other’s ideas. This way, if all goes well, you’ll end up with 2 finished tracks which you can send to labels and you will have minimised the tedious bits that usually lead to time being wasted.

There are sure to be times when you’re not feeling quite as creative. Maybe you’re tired, or perhaps you don’t have the time on a particular day to get into making a full track. On these occasions, it’s important to remember that no session in the studio ever needs to be wasted. If, for instance, you’ve only got 2 hours to spare, you could use it to export stems and loops from existing projects, organise your sample folders, and save channel strips & synth patches. This makes sense on several levels – it’s likely that you’ve already spent a reasonable amount of time getting those sounds exactly how you want them, so why not call upon them again when you’re making that next record in the same style? They should slot in nicely with whatever you’re working on in terms of tone and processing, and reusing them also has the added benefit of helping to establish your ‘sound’ through repetition of certain signature elements or motifs. You can effectively think of this as your own ‘in-house’ sample library, which you can chop, flip and resample. If you’re diligent about it, it can really pay dividends in the future.

Another recommendation is to move your most inspiring samples into a dedicated folder so that when you need something with a bit of magic, you can simply heato the ‘inspiration’ folder to find it.

Finally, Save precious hard drive space (and your sanity) by deleting sounds you’ve had for years, but never used. We all have those sample graveyards that (even with the best of intentions) never get visited. It’s highly unlikely you’ll miss them if you delete them, and it’ll make finding those hidden gems that bit easier. Just because there’s an endless palette of drum sounds out in the world, it doesn’t mean that you should waste your time trying to acquire them all.

It might initially seem counterintuitive, but too many options can be stifling. It’s what’s commonly known as ‘analysis paralysis’. Before we had the computer processing power, choices and (almost endless) distractions we do today, the specific ways in which most hardware and software worked arguably helped us to focus far better. Limitations included: available memory, sampling time, mixing desk channels or just a general lack of equipment. Very often, there might only be single compressor / delay / reverb along with possibly 1 hardware synth or some type, a drum machine, and perhaps an 8-track recorder, in a smaller home or project studio. As a result, producers and musicians had to find creative workarounds to bring their ideas to life.

You can apply these principles to your own music by setting boundaries. Why not try and make a record with only 5 elements, but make those elements evolve by continuously automating them to keep things interesting? Or if you usually use live instruments like Rhodes, guitars, and bass, try writing a track with entirely synthesised elements. These self-imposed restrictions should speed up your decision making.

Another fun approach, if you’re able to, is to use a standalone groovebox like an MPC or Maschine to construct a track. In the heyday of house and hip hop, many beats would have been composed entirely on an MPC or SP1200, and the ‘on-the-fly’ performance recorded to a 4-track or DAT or tape machine, including breakdowns, effects, and main sections. You could then choose the best parts and edit a 12 minute recording down to 6 or 7 minutes. Many producers still employ this method today.

In this article from our ‘Classic Techniques’ series, we’re examining one of the most distinctive sample techniques to emerge in the 1990s – the timestretched jungle vocal.

The frenetic beats and earth-quaking sub-bass of drum and bass have become a global-dominating sound and the genre continues to develop in new and interesting ways. Drum and bass was born from Jungle, which first developed out of hardcore breakbeat rave music in the early to mid-90s. It was a hugely fertile and productive time for dance music, as the price of decent home equipment dropped and producers delved deep into the submenus of their kit to shape their sounds to their precise desires. This was particularly noticeable in the Jungle genre, as junglist producers embraced the idea of the studio as a lab and their role as that of sonic scientist, and it seemed that each new release raised the bar with the cut-up and fractured breaks manipulated to new levels of poly-rhythmic intensity.

One of the many studio innovations that Jungle bought was the introduction of a brand new sonic texture to the producer’s toolbox, that of the time-stretched vocal. It’s a very distinctive sound and instantly recognisable, where a vocal sample is stretched out and in the process gains a stuttering, metallic sheen which sounds futuristic and robotic.

Hardcore Junglism!

Dead Dred’s ‘Dred Bass’ on Suburban Bass is usually acknowledged as the first Jungle record to feature the time-stretched vocal effect, and you can hear it in countless other Jungle tunes from the likes of Shy Fx, Origin Unknown, DJ Hype, Remarc and so on. It also became popular in house music and featured in many records, including Josh Wink’s acid banger ‘Higher State of Consciousness’. UK Garage was also happy to adopt it, notably on Armand Van Helden’s Remix of ‘Spin Spin Sugar’ and Double 99’s massive ‘RIP Groove’ from 2001.

