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 to play when the next hi hat 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. 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 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 (headphone 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 Amp Envelop 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 velocity (127) (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 point, 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, let's turn this sequence into a unique sample using the internal re-sampling feature (as seen in the last chapter). 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.