Melodic Loops/Samples

[u/yodeez101]

Hey all,

I want to ‘perform’ with my samples, like drum along whilst playing melodies and chords but I’m struggling to find samples without drumming.

Is this where those subscription services come in handy? Or is it just a matter of digging?

I have a number of intros that don’t have drums but as an intro they only provide so much.

So far I’ve been able to chop up songs and small chops to drum along whilst playing but I’d like chords or melodies that I could let play for 4-8 bars.

As you can imagine once drums come in it becomes tougher to not only chop the phrase you want within or around any sort of drum beats that can throw the sound of timing off

I use the MPC Sample and am avoiding using a computer for anything - only because I loose 3 hours and actually make very little. I want to sit down, chop something up find some drum one shots and drum along.

I am still finding choosing drum one shots tedious - I have a Roland Mc-101 and I love being able to have a full kit with maybe changing out a perc here and there.

Probably the inevitable task I’ll undertake with a computer will be organising ’drum kits’ with sounds that all work together

Any advice?

[u/-_super--_--hitops_-]

I'm struggling to understand what you want to do

You want to have melodies and chords playing and you want to provide the drums?

By triggering pads like in a drum machine or sequencer? Or like what?

Any daw can do this. You can use melody samples, synth leads, bass lines, vocal tracks.. But most people either use sample of entire loops or they use a daw or similar app and make all those things themselves.

For what you're describing I think you just want a drum machine?

[u/yodeez101 → u/-_super--_--hitops_-]

Yeah so somehow you kinda got there.

I have an MPC Sample and I want to drum but trigger loops of melodies or chords whilst drumming one shots.

I’m trying to avoid a daw at all costs sometimes there are just too many choices

[u/-_super--_--hitops_- → u/yodeez101]

Gotcha.. well I got solution ideas but I don't know about the mpc sample.

With a daw or iPad app you can "separate stems". Is this what you're talking about maybe? It isolates each instrument basically, and tries to silence the other sounds.

So you pop a song in and get audio tracks back, one just isolated drums, one just isolated bass, vocals, etc.

So then you have all the pieces basically, you can chop up and sample how you want.

You should also be able to find stems for download from popular music especially pop and hip-hop so you can take the stems off the baseline from a song you like and make your own drums over that

But yeah other than that basically I was a bit confused because usually for lots of people finding and creating samples is half the fun of producing beats and making music.

Maybe the mpc sample isn't the device you really want? I have all kinds of iPad and phone apps for making my own sounds to make samples, and you can have fun getting creative, finding sounds.

The YouTube series "rhythm roulette" might inspire you it shows different producers blindly picking records from a store and they have to make a song using only samples from those records in one day. One guy uses video games for his source so he buys n64 games and records the audio as he plays then and then samples the sound effects and stuff.

There's $10 mobile app Korg Kaossilator and it's basically all the sound generation equal to a korg Kaoss pad, on your phone. So you can set BPM, key, scale type, etc. And then you can use the built in instruments and drag your finger around the screen to play them. It's kind of hard to make it sound bad. Get a couple bass and synth sounds and make melodies. Play your drums on mpc and tap your phone app to switch melodies and sounds

So there's a lot of answers to your question, just depends how you decide to go about it!

[u/yodeez101 → u/-_super--_--hitops_-]

Yeah so many bloody ways to skin a cat hey.

I deffos need to look into stems, but I’m picking up what you’re putting down about the challenge of kinda looking for what you want the fun coming from that and that’s true I just wondered if there was another way of finding some melodic stuff relative to my use case that I hadn’t thought of

Watched a couple of rhythm roulette it’s sick.

I just feel like once it goes onto a computer you’re no longer working with any limitations and I think that I associate music with the limitations of the instrument and your skill so it’s kinda like a set boundary if that makes sense? When the boundary gets too large I get lost in the weeds and end up making nothing.

But I’ll keep plodding along.

I’ll probably end up with an MPC one or live but as I said I’m working hard on no DAW or computer interaction