Essential Maschine Pitch Shift+Timestretch Masterclass 2021!

so this video came after a youtube commenter asked me how do i take a sample that maybe has something rhythmic and change the pitch on that sample but not have that sample speed up as you're moving up the keyboard and in the sampler module there isn't an easy way to do that you can't just switch it to keyboard mode as i'll show you in a second and just start playing different samples and have them say the same speed if you go up different pitches they're going to speed up or they're going to slow down if you go lower so what i want to do in this video is show you the audio module and the sampler module and how both of them work in terms of time stretching and pitch shifting and why you would use one over the other and also when you would use one and then the other so you can use them in connection with each other and get some really interesting results so i'll dig deep into those two modules show you some real world examples and then i'm also going to point you to a few other videos by other amazing youtubers who go into detail and show you different ways of doing some similar things i'm showing you here today two videos that i found that do a lot of the same stuff that i'm going to be showing you today would be blesbeets and fizzent so i'll give you links to their videos make sure you go watch those as well and i'm telling you when you learn this stuff you need to hear it multiple times from different people and eventually something is really going to click so first thing i'll do is go through the audio module and the sampler module specifics and then later on i'm going to show you a little trick that you can use with the audio module on little chunks of samples that aren't bound to a perfect beat so in other words they didn't come from the loop menu they're not exactly two or three bars long or something like that so if you want to skip ahead i'll put a chapter marker in for that and you can get to that little tip which is kind of an essential thing for working with samples and something that's really frustrating when you're first getting into machine okay so first off let's see if we can figure out the audio module and when you would want to use it so i've just got one little loop here that i found in the crate cuts and so we'll go back to crate cuts and we'll dig that one up again it was a piano loop [Music] [Laughter] so we got a really nice four bar loop here and when you go to the loops menu on machine you are by default working with the audio module and when you load a loop up it's going to load right into the audio module the audio module came out a few years ago sort of in answer to problems and desires people had for the sampler module but we've also realized that the audio module is essential for working with clips which is something they added very recently so they've got a plan with all of this stuff and hopefully in the future we'll have more power with things like the audio module because right now if i play this but you'll find out as soon as you play back your song you can't trigger the audio module in the way that i was just doing you know that kind of rhythmic thing and so that's when you would need to be on a sampler module if you want to be triggering like this you know that's when you need to be on a sampler the problem that happens when you switch to the sampler is right now when we listen to this loop the time is being stretched perfectly to the tempo of my project my project is at 79 beats per minute this loop started at 70 beats per minute watch what happens if i take this tempo and speed it way up it keeps the sample in the same key pitches are all exactly the same but it's sped the sample up perfectly to 121 beats per minute and the audio module has two different ways that it can work one is simply loop and so we can see the playback mode right there if you're on the machine hardware itself and you're on the sound level you can see playback right here is set to loop the other option is gate loop mode is the default state for audio modules and if you record something into machine it's going to play back in loop mode if you're using clips it's going to use loop mode unless you change it to gate mode and loop mode automatically drops this loop right onto your project and if you can't see it all you have to do is double click in the empty area the audio shows up right there if you want to get rid of it double click again and it's gone so if you have a whole bunch of loops here as audio modules just double click and it will loop this audio file however long it is for as long as your pattern is so right now my pattern is four bars so what that means is it's going to play this loop in its entirety for the four bars because this loop is actually four bars long and we can see right here under length that says 16. here in the audio playback this actually means beats so you can see it's 16 beats long and it calculates if this is 16 beats long then the tempo is 70 beats per minute based on how long it is watch what happens if i set the length to two beats it's going to play super [Music] now let's go to 32 and it perfectly stretches the tempo to be half what it originally was so we know it's 16 beats long so we'll set it back to 16 beats and watch what happens if i set my length to eight bars of my pattern and double click down here to zoom all the way out so you can see the bright area here for where the original pattern is playing and then you see a darker version of it to show that this is simply just going to loop again from the start now what we can do is click over on the sampling area or i can press s on the keyboard or the sampling button on machine so if i press the sampling button we now see our four bar loop and in this menu here we can go in and do all sorts of