Dibia$e Flip Session #24: Low Key sample flip

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Dibia$e came back from a bit of a hiatus for his 24th flip challenge, tossing up a sample from Low Key's upcoming Nostalogy sample pack for his Discord server to mangle and shape into something new and that brought me out of my own mini dibiflip hiatus to jump in on this one. I have this thing where sometimes, I just don't dig the provided samples for a challenge and I'll pass on it, or I might load them up and play around and if I'm not getting a spark, I'll just ditch it. It's happened with the last couple of STBBs and a couple of dibiflips before that, but this sample was pretty nice so I got to work. This was my first chance to actually make something with both the MKII and the MPC since I updated to the 3.x firmware and had been spending time getting acquainted. There's still a long way to go for me on that front, but I'm comfortable enough to fight my way out with what I know.

To start with, I laid out a bank with chops from the first half of the provided sample - this bank basically had chords and some sustained melodic sounds. For the second half, there were enough individual piano notes that it felt suitable to have a separate bank for those. I noodled around for a while and came up with an initial sequence that I liked well enough, but after some time I decided I wanted to really transform the source material. I popped into that second bank and just reverse the entirety of it and start noodling around in there, eventually coming up with my A section, which is what the track starts with. From here, it was a matter of recording the pattern and, once satisfied, reconfiguring the A and B FX busses to run consecutively so I could add some first-mile FX to it. I landed on Ko-Da-Ma (an MKII synced delay effect that sort of uses a send and sounds very pleasant in a lot of different use cases) to fill the empty space between my chops, which I then ran through To-Gu-Ro (a sort of stopper/tremolo/gate type of effect on the MKII that I often use very subtly to give a slight pitch warble and very mildly age a sample - I literally have the depth setting set to 1; that's how subtle). From here, I recorded one run of the pattern into an Audio track in the MPC.

At this point, I decided to lay down drums so I picked a few samples and got the kick and snare recorded. This ended up being one of those situations where I just couldn't find a hat sample that I liked or that sat well in the mix, so I did the sacrilegious thing and ditched the idea of using any hats entirely. Honestly, the ends of those reversed samples were doing a pretty OK job of kind of simulating the rhythmic tap of a hat,  especially with the delay present, so I was OK with the decision.

With the melodic core of the track laid down, and the drums placed under it, I wanted to get a bassline in. The way this track was sounding, a modern synthy or 808-style bass didn't feel right, so I pulled up a nice electric bass keygroup from the F9 expansion. I wanted to go for kind of a sloppy vibe, so I thought up a decent bass progression and slapped some notes in slightly out-of-place spots, and made a couple of notes feel off melodically, too.

After that, I landed on making heavy use of the MKII's Scatter effect to do a lot of the heavy lifting for A section variations, but my current A section - even with the delay applied - was still a little too empty for Scatter to do its job well. I recorded a variation pattern of the A section on the MKII where I used the same pattern of pads, but repeated them on rhythm to fill out the space - I also reenabled both of the previous effects because while I didn't really need the delay to fill the space, it did a really good job of giving individual piano notes within the sample some extra flair by repeating really nicely. I took the pattern and ran it into the MPC's sampler, doing the Scatter knob-twisting live until I was satisfied with the output. Got two variations recorded like this and they went into their own Audio tracks, and then their own sequences.

For a B section, I originally wanted to go back to the initial bank with the chords, but the difference between my original recorded pattern and what I was using for my A section was too jarring... and so was every other attempt I made using that bank. In the end, I returned to the bank with the reversed single notes and cooked up a new pattern. Followed the same process as before from there: record pattern into MPC, record a Scattered variation into the MPC (just one this time), lay down a new bassline using the same bass keygroup (I did one bass progression for each B section variation this time).

With everything ready to go, I did some last mile mixing, filtering, and EQing, slapped some limited Flavor Pros onto the tracks that needed them, slapped one final Flavor Pro on the master output to give me some vinyl filth on top, and arranged my sequences in the order I wanted them in Song Mode on the MPC. Once I felt like I was good to go, I simply played the entire song into FL Studio (I've moved to using the MPC in standalone exclusively) and recorded into Edison!