Just like many other audio innovations in dance music, the Jungle time-stretch vocal was the result of a piece of studio equipment being stretched beyond its own capabilities. The technique was actually the sound of the time-stretch algorithm from the Akai S series samplers, being pushed way beyond its normal limits and producing audible ‘artefacts’. As the BPMs and complexity in Jungle steadily rose, so did the demands on the Akai’s time-stretching functions, and that distinctive robotic, shimmering sound was the lucky result.

Warp Factor 9

Audio technology has of course vastly improved since the birth of Jungle and all DAWs now come with time-stretching and warping abilities that allow users to change the pitch and tempo over a vast range, with little if any noticeable degradation to the original sound. Audio warping and time-stretching software now aims to eliminate any audible artefacts to maintain sonic integrity and the original characteristics of the sound, particularly for vocals. But for us to get anything approaching this Jungle time stretch effect, we’re going to have to deliberately circumvent the innovations of the last 20 years, and try to achieve an un-natural vocal sound.

As with many sampling techniques, there are often several methods of achieving the same end, and it’s the same with this; so we’re going to supply some of the most straightforward methods to get results quickly.

In Ableton Live, if you were going to warp a vocal sample, you would usually reach straight for the ‘Pro-Complex’ setting to ensure that it sounds as natural and unprocessed as possible. However for this technique, we’re not looking for pristine vocal processing that you don’t notice, we want to achieve the opposite, we want this to be all about the sound of the processing itself and not the sound of the vocal. To achieve this you will need to select the ‘Tones’ warp mode. Then you can simply change the length of the loop and click on a marker on the sample to stretch it out as long as you like. You’ll quickly hear all the aliasing and achieve the stuttering, metallic sound we’re talking about. Ableton allows you to alter the ‘grain size’ – you can think of grains as tiny snippets of audio used to create a larger waveform. Experimenting with the grain size will get you the effect you’re looking for here, generally, a higher grain size will create that particular stutter effect we’re looking for. Adjusting the grain size also contains the potential for all sorts of far-out vocal processing too.

In Cubase, you right click your sample, click process to enter the time-stretch menu and select the ‘Standard’ algorithm. Aside from the grain size, Cubase also allows you to adjust the ‘overlap’ and ‘variance’ which are controls to help the results to sound as natural as possible: in this case, low values of each will be appropriate. Again, try experimenting with high grain sizes to get the Jungle time-stretch effect.

Logic Pro’s Flex allows easy stretching and warping of vocals and again, here it’s about reducing the software’s ability to do the job seamlessly. So select ‘Tempophone’ mode and just by selecting and stretching an area you can easily get a sound that approaches the 90s Jungle feel. The default grain size of 45 ms is perfect for this but Logic also gives you control over the size, so again, you can experiment with this setting for more extreme vocal effects.

Reason’s slice markers allow for all sorts of stretching and warping, although abusing the software to affect the sound in this way is slightly more involved, as Reason’s automatic warping doesn’t seem to allow you to degrade it in the way you can in Logic or Ableton. Luckily there’s another neat trick you can do instead to approximate the Jungle time stretch effect – and this trick will work in any DAW you like: First, you load your sample up, then in your sequencer draw a long line of 32nd notes next to each other, each with zero attack and release. If you then press play on the sequencer and automate the sample start point, it will produce a fair approximation of the Jungle time-stretch sound as the sample continually re-starts from a slightly different point. Adding a little delay and reverb will help mesh the sound together. You may also find that a hint of flanger can also add an authentic metallic sheen to your sound.

As an additional option, there’s also a very good freeware plugin called Akaizer that’s available for all platforms (Windows, Linux and OS X) which can time stretch (and/or pitch shift) any WAVE or AIFF sound file in the style of the ‘cyclic’ time stretch which featured on old Akai sound samplers, like the S950 / S1000 / S2000 / S3000 series. It’s definitely worth checking out and in our tests yielded some pretty authentic sounding results. However, please be aware that as Akaizer is freeware, it’s not supported by 64bit systems and may not work with your current OS.

