I was once so naive, I thought one simple piece of software would transform my music into a baroque panache of clattering breakbeats. As it happens, my music progressed in a different direction, and ReCycle has slowly fallen to disuse. The ostinable goal of ReCycle is to allow you to play back breakbeats at different tempos; I have *never*, and I believe I speak for most people here, used it towards this purpose. It's far easier to simply pitch a break up or down than it is to scrub every subaudible hi-hat close into a separate slice. I don't even know how to work its pitch adjustment; I use MasterWord Calc for my pitch calculations, and suspect most people here do the same with similar software, or use specialty musicians' calculators. For cutting up breakbeats, I find it much easier to load the sample into DSoundPro, slice the beat by hand, and fire the snippet off to my sampler without having to worry about silent "delay" tails messing up the groove of my beats. I did, however, once find a use for ReCycle, which has more to do with a very specific stage of my artistic development than anything ReCycle advertises itself as. Basically, circa two years ago, if I had a complex rhythm in my head, I would work the rhythm out on my DDD1 drum machine and, once I had perfected the beat, I would sample a loop off the DDD1 at a slower tempo and import the sample into ReCycle. Once in ReCycle, I would identify each attack and export the beat as a "groove template." I would then import the template into my sequencer (then Vision) and "clean up" the timing of the beats. As I've progressed as a drum programmer, however, I've been relying on this technique less and less, and have slowly become more apt at determining where the beats fall by ear. So basically, the only use I ever found for ReCycle was its groove templating, and even now I have reservations about that. You see, I just recently completed a track with very complicated drum programming, and I used every trick in the book to announce to the listener "I PROGRAMMED THIS BEAT." And yet, for all my efforts, I'm not sure my beats couldn't just have easily been the result of somebody sampling a live drummer, extracting a groove template, and futzing with the kicks and snares afterwards, giving the *appearance* of drum programming, but without all the hard work. So basically, not only do I find ReCycle not useful, but introduces an element of doubt in the listener as to whether a rhythm was sampled or programmed. That is, it undermines the entire inventiveness of the drum programmer. Anybody else feeling nascent distrust of ReCycle?
-- T.W.I.D.N. * http://www.nr.infi.net/~tagutcow/twidn.html --- Drum&Bass Arena Producers Discussion List http://www.breakbeat.co.uk You are currently subscribed to dnb-prod as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
