Lo-Fi samplers, beats and things

Yeah this is all true. Better to mangle and then sample from than use purely as a drum machine.

Would be great if they made a bigger PolyGranny but they have said that is unlikely.

Yeah, the Sampletrakā€™s sequencer is weird. Itā€™s not hard to make patterns but you canā€™t chain them together or even cue them to play one after the other. But they can be like 300 bars long. So itā€™s doable.

Iā€™ve also done it just for fun;

I think that the best route is to use a few songs to make loops, resample them through the fx and then use another song to sequence the loops.

I also recently made a video where I went through using it as a module. I was sampling in hifi so I wasnā€™t leaning into the crunch of it. But for anyone curious about the workflow, it might be helpful.

Ha! Sorry, not sorry. And thanks!

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These are really great videos man, awesome work.

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It would make for a great subject in Maschine or MPCs autosampler thatā€™s for sure.

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This seems like the place to post this.

I wrote a little program for the Retrokits RK-002 that gives you more control over the Sampletrak. It lets you trigger pads as one shots. Thereā€™s a choke mode. It responds to MIDI velocity. And youā€™ve got control over pad level, pad panning, reverse, and fx enable with MIDI ccs. Thereā€™s also a channel for triggering songs with MIDI notes.

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The sonocware Lofi-12 has caught my ear lately

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Interesting to hear these tests. One of the things I did a lot was record LPs at 78 RPM, a little over an octave. Iā€™m not sure if this was common back in the day, but I ended up doing it a lot because I was crate digging and sampling with an OP-1, which has limited sampling time.

I found the effect to be just about right. Good for grit without being overboard, taming the transients from the vinyl defects (converters have lp filters) but leaving the bass frequencies wholly intact. This technique with vinyl is basically kismet.


Lately Iā€™ve been using the DN for some lofi stuff since there are pretty good techniques for designing sounds that are lofi by construction, which is a bit of a mind bender. But it can still use some help so Iā€™m working on (read: have put on the back burner because Iā€™m lazy) an effect based on the Axoloti to do tape-like things to the signal. Warble, hiss, sat, authentic sampled 60hz hum (dumbass me actually went looking for this online before realizing he could literally just touch one of the pins on the board.)

Most recently, however, Iā€™ve been inspired by Ricky Tinezā€™s monotron delay video. Iā€™ve had a delay and duo for a while, but I donā€™t take these seriously because theyā€™re mono, but wow do they ever work for lofi. You get that lowpass and sat with some resonance and a touch of natural hiss. Shame about the mono.

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