The Jungle time-stretched vocal is a hugely evocative sound that can instantly transport you back to the mid to late-90s club scene. However, it is also a technique that still sounds unarguably futuristic and your DAW will allow you enough control over the various parameters to take this technique and develop it way further if you wish. Alternatively, you can easily achieve that classic sound and give your tunes that 90’s Jungle flavour with ease. Get up and get stretching!

We take a closer look at one of the simplest yet most effective sampling techniques to have emerged from dance music: the filtered disco loop.

Filters have long been revered by electronic music producers. Although they were originally designed as tone controls to address particular sonic problems, dance music producers came along and misused filters in ways that took them far from their intended purpose. It was Chicago producer DJ Pierre who first bought the squelchy delights of a decent filter to the attention of other beatmakers. His tweaking of the filter cut off and resonance controls on his Roland 303 on 1987’s ‘Acid Trax’ by Phuture created the new genre of acid house and filters have been used extensively in dance music ever since. Although the very first samplers had no synthesis functions at all, it didn’t take long for manufacturers to begin making samplers with filters, envelopes and LFOs, bringing a whole new suite of sonic possibilities to working with samples.

Music Sounds Better With Filters

The filtered disco loop is a technique that has been used countless times in dance music and which never fails to work on a packed dance floor. You can hear it used in Pete Heller’s ‘Big Love’, Stardust’s ‘Music Sounds Better With You’ or Pepe Braddock’s sublime ‘Deep Burnt’. Essentially, this technique takes a sample loop and then puts it through a low pass filter. The audio then sounds muffled, with no top and very little mid-range, as though you’re listening to it through a wall while it’s being played at a house party next door. Then slowly the filter opens up to gradually reveal the rest of the frequencies. Careful manipulation of the filter on a track can tease and tantalise a crowd before delivering a knock-out blow. It’s a simple but brilliant technique that has destroyed dance floors for years, largely because it is a hugely effective way of building and then releasing tension in a song. The use of the filter to tease an audience with a disco loop was so popular, it became the basis of an entire genre, in the shape of French house.

To get this technique working in your tracks, you’ll need to understand what filters do. Although they perform a similar role to EQ in that both adjust the tone, filters work in a different way. EQ boosts or reduces a range of frequencies, filters let audio above a certain frequency pass whilst attenuating anything outside those limits. So a filter doesn’t just either boost or cut a particular frequency like an EQ, it entirely removes all the frequencies below or above a certain limit. It’s the changing of this limit – the moving of the cutoff frequency by the producer during a filter sweep – that provide the characteristic sound of this technique. There are a few different types of filters, but here we’re going to be looking at the low pass filter, which, as it name suggests, lets the low frequencies pass whilst attenuating the rest of the frequency spectrum.

“None Shall Pass!”

One of the key things to consider when using filters in your productions is the slope of the filter. The slope refers to how – either gently or sharply – the filter cuts off the frequencies and is measured in decibels per octave (‘dB octave’). The filter slope determines the reduction of signals outside the ‘pass’ frequency and gives a filter its particular sonic character. Generally, this slope will range from 12dB to 24dB per octave. If a 12dB filter is set to 100Hz, then any audio an octave below that at 50Hz will be reduced by 12dB, and any audio an octave below that at 25Hz would be reduced by 24dB and so on.

For the purposes of making a looped disco sample into a fat pumping dancefloor destroyer, all we really need to know is that the steeper the slope, the more pronounced the effect of the filter and, when used in tandem with higher resonance settings, the more intense the ‘squelch’ effect of the filter. Essentially you would use a lower slope for gentle tonal shaping, and a higher slope for performing an ‘in your face’ filter sweep.

Your DAW will have a number of filter types available and there are plenty of decent filter plug-ins on the market, but in Logic and Ableton the auto filter defaults to a 24db low pass and in Reason, the ECF-24 standard filter is a 12db low pass. In Ableton Live you can drag an Auto Filter from the effects onto the sample you want to filter. In Logic, you can select the track you want to filter, re-route the audio to an empty bus and add the AutoFilter to the track that Logic will create. In Reason, you can just right click on the instrument you want to filter and add a filter unit from the menu.