destructive edits to it destructive edits are going to go with the audio if you were to switch this into a sampler so i'll show you later why we'd want to switch this into a sampler but also show you what happens if you switch it into a sampler because remember this beat is actually at 70 beats per minute but the audio module is doing the work of stretching this or compressing it to whatever your new tempo is so right now it's it's speeding this loop up to be 80 beats per minute with my project here i can do destructive edits truncate normalize reverse fade ins fade outs all sorts of stuff like that so i can select a range right here just by clicking and dragging on the machine i go over to the second page which is selection range and here i can adjust the start and end of that and then i can do something like fade out right there click that and then now when i get to that spot [Music] i could go in and do something like reverse a chunk right here let's just do that [Music] you can still do a fair bit of editing to audio as an audio module let's not worry too much about all the things that we can do in the audio module here that's maybe subject for another video because all we want to talk about is time stretching and pitch shifting now what can we do while we're in loop mode we can go in and we can change the pitch of it so i could make this one right here [Music] i could make it you know three semitones higher or something like that let's go six semitones higher and then next to that we see the pitch bend and with the pitch bend that just determines how many semitones is it going to move up if you press play and use the pitch bend on your controller and then next we've got a bunch of other things specific to loop mode so first thing we see is re-pitch if you choose re-pitch whatever the tempo of your project is that's going to determine the speed but the pitch is just going to be raised or lowered depending on if your loop is actually playing back faster or slower so it's kind of like a record if you speed up a record faster the tempo goes faster but so does the pitch so if i set it to re-pitch listen to what happens to the loop let's go faster and then let's go slower so you can hear it's keeping the tempo perfectly in time with the project but it's changing the pitch so that could be very useful in certain situations you know you just got to be aware of a situation where you'd want that and then next we go over to stretch and stretch when you change the tempo is going to keep the note at the same spot changes tempo so it's time stretching that chunk of audio to fit the tempo but it's keeping the pitch at the same spot formant is a weird one format is a word that comes up in audio production all the time it kind of relates to the harmonic content and harmonic content refers to the overtones over a pitch so whenever you sing a note or play a note on a synthesizer or a piano or any other instrument there's all of these harmonics that happen at the same time as that fundamental frequency and so when you take some kind of chunk of audio and you pitch shift it up what ends up happening is the harmonic content goes with it and it gets pissed pitch shifted up as well and what ends up happening when you do that is it sounds artificial it actually sounds like chipmunks so format will give you different results and it will change the harmonic content as the note goes up as well to compensate for the the pitch shift and honestly it works really well with some musical stuff and it doesn't work as well on other musical stuff i tried it on a saxophone sample just today and it didn't work the formant mode felt kind of funny but the stretch mode worked perfectly so first try the format mode and then try the stretch mode and just go with whatever sounds the best go to stretch mode [Music] lots of artifacts go to formant here like we kind of lost some of those high notes when we switch to format mode so in that case i'll probably go stretch six semitones lower go on stretch go to formant that sounds weird i'd go a stretch on that one we got some weird artifacts happening on on format mode as well you know what i could do is just very quickly load in a vocal sample and right now it's a sampler and so it's something i haven't mentioned yet if you ever want to switch between a sampler and an audio module all you have to do is click right here on the 4d encoder and then change it to audio or in the software just go up here and change it from sampler to audio let's take the pitch and send it up a few semitones so you hear it on the stretch mode it sounds very chipmunky but on the format mode it actually sounds really good so you can hear how well the format mode works on vocals and then here we can see the tempo and the length which we're going to play around with in a moment and see how we can work with this information to take something that isn't defined by bars and beats and still managed to line it up in our project so that's loop mode the other mode for the audio module is gate mode so in gate mode anytime you hold down the key you're going to hear the loop that is underneath but the weirdest thing about gate mode that you have to understand is it's not going to start it over from the beginning of the sample it's only going to allow whatever audio is just kind of printed down on your track to play back and so that's where i think people get really confused with the audio module it's like so why can't i just why can't i trigger the sample just like that in gate mode and if you press play for anybody who's new to the audio module this would be super confusing i think but the way the gate mode works is it just lets whatever's on that track come out so it's not going to re-trigger the loop and that's why we need to use the sampler module for anything like that but