This tutorial is taken from our bestselling ebook 'Beat Making on the MPC2500
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Rebuilding Decay Tails on Snares
You can download the files for this tutorial here .After chopping a snare from a loop, you'll find that in most cases, the decay/reverb tail gets lost - here's how to get it back!
Re-building reverb/decay tails on snares
Chopping snares from a drum loop usually has one big problem - the reverb tail on the snare is usually chopped off because it continues decaying in the background as the next hi hat of the loop comes in. So how do we extract a nice snare sound with a natural sounding decay tail?
First off we'll use the example of sound 'SNARET' from the tutorial files . Load this snare into memory and assign it to PAD A1 on a new, blank program.
Have a listen to the snare - it doesn't end very nicely, it's
quite abrupt (just as many snares sound when chopped out of a loop). To
recreate the reverb tail for this sample, you could try the following.
Open up the sample in the
TRIM screen. Highlight the St: point and using the jog wheel or Q1 slider,
set a new start point around 6000 - this basically ignores the initial portion
of the snare and just leaves us with a tail section press PLAY FROM (pad
15) to preview this.
As you can hear (headphones will help), there is just
a small amount of snare tail just
audible. Select EDIT and jog wheel to EXTRACT. Highlight 'New sample:' and give
this sample the name 'TAIL'. Press DO IT to create our TAIL sample.
Now return to our
'SNARET' sample and return the start point to 0.
Go to your new program
and assign your 'TAIL' sample to pad A2. Open up the Amp Envelope screen
(highlight Lvl and WINDOW) and change the attack parameter from 0 to 9 - this
will smooth out the start of the tail sample so it blends nicely with our
'SNARET' sample.
Now select PAD A1,
highlight Lvl and change the decay value from 5 to something around 30 - this
will also help our two samples blend nicely together.
Open up your sequencer
and start a new blank sequence - call it 'TAIL'. Set the BPM to 80 and set your
timing to '1/32(3)'. Open up STEP EDIT, press OVERDUB, and at 1.00.00, add a
copy of pad A1 at full 127 velocity (just press pad A1).
Now press the right hand
STEP button (SHIFT and BAR) to advance the step editor forward to the next
quantise point (01.01.08). This time, place a copy of your tail sample from PAD
A2. Set its velocity to around 80. Move on to the next quantise point and
repeat this, except this time reduce the volume to around 60. Continue this for
around 10 quantise points, gradually decreasing the volume of the TAIL sample
each time until you end at a velocity of 1.
Alternatively, you can
enable Auto step increment to avoid having to press the STEP button each
time. To do this, in STEP EDIT, highlight the top left time field and press
WINDOW.

Set Auto Step increment
to YES. You can leave the duration field AS PLAYED as we are only dealing
with a one shot sample. Now you can return to your sequence and each time you
enter a note event, your MPC will automatically progress onto the next step.
Press PLAY START on your
sequencer. You should hear a pretty
realistic reverb tail. You might need to mess around with the volume settings
of the TAIL instances in order to produce the most realistic decay curve, but
you can certainly hear what a difference these additional samples make.
If you would like to hear
my version, simply load up the project file 'TAIL.
At this stage, lets turn this sequence into a unique
sample using the internal re-sampling feature (as seen in the last chapter). You
may wish to go to OTHER (MODE and pad 10) and set the MPC master level to 0dB,
thus ensuring your resampled audio is fairly loud.
Go to the RECORD screen (MODE
and pad 5). In the top left of the screen is the Input parameter highlight
this and select MAIN OUT. Now go to Mode and change this to MONO L (we only
need to use mono for a snare). Leave everything else as it is.

Arm the sampler (RECORD
F6) and press PLAY START on your sequencer as soon as the sound plays, your
sampler will begin recording. Once the sound has played through, press STOP on
the sequencer and then press KEEP on our sample screen.
Go to TRIM and edit this
sample you might want to normalise it also (EDIT, NORMALIZE). Name this
sample TAIL-FINAL you can find my version in the tutorial folder.
What's next? If you found this MPC2500 tutorial helpful, you should check out the ebook it came from, as there's 51 more tutorials covering subjects like sequencing tricks, sampling techniques, recording tips and drum kit building processes, all designed to make you a better MPC beat producer in no time! Get more info on 'Beat Making on the MPC2500
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