If you’re after the true sound of French filtered house, you like the tactile interaction of physically tweaking the controls, and you’re feeling particularly flush with cash (or maybe you just hate money and you want less of it), then you could invest in one of the genuine filter units used by Daft Punk and their peers. Your choices are; The Mutator, made by Mutronics, based on technology originally developed for analogue synthesis in the 60s and which was the go-to stereo analog filter and envelope follower for many of the bands and musicians who shaped the 90s sound.

Another option is the MFC42, a true analog filter module designed by Akai for their MPC-series gear. You can use it to process any sound source since it has basic 1/4″ inputs and outputs and MIDI. It has genuine analog filters for that warmer tone with Lowpass, Highpass, Bandpass, and Notch filter types. You can find them on eBay from time to time for a price that isn’t too crazy (around £800) and they really do have a wonderful sound which instantly transports you back to the squelchy funk of the filter-disco-loop era.

Unfortunately, in the case of The Mutator, an important component was discontinued by the manufacturer which effectively killed production. Since then, it’s became very much a collector’s piece, and the only way artists/engineers can get their hands on it is via auctions or eBay. We’ve seen some go for as high as an eye-watering £2800. There is a Softube plug-in version, although as we haven’t tested it we couldn’t definitively say whether it’s an accurate recreation, but Softube overall are an excellent developer so there’s a good chance it’s very close.

In terms of what you’re applying the filter to, you may want to process the entire track, an individual sample, or a group of samples. Some producers leave a hat or a clap unfiltered to hold the rhythm together and some leave the kick outside the filter sweep so that all the low-end energy doesn’t get over-amplified during the sweep. Other tracks feature filter sweeps where every single part is filtered – it’s a creative decision, depending on how you want your tune to sound and what effect you’re aiming for.

If you’re going to filter the entire song rather than just individual samples, in Ableton you can simply drag a filter onto the main outputs, and in Reason you can right-click on the hardware interface unit and drop a filter straight onto it. In Logic, you’d just select all the parts, re-route to an empty bus and add the filter there. Alternatively, you can use Logic’s ‘summing stack’ command. The Autofilter in Logic allows you to adjust the level of dry and wet signal and for this technique, you need to have the signal entirely wet. LIVE and Logic’s auto filters should default to 100% wet, and Reason’s ECF has no dry/wet controls at all.

Cutoff And Resonance: A Deadly Duo

Once you’ve got your filter in place (and you’ve remortgaged your house for the Mutator), you’re ready to get tweaking. Moving the cut off control anti-clockwise will slowly reduce more and more of the top and then middle frequencies until you’re just left with the lows and that characteristic muffled effect. Turn the control completely to the left and the sound will disappear entirely. Now you can start to increase the resonance whilst sweeping and you should start to hear some serious squelching as the filter moves through the frequencies. This is caused by the resonance control adding a little boost to the frequencies just above the cut off point. It might be tempting to simply turn the resonance up high but you have to beware – high levels of resonance can provoke extremely loud volume peaks as you perform your sweep.

This is a genuine health and safety issue if you’re working on headphones, and can also cause you to shred your monitors if you’re not careful, so we would strongly advise caution at this stage. We would also recommend using a compressor to reign in the inevitable peaks, and maybe also try adjusting the resonance up and down manually as you sweep the cut off to maintain a more even volume level. Depending on the audio material and the behaviour of the particular filter you’re using, you may also find that you need to turn the resonance down once the filter is fully open to avoid a drop in volume or an over-sizzled sample. In many cases, it works well to automate the resonance along with the cutoff for maximum character and vibe. It can also help your record to feel a lot more human and ‘Alive.’ That was a Daft Punk reference, in case you missed it.

The trick is to use the filter to give little glimpses of the sample and to hint at its existence to build tension. You can do this with smooth sweeps or experiment with more radical tweaks – experimentation is half the fun. The cutoff and resonance controls are a gateway into hours of filtering and squelching and can be a key part of a live performance too. It’s such an effective technique that entire records have been built around nothing more than a filtered disco loop and a beat. Hell, some artists have built an entire career from a beat and clever filtering of a choice groove. However, while sampling chunks of old disco records might have been the route to filter-house success in the past, major record labels now have entire departments dedicated to tracking down copyright infringements. Luckily, there are now enough high-quality royalty-free sounds on the market for producers to be able to build their own disco-style loops using drum loops and individual instruments. All you need are some keys, a guitar lick, some bass, and perhaps some strings and/or brass which you can ‘mix down’ or bounce in place to create a stereo file. From there you can add some tape saturation, vinyl crackle, and any other lo-fi style processing that your heart desires, in order to get closer to that ripped-from-your-record-collection feel. You can then resample it again, and filter it to your heart’s content. That way, you get to keep all the royalties and publishing when your filter-disco-house track goes global next summer.