the gate mode is also very valuable and if you look at one of my old videos on comping you'll see how with clips and gate mode we can comp audio in machine just like we would with a traditional daw another neat feature about the gate mode is you can use the keyboard to change the pitch in real time of your audio but just remember it's not going to re-trigger it but it's going to change the notes that are underneath so watch what happens when i press play [Music] it's again it's really confusing you could get some really interesting results but if you were to kind of reverse engineer what you had done or to try and plan something with a loop you'd really have to have some extensive music theory knowledge to understand what chords you're playing and what you've just done you know but sometimes you just get cool accidents so i mean whatever that's gate mode in the audio module let me try and show you one more example of gate mode just so that we can really get an understanding of what the heck that means let's load up something like this a full loop from basement era and i've got it in gate mode already so let's see what happens when i press play and start changing the midi notes let's just set this to a minor scale for a second and we're going down an octave there we go there's our middle c so watch what happens now when i press record [Music] so you can hear what's happening it's pitching those portions of the loop up or down to the appropriate semitone and allowing me to change the underlying chord structure that's happening in that loop and maybe have a change appropriate to the changes of the song this little feature is very powerful but you just have to be aware of when you would want to use it so let's go back to that original question the youtube commenter had what if you have a sample like this [Music] and you just want to be able to trigger it kind of over and over again like this so that's of course when we would want to use the sample module watch what happens when i click the 4d encoder go to plug-in sound you can see it's an audio module i click the 4d encoder change it to a sampler and let's have a listen we can hear that it's slower i'm going to undo that because right now as an audio module it's stretching it from 70 beats per minute or it's actually compressing it it's making it faster to go 80 beats per minute which is what our project tempo is at but the problem with the audio module it doesn't carry that time stretch or the pitch information over when you set it to a sampler and this is super confusing let's let's try that again i'm going to go up to 113 beats per minute we can hear place it back nicely if i play the song playing it nice and fast 113 beats per minute i switch this over to a sampler and i press the sample and it goes back to the slow tempo so it doesn't carry that information with it when it becomes a sampler and so that could be kind of frustrating if you've been working with something you've done something to it and you realize that now this is at the wrong tempo so that's of course when we have to go in and use the time stretching capabilities of the sampler and one more thing i should mention is if i go back to the audio module and i try something like tuning so let's take the tuning and we're gonna set it up six semitones watch what happens when i switch this over to uh sampler and i press the sampler and now let's listen to it and you think oh good it brought the pitch shifting with it but actually all it's done is gone over to this sampler module on the plugin button and we can see that the pitch and tuning here is is bumped up six semitones so we'll see in a little while that that's not doing what we wanted it to do it didn't actually change the sample into a pitch shifted sample all it did is sped it up so that it's six semitones higher watch what happens if i change the pitch a little bit faster [Music] it goes faster right or watch it because that's what the sampler is doing it's kind of like that re-pitch mode that we saw in the audio module all it's doing is if you're changing the pitch all it's going to do is slow the sample down that's not what we want to do we actually want to process it and time stretch it so in order to time stretch in here we need to go into the sampling menu again we press sampling right here or s on the keyboard and with the stretch option we can take this loop or we can take a chunk of this loop and we can stretch it out speed it up change the pitch higher or change the pitch lower all independent of each other on machine you go to the stretch option right here on the software we just click stretch right here and the same options pop up on the software as pops up on machine if you're on machine micro click the settings and here we can see our stretch options so in this case we want the new beeps per minute to be 80 beats per minute and this says source beats per minute src we can see that this whole thing is four bars long that's perfect that's exactly how long it is and right now we are on beat mode i can just hit apply right now without changing the tuning it's going to process the audio and now it's faster i will undo that now watch what happens when i change the pitch as well let's go up seven semitones and speed it up to 80 beats per minute i press apply now we can hear that the tempo is sped up and the pitch is higher but those are exclusive things from each other and that's what's so great about this mode here is that you can set the tempo to whatever you want you can set the pitch to whatever you want and you can bake it in so back to that original question what happens if you set this to keyboard mode gets slower if you play lower notes [Music] and faster if you play higher notes that is not what the commenter wanted they wanted to be able to hear that sample but play it