bug0ut | Dibia$e Flip Session #25: Marques Murrey sample flip

This is going to be a short one because I forgot to note the details down for this one and its been a few days, which means I don't remember half the shit I did.

The Dibiase server is on a roll with decent samples, but because I have my hand in multiple pots and also have my boring personal life to deal with, I don't always have time to jump in - even when I really want to. For session #25, the gods gave me some reprieve by way of plaguing poor Dibi with internet issues, causing him to postpone not just once (which I missed), but twice, giving me just about a day and a half to try to flip this session's samples which were provided by the talented Marques Murray. They came in the form of several stems from one of his upcoming sample packs. While all the stems were nice in their own way, I immediately zeroed in on one of the piano stems and a kind of reverby siren/alarm stem.

With the piano, and with any piano sequence I'm sampling, I played around with various chops and pitches until I found chops (and a combination of chops) that I liked - I know, really specific of me... but that's how it goes with highly subjective creative processes. Sometimes I'll auto-chop across 16 pads, mess around, realize I hate all of it, clear the chops, then just put down random ones, realize I hate all of it, clear the chops, then kind of do half-random chops (usually on note transients, or sometimes a little before to create the illusion of some kind of instrument articulation or whatever) and eventually, when the smoke cloud clears and the dust settles, I end up with something - and not always a good something. In any case, since I was limited on time and wanted to keep it relatively simple, I got my pattern down and moved on to get some drums down for a basic rhythm.

Sound selection for drums is one of those things where I always get fucking stuck and fatigued and I've been promising myself to do two main things about this. The easier task is starting to note down what pack a given one shot is from when I find one I really like. I can't count how many times I've been down the rabbit hole of digging through sample packs, finding a sample I really dig, and then never being able to find it again. Once I've got them noted down, I'll ideally move them into kind of a makeshift pack of "favorites" for easy access. The harder, but more rewarding task, is cooking up my own, custom drum samples through a combination of synthesis, stacking existing samples, and leveraging my Zoom H5 to get some field recordings to add character to them. I've set a realistic goal of 10 kicks and 10 snares and I'm going to try to get this done relatively soon.

With the kick, snare, and hat laid down in a simple pattern, I moved on to checking out the siren samples. Chopped them up, like you'd expect - but this time, because the notes were so far apart, I just chopped on each note with the end goal being to play with pitches and FX until I found something that fit melodically and thematically. If a sample's melodic elements are arranged more densely, there's a lot of potential for strange off-rhythms and stuff that you may not be planning for going in, but when its like... one note every 1/2 bar or more, I treat it more like you would a keygroup or using a sample in chromatic mode and playing it like an instrument. I decided to make the siren a sort of eerie, ghostly sound, and it frankly ended up sounding like some shit from an old sci-fi movie, which explains the title and cover art I ended up with.

For the bass, I picked one of the standard MPC keygroups, limited myself to a higher register (i.e. we're not going for big, fat sub bass here), and noodled around until I felt like I had something I like that matched the vibes.

After going back and forth with a friend on some advice he offered, I fixed a couple of things up. The big one was making the siren sequence I laid down more subtle - at least on its first appearance. For this, I just automated the volume for that 4-bar sequence so that it started low, slowly swelled (but still peaked relatively low - it didn't swell up to 0dB), then brought it leading into the last 1/4 bar and quickly swelled it once more. On its second appearance, its at its steady, full volume as it was set in the mixer insert.

I still wanted to add something more because I just don't know when to fucking stop, so I grabbed the PT-01 Scratch, blew the dust off of that shit while pretending I was Indiana Jones or something, slapped one of the little 7" scratch records I have in there, and recorded some scratches. Well, a lot of scratches. I'm not afraid to say that I suck at scratching. The first scratch sequence heard on this track was edited slightly to get the timing better matched up with the beat. The second one - you know, the one that sounds awful - was all me, baby!

Little bit of Air Flavor Pro sprinkled on top to dust things up a bit and voila: another subpar track - lol