Continuing our look at the current boom in external hardware samplers, we review three of the best machines released in recent years that come in around the £500 price point.

Akai MPC Touch

First up we have a great sampling box courtesy of a company with some serious heritage in the world of sampling. Of course, the Touch is not the newest addition to the MPC range but it’s the one released in recent years that fits into the budget remit for this article. and it is a beautiful machine. What set it apart from its competitors upon it’s release was the large (seven inch!) colour display multi-touch screen, which allows tactile iPad-esque editing of samples, and allows the user to draw, edit and work with samples in a visually intuitive way. It’s a very well-spec’d controller rather than a standalone sampler, so you’ll be using it in conjunction with your computer. You should be able to pick one of these up for under £500 and it’s really a wonderful entry into the world of Akai and MPC products if you haven’t yet made that leap. If you’re after a standalone machine, then the Live or soon-to-be-released Live II will fit the bill for you, as will their pricier flagship product, the MPC X.

Akai MPCs were always famed for their workflow and the MPC Touch doesn’t disappoint in this area. Aside from the smart screen, the Touch also comes with 16 full colour (extremely) responsive pads, four small and one large encoder. You also get two sets of back-lit soft buttons, transport controls underneath the screen and bank selection controls above the pads.

The Touch allows sampling directly through the 1/4 inch jack audio inputs or through the USB, and it comes with 1/4 audio outs to allow you to further process your sounds with external gear. You also get MIDI in and out and a headphone socket. It’s slightly larger than the average laptop and there are no battery options with this beast, it will only run on mains through a wall socket.

As you might expect, it ships with 20gb of samples (that’s over 20,000 sounds) and also comes with a decent set of FX, which can also be controlled via the screen through a Korg Kaoss-type ‘XYFX’ mode. Indeed, it is the touch screen which really sets the Touch apart from its rivals at this price point, providing an intuitive and tactile approach to working with sampling – using it in tandem with the machine’s onboard step sequencer can also be an extremely fruitful way of working if you enjoy the particular constraints of step sequencing.

The strengths of the MPC Touch are simple – the workflow is superb and the touch-screen brings an element of intuitiveness that you just don’t get with a standard screen. Equally, there are multiple ways to do the same things, using the screen, the buttons, the encoders etc. It’s also a great looking piece of kit too and comes highly recommended: With all of the new models that Akai have released in the last 2/3 years, picking one of these up now second-hand represents good value for money and is more than capable of providing a creative working environment away from your computer.

Roland SP404A

Roland call their latest incarnation of their SP404 series a ‘Linear Wave Sampler’, and is marketed primarily as a live module. Although its similar in price to the MPC Touch, it’s a smaller and more portable machine, and its a standalone box too, so you could easily use it in a DJ booth without having to have a laptop with you.

You get 16 backlit pads and a bunch of other buttons, with four encoders at the top of the machine. In terms of the screen, the SP404A provides a basic ‘calculator-type’ 3 digit display. Samples get in via smart card (up to 32 gig – that’s like a couple of days of sampling time), via your computer or through either the mic or line inputs. You get 16-bit sampling with 29 of Roland’s superb DSP effects to play with as well, all of which can be adjusted from the front panel, so instant extreme sample mangling is easily attainable.

Aside from the standard delays and reverbs you also get a voice transformer – good for spooky robot voices – an isolater, a looper, tape echo, chorus, flanger, phaser, distortion, ring modulator, pitch, wah and more, and you can resample with effects too. It even comes with a built-in microphone and comes bundled with a quality sound library too.

The pads, although small, are responsive and most of the main functions are easily accessible, despite the limits of the display screen. In terms of looks and intuitive creativity, both the Touch and the Maschine MK3 (see below) edge ahead, but remember the SP404A can be used as a stand-alone sampler/sequencer which the other two can’t – and in terms of live sampling, looping and jamming, the 404A is very capable and enjoyable to use bit of kit.