at different notes but have it be at the correct tempo so how do we do that i'm going to duplicate this one onto other notes so i'm going to go duplicate and press those different ones right there the first one is that the correct one that i want this next one i'm going to put it up a few semitones and to do that instead of using keyboard mode we have to process each sample so there is no way to do this in real time but it's really not that big of a deal i know that would be great if we had that feature say for the audio module to be able to do the same thing and just have play different notes in keyboard mode and then have it pitch shift but keep the time at the same spot so hopefully that feature comes but we don't have it yet go over to my next pad i'm going to go to settings and i'm going to raise this one up one semitone and then i'm going to keep the tempo the same so i'm not going to touch that hit apply [Music] and we can hear that that that went to the right note let's go to this next one i'm going to go settings and i'm going to do two semitones down hit apply and then i'm going to go to i'm not going to worry about the fourth one but let's go to pad mode and i'm going to select all of these guys right here one two three and in pad mode i'm gonna set them all to choke group one so that they're gonna cut each other off so we don't hear them all you know trailing into each other the other thing i should do with all of these is maybe set my playback mode to adsr so i'm going to go to page 2 with all of these selected and i'm going to go to adsr under type and what that means is it's only going to play this loop as i hold the key down so when i release it it stops the last thing i should do while these are all selected is i'm going to go over to uh voice settings i'm going to set them to one note of polyphony so that if i re-trigger on one sample it doesn't keep building up the sample of itself now each one of these [Music] are going to cut each other off and they're only going to trigger once if i hit that note multiple times all right so now i've got a little beat in here to play along with also from crate cuts and i'll show you how this little pitch shifting time stretching thing would work in a real life situation [Music] and that's it so now i've got an interesting little loop that i'm triggering it's tempo is working perfectly with the tempo of my song and i've got it pitch shifted with specific notes and this doesn't go into slicing up a sample into little chunks at all i've got an entire video about sampling that i'll put a link to in the description where i talk about slicing up things this is more just about time stretching in general and trying to get an understanding of how the audio module and the sample module work and how they work together okay so now for something a little bit more interesting a little bit more practical i'm going to show you how you could take a sample that doesn't have a defined length so a one shot that isn't a loop it's maybe two and a half bars or something like that and figure out the tempo really quickly and easily and then take that chunk of audio from an audio module convert it into a sampler module and have your tempo and everything just work how many times have you loaded up a really cool one shot from say expansion pack and you play that one shot and it's the wrong tempo and it's the wrong note and then you go into the sampler module and you try and figure out how to get that thing to line up rhythmically you know changing the pitch is pretty easy but working with the rhythmic nature of some one shots is hard it's kind of confusing so let's check this out i'm going to go over to the browser i'm going to go to one shots and then in the menu here i'm going to type in sax i'm just going to look for a sax lick so make sure nothing else is selected and i've got a bunch chosen here okay so i'm going to take this lick right here i'm going to double click on it it's going to load up as a sampler and i'm going to turn this into an audio module first and we're going to try and figure out the tempo of this little lick and let's try playing it with our song and we can see that it doesn't work at all it's the tempo is totally wrong and that's not because you know machine did a bad job of calculating the tempo it's just the fact that this little sample isn't actually exactly a bar or two bars long so what we need to do is we need to figure out a way to get this thing to line up and first thing i'm going to do is just make the audio a little bit bigger so i'm going to go over to the edit menu and i'm going to go normalize so we can see right now that as an audio module let's just solo this guy [Music] it's not lining up with the click at all i got to figure out what beat is this you know transient this sound gonna happen on one two three four and so i can see my beats one two three four and then there's bar two so i want this sound to happen on the end of beat four now this does get kind of technical with you know music theory stuff but you guys can look at a chunk of audio if you have no idea about this kind of rhythmic music music theory stuff and you can just look at these blobs and get these blobs to line up with a beat that makes musical sense to you and the way we're going to do that is we're going to play around with this length button right here so let's go like this i'm going to crank up the length to six beats it's pretty close i want this thing right here to line up with this line in between beat four and the next bar so that's called the end of four so i'm what i need to do now is if i crank this up to seven it's going to go too far so six is not far enough so all i have to do now is hold down shift and i would hold down shift on the machine controller itself if i was doing it on the controller and so