One thing I'm trying to figure out is what to do about loops. Main thing is maintaining the sound of the sampler, which is the whole point of using one in the first place.. ie recording loops in pitched up and hot, so when you pitch back down to normal you get the grit as was the way bitd. But then there's the issue of matching the pitched back down loop with the tempo of the project. Not quite sure of the right way to go about this yet. Maybe easiest would be record in pitched up an octave, that'd be double the speed, so have ableton pitch warp the loop to the desired tempo. Print it. Turn warp off, pitch it up an octave, record hot into the sampler and then pitch back down an octave in sampler's engine for playback. Need to check if pitching up an octave is the sweet spot for optimum grit. But then I guess it's just a case of pitching back down whatever the amount you pitched up to start with. So no harm in trying out a bunch of different pitches. A bit convoluted but not too big of a deal.
Then there's chopping. Definitely something quicker to handle itb, so prolly just gonna take the above treated loop via SD card back to the comp, chop it there and maybe see if there's a prog that can easily make Akai programs and have them laid out across the keys and put that back into the Akai. The SD hookup in the sampler makes a lot of this stuff much easier. Still nowhere near as fast as just doing everything in itb, but a decent half way point.
It'd be cool to be able to just have a library of all that stuff ready to go, maybe with a bunch of different tempos for each loop so if I'm on a tune in the 150 range and want a chopped Apache it'd be quick to dial it up.
All this stuff is to be thought out and set up so I spend as little time fucking around on the sampler when in tune making mode as possible. That's what I meant about prep in the earlier post. Have done stuff like this before, totally laborious shit like going through one shot drum samples and whittling them down from 500 to 30 of the ones I know I'll definitely want to use. Saves so much time once they're sorted. Have them all categorized so when I have a rough idea of what type of kick I want it takes a couple seconds to get the right one for the tune. We'll worth it in the end. But with loops it's a bit more specific cos you have tempo to consider.
Will figure it out eventually. The long term plan is to have the Akai be like a drum module. Just turn it on, load up the kit or loop and trigger from in ableton. No messing around. I've got an Emu which is way more in depth for sound design and is a lot of fun and sounds great but again am thinking the focus should be more on loading it with sounds ready to go so when in writing mode it's just a case of turning it on and flipping through presets..