Native Instruments’ Maschine MK3

NI Maschine, in its original incarnation, originally hit the market in 2009 and was something of a game-changer at the time. The MK3 is an update of the original and provides the user with 16 great big pads, 8 smaller backlit pads, a row of eight encoders, one larger push-encoder and two high-resolution screens as well as a touch strip controller too. It’s a very sleek design, and the high res screens, although not as instantly rewarding as the touchscreen on the Touch, are a classy feature.

The audio ins and outs are on 1/4 inch jacks and you also get a mic in, MIDI in and out, USB and a pedal control input too. It can run on mains or powered via USB. Like the Touch, and unlike the SP404A, the MK3 is used in conjunction with your computer. It’s a great looking piece of kit, and along with its modern design, you get pristine 96kHz / 24-bit audio too.

It’s a good performance instrument as well as studio tool and one feature we were particularly impressed with is the ‘lock’ function which takes a snapshot of your production, enabling you to then tweak and twist to your heart’s desire before hitting lock again to return everything to where it was. Perfect for live jamming and for creating huge builds and breakdowns.

Maschine MK3 comes bundled with an 8GB sound library, as well as the 25GB Komplete 11 library collection, all of which should keep you occupied for a while. There’s also plenty of expansions to choose from and new ones being released regularly. Navigation around the menus and functions is smooth and the screens give you plenty of visual feedback too. The layout is well designed, providing plenty of opportunity for immediate improvisation and what NI call ‘classic groovebox workflow’. The MK3 has a particularly impressive build quality and overall its design is extremely sleek.

The next best options, such as the outstanding products from Elektron, other models from Akai, and Pioneer’s Toraiz, require quite a significant increase in budget. At this price point of around £500, it becomes more challenging to directly compare machines as apart from comparing functionality, each box also engenders a particular creative approach. Your choice of external sampler will be at least partly driven by how you like to work. If you need a standalone sampler that you can use independently, then the Roland SP404A is the one – it’s also the cheapest of the three samplers we looked at. It’s also likely that your choice will be swayed by the genre of music you’re making too – the SP-404 is a mainstay of lo-fi hip-hop producers, whist Maschine sees heavy use within the house and techno community. If you want to work with a DAW and your computer, then both the Touch and Maschine MK3 have a lot going for them. The Touch’s screen lends itself to creativity, and it’s a superb bit of kit for improvisation. Maschine is also a very capable and classy performance machine. In order to write this review, we went down to GAK, our local pro-audio shop, and played around with the various samplers – we would advise you do the same to find which workflow works best for you. Whichever choice you make, we can firmly recommend any of these three machines.

If you’re looking to spend a little less, please check out our recommendations for hardware samplers below £300 here.

The UK Garage style of Cut-Up Vocals is one of the genre’s distinctive elements, and the skippy, soulful refrains can be an extremely effective technique that can really revitalise a remix or an original project. We look into producing your own cut-up vocal, UK Garage style.

The Garage cut-up vocal is a technique where a producer takes a vocal sample, slices it up into tiny parts and then re-constructs it into a staccato vocal melody, sometimes even mutating it so there are no actual recognisable words. It’s a sound which came to characterise UK Garage and has since been picked up and used in many other genres too.

A very early example of this technique is the vocal refrain in MK’s Dub of Doom of Nightcrawler’s ‘Push The Feeling On’ from 1992, a tune so successful that you can still hear it being played any weekend in clubs up and down the country. US producer Todd Edwards further developed the technique incorporating folk, disco and even samples of gregorian monks into his productions. Records like his 1996 release ‘Saved My Life’ feature a set of vocal samples that have been chopped up, filtered, panned, pitched and re-arranged, before being quantised in his distinctive skippy style.

In the late nineties, Sunship picked up the baton, lending his immediately recognisable vocal reworking to the likes of Craig David, Mis-Teeq, M-Dubs, and so many others, with probably the best example also resulting in his biggest hit, ‘Flowers’ for Sweet Female Attitude.

There are two basic approaches to producing this effect – you either chop up your audio sample by hand, or, thanks to the power of modern technology, you can let your software analyse the audio and chop it up for you. If you’re doing it by hand (which we’d recommend since that’s the authentic way) take the time to get in close when trimming the samples so that you aren’t leaving tiny gaps at the beginning of the clips, as these may start to be noticeable and result in sloppy timing when you come to quantising. Any unintended gaps at the beginning of audio samples can lead to a naturally swung,rough groove that’s not in perfect time and so lends itself well to the sensibilities of garage.

