I really need to learn how to chop samples. Do you have a good video out on YouTube maybe? Can you suggest one?
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Congratulations to the top three! I got a couple votes so I’m feeling good. My track was number 7. I couldn’t get any of the guitar samples to work for me or at least I wasn’t feeling it. So I went with the obvious one to me that could be flipped. The way I set it up was pretty cool: I made a scene on the OT that increased the depth of a random lfo set to the slice number. So if I pushed the cross fader over just before a trig played a random slice played. This gave it some interesting results and put different chops where I wouldn’t have thought to if I was sequencing it manually.
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Looking forward to what @Unifono will come up with for a concept for #20
And nice to hear everyone’s breakdown of how they made their beat.
Really interesting.
And thanks to anyone who liked mine, I think I’ve been really lucky if I’m honest and it’s still a surprise to me when I do ok in the votes
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I‘m brainstorming ideas for the next battle. Will come back to you guys soon
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Congrats everyone! And @Doug, thanks for hosting buddy 
My beat (#1) was made entirely on the DT using the new 1.50 update. Just did some arranging, “mastering” and effects in Ableton
It was my final beat on the DT, as I decided to significantly downsize on gear. I am down to an OT, AH and DN now….
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The “step by step” videos on my channel go through how I chop samples on the Digitakt and the Sampletrak. But I would recommend hitting up a site like whosampled. Search for some songs that you like and then try to recreate the chops yourself from the original. I would also recommend Jon Makes Beats on YouTube. He usually makes beats on the Octatrack and he’s always talking through his thinking on how he approaches chopping a sample. The videos on his YouTube are clipped down from his streams. I haven’t checked those out but that would probably be worth checking out to get the whole process.
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Thanks! I never would have thought about using 16 levels on the attack. I’m hoping I can sell some things and pick up an MPC One in the next few months. So hopefully I’ll be bothering you about tips in the not so distant future
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My Track was 17
This is a bit of a weird one. A few people mentioned that it didn’t sound like any of the other tracks and there is a reason for that.
In the first couple of days of the challenge I downloaded the sample pack and also happened to buy Shaperbox. With time on my hands I had a session using the samples to hand to learn Shaperbox with a total focus on nothing else, but really crazy modulation and sound design, to really mess some samples up and create something that was very atmospheric with lots of movement. There was no intention that this should be my entry.
It’s made entirely with the Bitwig stock sampler and Shaperbox on every track except for some Fabfilter reverb and compression / limiting on the master chain.
The track isn’t made with the competition in mind which is why the beat drops right at the end. It was originally 4 minutes and then had to be cut to fit the track time limit, but I didn’t have time to change the arrangement so it’s just cut short.
For the next week life got in the way. I found myself very busy with zero time on my hands and I didn’t have enough time to go through all the Youtube clips and extract samples.
I decided I wouldn’t be able to participate and I felt bad about it as I’d suggested the theme. My wife then said she really liked the thing I’d made with Shaperbox which was made with the samplepack and why didn’t I submit it. It felt a bit wrong as it doesn’t use any of the posted songs only the additional samples and it’s completely missing the theme however I thought it was best to contribute to the competition.
I didn’t expect to really get any positive feedback on it so the fact that it got votes and honourable mentions and some nice comments is a really great feeling for me.
In some ways I feel it’s a win for me as I’ve previously been quite vanilla with samples and also been stuck in a very literal interpretation storytelling vibe with my tracks and this is darker and more sound design driven which is something I haven’t been able to achieve before.
Once again thanks to everyone involved. You continue to blow me away with the 
you deliver every time.
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Congratulations to those that won, but really a big shout out to all who took part. And thanks to those of you who took time to explain a bit about how you did your tracks - I’ve just been listening back to them all whilst reading your notes - it’s really enlightening. It’s been a crazy busy week for me but I did want to at least go back and finish off typing up some feedback about my votes:
1st - Beat 8 - I’m sure a lot of us are in agreement about why this is a great track but one thing I want to highlight was how I thought it seemed best to get the balance of hip-hop and rock.
2nd - Beat 3 - I was initially underwhelmed by this but it really grew on me after a few listens. Yeah, it’s a solid head nodder of a beat and the piano anchors it but where it really shines for me are the various fragments and layers of guitar samples underpinning it… they give it a real loose, hazy kind of atmosphere.
3rd - Beat 6 - Another grower for me and I’m really enjoying the cut and paste vibe to it, almost like a gently plunderphonic take on hip-hop. It was quite a bold move to use what I presume were the Thunderdome kick drum samples that someone provided. The woozy SRR tones that linger about here and there are pretty cool too.
My honourable mentions:
Beat 5 - It’s only a very loose comparison but the beats in this really made me think of Alias (RIP) which is always good to be a big plus in my book. The staccato guitar samples were pretty cool too, that had a bit of a cool robotic vibe to me.
Beat 11 - I really enjoyed how it sampled the count-in from the Death track I posted which was always going to predispose towards the track. It’s just a really nice head-nodding beat and a really lovely melody that catches my attention guaranteed everytime about the 1:45 mark.
Beat 17 - My comment was going to be that I really enjoyed how it was building up and then seems to run out of time and then I read the comments from @monquixote about how it was written and that totally makes sense. Would be interested to hear how a fuller version worked out.
My track was pretty much all DT that run into Live via overbridge with more effects added in there. Only thing that wasn’t were the vocals samples which I extracted from the Captain Beefhart song using Spleeter and then arranged on the timeline in Live.
As far as the new features from the DT… I definitely used a fair bit of the new SRR. The lush pad on the breakdown was pretty much just the pad sample that @flipinfantile contributed that was looped and with some LFO on the SRR to pick out harmonics here and there.
I didn’t use the slice mode to cut up beats, rather I used that on guitars from the Queensyrche song to get little fragments of guitar, and then used similarly on guitars from the Boris song - but for this I modulated the grid size at different places to go from a staccato to a more legato vibe.
Just to round out on the samples used, I got some lovely wash atmosphere from a weird gong sound in the Colosseum song. And the bass was pretty unaffected use of the really lovely bass sound that @sleepyhead contributed - I tried a bunch of things but it just sounded right played slow and letting the note decay naturally.
Anyway, I’ve been over the moon to make it onto a few people’s honourable mentions as I was quite far out of my comfort zone sampling in this way and I don’t have a huge amount of experience writing hip-hop… so, learned loads and pretty excited to see what’s up next!
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