Chopping Beats = Virtual Sampler or Groove Clips? esp. w/ Recycle
Hi there,
I've been a longtime Cakewalk user (since it was just midi!), and spent ~10 years (mid 1990s-mid 2000s) making beats w/ hardware samplers & external machines... but have since come back after a long break (mid-2000s to now) and am getting started again.
I know a popular answer to my kind of question will always be "whatever is better for your workflow"... but i'm interested in getting some feedback from people who have been doing lots more Beat-Creation purely 'in the box' on this question =
My drum-programming habit was always to take drum breaks off vinyl, chop them up in Recycle, and dump them to an external Akai sampler, where i'd program the beat in midi on the computer.
However, doing that same process "in the box" (with software samplers) seems redundant to me, given that Sonar can read REX2 files directly, and import them as 'Groove Clips', which i have little experience with.
Currently, i'm still doing something similar to what i've always done - chopping up breaks in Recycle, then dumping to Battery (native instruments drum sampler), and doing the pattern-editing in MIDI.
But i've been wondering - why bother with the sampler at all? Its occurring to me that the internal timing in the drum break is probably better-preserved by working directly with the audio-clips, rather than resequencing the pattern in MIDI, where things will get quantized.
Do people have any preferences for one over the other? are there still any advantages to doing things this way with a software sampler? or can drum-programming via Groove clips reduce system overhead, and provide better timing?
I'm sure someone has probably asked this question before, but my digging produced nothing. Thanks to anyone who can provide any insight, or re-direct me to other threads.
Cheers,
ceo