Vibes N’ That…

If you prefer, your DAW will happily assist you and make the process much simpler and take less time: One quick method in Ableton LIVE is to right click an audio sample and select ‘Slice to New Midi Track’ – LIVE will analyse the audio and cut it up into slices (based on timing or on transients, you decide) giving you a pre-sliced set of vocals to jam with. In Logic you can use the transient detection engine by right-clicking on an audio sample and selecting ‘Convert Regions to New Sampler Track’, and again, you can specify to split the audio up by transients or by a specified note setting. Alternatively, you can convert your audio to a REX file and map the individual slices to particular notes.

This technique usually involves small snippets of sound rather than full sentences or even words – so the first task once you’ve chopped up your sample, is to listen through and see if you can identify any interesting sounds or textures you might want to use. And don’t ignore the parts between the words, the breaths and also the plosives (the ‘p’ sound at the beginning of a word) can be really punchy and form great little percussive details, especially when compressed. Use a combination of softer vowel sounds and consonants which tend to be a bit more percussive. Ad-libs tend to be very useful for this purpose, since ad-libs are generally sung in the most emotive and expressive way and so lend themselves well to creating new, soulful phrases.

Once you’ve selected a few sounds, map them across your keyboard or assign them to the pads of your controller and you can jam along to your track or move them around on the screen while the track is playing to find something that works. This is very much trial and error but the beauty and fun here is that once you abandon the original meaning of the words there are no ‘wrong’ ways to do it. Once you’ve got a basic pattern down, you can experiment with adding additional layers of vocals to fill in any gaps.

A little reverb or delay will help the vocal samples sit in the mix – but you might also want to consider processing each vocal part individually, applying different effects, panning, EQ or filtering to each clip. You could experiment with a long-tailed reverb on one part and a short gated verb on another, and then pan them opposite each other. A further step would then be to automate the effects so that the slices of vocal popping in and out of the mix mutate as the track plays – perhaps through a phaser with a slow envelope or an automated low pass filter.

Pitch Perfect

Pitch shifting is another important big part of this technique. UK Garage was full of ‘chipmunk’ vocals, where the voice was artificially pitched-up to almost comical effect. But producers also began altering the pitch of individual vocal snippets. Applying individual pitch adjustments to your vocal slices changes the human voice into just another lead instrument that you can use to compose riffs or melodies with. Getting this to work in your productions will likely involve a little time – you’ll need to transpose individual sounds to change the melodic content and experiment in your piano roll window with moving the samples around to achieve a result you like. And remember you don’t just have to pitch vocals up, pitched down vocals can sound superb too, and the contrast between vocal clips that have been pitched up and down can sound particularly effective.

A lot of producers will compress their sampled vocals heavily, to ensure that all the sounds are punchy, clear and cut through the mix. The human voice is notorious for having a large dynamic range, so, depending on the source material of course, it’s likely that your sampled vocals parts will benefit from some compression to even out the dynamics.

Swings And Roundabouts

There is one more crucial element it achieving the Garage cut-up vocal sound, and that is quantisation. Once you warp the words so that they are no longer intelligible and turn the vocal sample into just another instrument, then you can quantise it to any setting you wish. Garage is characterised by its heavily swung rhythms and this swing is often applied to the cut-up vocals to give them that same skippy feel. When you’ve got your vocal snippets in place, try 16th note quantisation but with substantial swing – perhaps 60% – and see how it sounds. It’s really a question of personal preference and plenty of DAWs come with a number of different good quality quantise presets that are worth trying out too. To get the vocals sitting tight in the arrangement, use the same swing setting as you use for your drums, or lower the swing setting on the vocal samples for a looser feel.

The human voice provides a rich tapestry of textures and rhythms for the producer, especially once you can move away from recognisable words into using the voice as just another piece of audio to be manipulated. Just listen to producers like Sunship, Scott Diaz, Four Tet or Burial, who’ve finessed and developed the chopped up vocal template in new exciting and emotive directions.

Try chopping, pitching, panning, EQing and quantising some cut up vocals today, and see if you can get some of that UK Garage swagger and swing into your productions. Check out our selection of garage packs here.