watch what happens as i hold shift and drag this to the right that blob moves over to that line and now let's count it [Music] one two three four and it's lining up perfectly with my vision of what where i want this loop to lie in my little song so again if you have no idea try moving these blobs around to the grid and see what happens if it lines up so i've got my tempo set as an audio module and you think okay great it's it's working perfectly and it might even work with this song let's see what happens it's kind of cool it's actually kind of working that was a fluke by the way okay so next thing i'm going to do is i want to be able to control this sample you know like that youtube commenter wanted i just want to be able to hit it and have it start it doesn't work that way in the audio modules we already went over so what you need to do is turn that into a sampler watch what happens if i press the 4d encoder on that guy while i run the sound menu switch it to a sampler let's see if that worked [Music] it didn't it didn't bring the time stretching with it as i said the audio module doesn't carry over that information i'm going to undo that i'm going to undo switching it to an audio module so that we're back to the original tempo how do i get that perfect time stretch what i need to do is take this little waveform icon right here drag click on that chunk drag it over onto the next sound and what i've just done is i've created an entirely new audio file or a new chunk of audio that has now got its tempo as 80 beats per minute sort of imprinted in that file and the thing with an audio module is whenever you switch it over to a sampler it's going to take the original tempo and bring it with it and so any tempo changes you did here in maschine are irrelevant once you switch to sample mode unless you create an entirely new chunk of audio watch what happens if i click this guy right here this this new one i'm going to click it turn into a sampler and i'm going to do the same thing to the original chunk of audio click it turn it into a sampler listen to the first one that's too fast listen to our new one [Music] it's got the tempo change in it so that is now bringing all of the tempo change or pitch stuff if you actually change the pitch of it in the audio module as well it's going to bring that with it too it might get you even farther you're going to get the tempo at the right spot that you need for your project and you're going to also bring over the pitch that you might need for your project but we're going to change that potentially anyways as i just showed you in that other example now here's the weird thing about this with the way patterns work when you drag this little chunk of audio over it's going to create that sample looping over so you're going to get this long sample that keeps repeating depending on how long your pattern was watch the audio right there it starts up again it's kind of at a random spot because this loop isn't exactly a bar or two bars long which doesn't matter of course the tempo is right and that's all that matters but i do need to go chop off any extra little bits here in the software i can just go like this i can click and drag a selection and all i'm going to do is press cut and of course we can do that on the hardware as well and then i'm going to do a little fade out at the end just in case there's any gunk at the end now our sample is chopped up ready to rock and i want to copy this onto a couple of other pads and maybe you know use this in my little song so now i've got this sample duplicated onto another pad and on this pad what i want to do is i want to pitch it down just a couple semitones but you'll notice right here that it thinks that the source beats per minute is 101 beats per minute and that it's two bars long well we know that this isn't exactly two bars long this is like a bar and a bit so we don't want it to do any kind of auto detection of the beat at all we want to set it to free mode and in free mode i'm going to set it down two semitones now and keep the speed at a hundred percent and hit apply now let's have a listen to it [Music] let's hear them both at the same time they should be changing notes the rhythm at the same time [Music] perfect now this sample is working it's triggering at the appropriate time the tempo is all exactly the way it should be and it's just one little one shot that isn't exactly a bar or two bars long so with this technique you can get all sorts of one shots or loops that aren't necessarily perfectly timed you can figure out the tempo with that audio module sort of trick and then you drag and drop it as audio onto a new sound and then go and do your pitch shifting afterwards in the sample module to get it to exactly the notes that you want to trigger that is time stretching in the audio module and the sampler module when you would want to use one or the other it's complicated i understand that but once you get your head around some of these concepts and how to work with these different modules when you want to accomplish a certain task it's actually not that hard make sure you go check out those other youtube videos by those other amazing youtubers i'll put those in the description also thanks for watching

Channel: Jef Gibbons

Views: 21,422

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Maschine, Maschine+, Maschine 2.9, Maschine Tutorial, Native Instruments, Maschine Plus, Maschine 2021, Maschine Lesson, Maschine Tips, Producer tips, Beat Making, Beat Tips, Hip hop, Neo Soul, Chill, Chill Tunes, Chill Hop, Jazzy Hip hop, Jef Gibbons, Maschine Audio Module, Maschine Audio, Maschine Timestretch, Maschine Pitch, Maschine Sampler, Maschine Sampler Tips, Maschine Expansions

Id: AkXxg4yzbrA

Length: 30min 21sec (1821 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021