Once defined, the hitpoints can be used in a variety of ways, such as slicing parts into individual clips on the timeline and converting source audio clips to combined audio parts comprised of the slices. A common strategy includes making the detector over-sensitive and then deleting the unwanted hitpoints or, conversely, making it under-sensitive and adding missing hitpoints manually. Hitpoints are defined within the Sample Editor, and can be detected automatically based on the loudness and intensity of the transients within a loop, with a pair of value sliders providing control over these parameters. The standard approach concerns hitpoints, a type of marker used by audio clips in Cubase.
One uses the features of Cubase’s standard Sample Editor (that is, the window that opens when you double-click an audio clip in the timeline), while the other comes courtesy of one of Cubase’s bundled plug-ins, Groove Agent SE. There are two approaches to slicing in Cubase. Modern Cubase, however, has no need for additional software and workflows, as there are a bunch of beat-slicing tools integrated into the DAW. Beat-slicing circumvented these issues completely, and turned out to boast a number of beneficial side effects too: you can change the order the slices play in, apply processing to individual hits within the loop, replace slices with different sounds, analyse the groove of a loop, and much more besides.īack in the day, most people reached for Propellerhead’s ReCycle software for all their beat-slicing requirements, and the REX2 file format created for and used by that software remains a common format for distributing and sharing sliced loops. The technique became popular back in the days of Atari STs and Akai S1000s when, unlike now, computers and samplers couldn’t handle real-time pitch and time processing, and the results of offline pitch and time processing could be sketchy. By virtue of being a MIDI part, the pattern can be played at any tempo without impacting the pitch of the loop.
An accompanying MIDI pattern is created to trigger each slice in the correct order and with the correct relative timing between triggers. To do this, the loop is sliced up into its constituent hits, with each hit assigned to a trigger note in a sampler. The core aim of beat-slicing is to retime loops without affecting their pitch, and to do so without the need of processor-intensive time-stretching and pitch-shifting. It offers much more in the way of creative potential than modern pitch- and time-processing methods, and the practice isn’t prone to the same artefact-heavy warbles and stutters either.
Beat-slicing may be something of an old-school technique but it remains an essential weapon in the producer’s armoury.
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