Akai Force Tutorial: The Octatrack Random Sample Slice & Crossfader Technique on Force

hello welcome back i hope you're doing well recently i watched one of jay hoskins videos which i'll link to in the description where he took a drum break put it into the electron octatrack chopped it up into slices and then use the octatracks lfo on a sample and hold setting to play random slices of the drum break this made for a really interesting slightly chaotic kind of always changing drum pattern which sounded great so i thought i'd have a go at doing a similar thing on the force to see if it was possible which it is to a degree and also to see if it's possible to make it sound good in a performance as well so that's what we're going to do so the first thing i've done is create or sorry choose a drum break and you'll see here it's called break 125 125 relates to the project oh sorry to the sample tempo the first thing we're going to do is change our project tempo to the same value of 125 which we do by holding down tempo and changing the dial the reason i've done that is because i'm going to use the regions function to chop the sample up which only works if the sample tempo and the project tempo are the same obviously you can do it any way you want and this is just an easy way to do it for this example other thing to bear in mind when choosing your sample this will obviously sound better if your sample's got loads of variations in it if it's playing the same thing all the time then you won't hear any difference so now we've done that we're going to go to chop and regions and we can see that it's automatically chosen 16. for this example we're just going to go down to eight if we press pad view we can see it's chopped it up into nice sections for us so what we're going to do now is transform that or convert that into slices so that the slices go into the sample ball so we do that by holding shift and convert and we're going to go to new track with new samples and you can see here it's going to crop each of those slices for us and create a new track press do it and now here we've got that track so if we go into note mode now we're immediately going to delete that track because we don't want it set up like that we're going to set up a new track and use different layers so what we've got at the moment is an audio track with our original sample on it just playing in a complete loop we're now going to create another drum track and we're going to go to track edit and samples now what we're going to do is each pad or on a drum kit can have four different layers of sample we're going to apply a different slice to each of these layers which we do by tapping on it going to streaming and see these s1 to s8 these are the slices that we just created so we're going to put one to eight sorry one to four on our first pad so this is a bit boring to watch number four now on our second pad which has gone back to nothing because there's nothing on it they're going to put five to six on these layers six seven what's going on there hey is that right yes i don't know something weird's going on there why's that done that i don't know anyway that's done what we want to do sorry for that little mistake so now we've got um all of those four the first four slices stacked on pad one and the second four stacked on pad so now we're going to select that pad and we're going to change the layer play from velocity to random and that means that every time this pad is activated by the sequencer or by our finger it will choose one of those four pads at random and we're going to do the same for pad two so now both of our pads are going to play a random sample okay so now we've got our two pads set up each has four rotating or randomly playing samples on it we're going to create a clip for this track and we're going to edit it just for this example so it's nice and short down to one bar now we're going to select our first pad and go into our step sequencer mode and put that there then we're going to select our second pad and put it there now when we play this clip it's going to play each of these pads individually and each time it will play a different sample first thing we're going to do is mute our original tracks we don't want to hear that at the moment [Music] as you can hear with each time one of these notes plays we're getting a different sample the impact of this effect will be different depending on the sample you pick so now that we've got our randomized layer set up we need to figure out a way of making this usable and there's actually quite an easy way of doing it if we mute our random randomized track and just listen to our looping drum break if we go to clip editor we can find a section of the um of the drum break as it is that is uh steady which has no changes in it really which i've done by reducing the loop length to one [Music] so we've now got a really nice steady drum break um which we can use to alternate in and out so if we go to mixer what we're going to do is put our crossfader all the way to a and we're going to make our steady drum break um on side a of the cross fader and our chaotic um randomized uh track on side b of the cross fader we're going to unmute it and now we're going to play so now we've got our steady drum brake going [Music] but we can very easily switch to our chaotic one if we want to use it as a fill-in we can learn two together if we want extra chaos then we can just drop immediately back to our steady drum break [Music] and you can exacerbate this effect by putting a load of effects on one or the other of the tracks so you can see as a principle here it's very easy to build kind of an evolving drum pattern using the randomized slices method but if you have a counterpoint to that being the simple drum break which has no uh variation in it you can use it as a fill-in method um it's just a really useful uh kind of technique for building some variation into her performance anyway i hope you found that useful sorry it went on a little bit longer than i expected it to um there'll be some more of these in the pipeline so if you would like to see them please like and subscribe and all that youtube jazz cheers thanks for watching

Channel: Maxipok Music

Views: 634

Keywords: Akai Force Tutorial, force tutorials, akai force samples, random samples, akai force drum breaks

Id: iqTd4cSu-Mk

Length: 7min 35sec (455 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 30 2021