This is the first edition of my music help series. I will be talking about my workflow and giving some tips on how to make your music sound better. In this post I will show you guys different ways to chop up your samples in Propellerhead’s Recycle and load them into Reason…

The first thing you need to do is either have a loop ready to open up in Recycle or load your song in by clicking File > Open or pressing Ctrl + O on your keyboard. Find and highlight your song and click “Open”.

Once your sample is open in Recycle it should look like this:

You can now begin setting up your chop points. Once loaded into reason each section you chop will be assigned to a pad/key on your midi controller. Some choose to use the Sensitivity bar (the slider thingy with “Sens:” next to it), but I like to take extra time to do it myself using the pencil tool. If you set your own points it will be much more precise and you will have more control over your sample.  Click the pencil and begin clicking on the wave file where you think would make a good slice.

The image above shows an example of what the Sensitivity bar would do. Recycle doesn’t have a brain and can’t tell what sounds good or not. It will just set a point wherever there is a peak in the wave file. This can be useful in looping, though.

You can see that I used the pencil to set my chops in this one. The locks above the lines mean that the line wont dissapear when you adjust the sensitivity. The next step is to load the .rx2 file into Reason’s Dr. Rex Loop Player or NN-XT. I will use the Dr. Rex this time because it is much simpler for sampling.

Now, the question I probably get asked the most is “how to use it like an MPC”. In my videos people see me pressing pads on my Akai MPD32 and wonder how the sample keeps playing after I let the pad go. They also ask how to get the next pad to “interupt” the first one if I press another pad while a sound is playing. The answer is in the polyphony and the release. Polyphony basically is how many sounds or chops can play at one time. The release is how long the sound will play for after you let go of the pad. You must set your Polyphony to 1 and Release to 127 if you want MPC style sample chopping. I will go more in depth with the Dr. Rex loop player and show you how to do this with the NN-XT in the next post.