Studio One: Chopping Breakbeats

A tried and tested method of rearranging breakbeats is to simply chop them up and reassemble them in the timeline.

There’s more than one way to slice your beats in Studio One!

Looking to chop up bits of audio to rework them into some other groove? Studio One offers a number of ways to approach this. You have two sample‑based instruments, Impact XT and Sample One, which love nothing more than to chew on chunks of samples and spit them out in a different order. You can achieve similar results with both, but they each have their strengths and weaknesses. In this workshop, we’ll look at these instruments and rummage around in their breakbeat‑chopping processes.

First, though, I wanted to look at the old‑fashioned way of chopping up loops and rearranging them by hand on the timeline, which should introduce us to a few tools and processes that are always useful to know about.

Sampling The Goods

Studio One has all sorts of clever technology to ensure that loops brought into your project will automatically fit with your chosen tempo. The included content, and loops from the integrated Splice library, have tempo information baked in, and will stretch to fit your project. This is often true of audio loops wherever you get them from.

But what if you wanted to sample from a piece of vinyl straight into Studio One, or you had recordings or tracks on your computer that had no stated tempo? The fundamental bedrock of looping, chopping, slicing and breakbeating in a DAW is the ability to work to a grid, and for that you need tempo information. The answer is really easy: right‑click your sample or piece of recorded audio, go to Audio and then click Detect Tempo. Job done.

Now, Studio One will probably be cleverer than you want it to be and will automatically time‑stretch your sample to fit your project tempo. You may want that, but you might want to work with the tempo of the music you sampled. The time‑stretch information can be found in the Inspector on the left of the arrange page. Click the ‘i’ at the top of the track list to open it. Alongside the Tempo field are options for Timestretch, Follow and Don’t Follow. Timestretch will slow down or speed up your sample to match the project tempo; Follow will leave the sample unchanged but will ensure the start point of an event is in line with any tempo changes; and Don’t Follow just leaves the sample alone.

What’s important in terms of chopping breakbeats is that our sample fits on the grid. So you can either leave it time‑stretched to the project tempo, or set the project tempo to match the detected tempo of your sample. You’ll find the sample tempo under the channel strip at the bottom of the Inspector. If it’s in red, then it’s waiting for you to approve it. You can also see the tempo on the right‑click menu. All you need to do is stick the tempo into the transport bar and you’re good to go.

Chop...