When Beat-Slicing Goes Wrong

For nearly 15 years (holy crap, can it be that long?!), Propellerhead's REX (and subsequent REX 2) format has been the industry standard for chopping up drum loops. The files, created in the company's ReCycle software automatically detects attack transients in a sound file and uses that as the basis for cutting the loop up into its individual hits. It can also automatically create a MIDI file for you to import into your DAW of choice to play the sliced loop back perfectly. As you might imagine, this MIDI data is totally editable, which means you can edit and twist the beats into totally new variations that nature never intended.

What's cool about this, is that the MIDI file is in no way 'married' to the original beat. So one method of coming up with interesting 'happy accidents' is to use the MIDI file from one beat, to trigger the slices of a completely different beat. The results are totally unpredictable, so it takes a lot of trial and error before you're likely to find something that works well, but that's half the fun. Have a go at it, and you might come up with a killer new loop that inspires you to finish that track you've been putting off finishing.

Abusive Recycling

Sometimes the most interesting sounds in electronic music come from using software in ways its creators never intended. It's easy to get boxed in to what a piece of software is 'supposed' to do, that it might never occur to you to try utilizing it new ways.
Propellerhead's venerable Recycle has been the dominant drum loop-slicing utility pretty much since it first came out way back in 1994. I always thought they sold it short by calling it loop slicer, though. Sure, the transient detection makes it ideal for using with drum loops, but if you are experimentally minded, just about any sound source (provided it is not too long) can be sliced to bits and reassembled as well. Sounds that work best are ones that evolve a bit over their length. Load the sound into Recycle, turn up the sensitivity, and Recycle will insert slices in odd places as it tries desperately to find transients. Export the sliced samples and bring it into any sampler that supports REX files, and try playing a random pattern using the sounds. The abrupt cuts and timbral changes can be really striking if arranged correctly, and taken to ridiculous extremes can get you into the territory of the Clicks n' Cuts subgenre of IDM. Try processing each slice individually and doing other crazy stuff to take the sounds even further into mutant territory. Try it on vocals too! It can be fun rearranging the lyrics of a song to say something entirely different than the original.