Note: Remembering now that I tweaked the arrangement at the last minute before adding video, so the info below applies to the following audio clip, not the one that’s in the above video.
Hopped into Micro-Chop’s #YouWereMineFlipChallenge and came up with the following beat. The video is from a Felix the Cat cartoon that I grabbed off archive.org and chopped up a bit to coordinate (kinda) with the music. Note: I need to get better video editing software because this was 1) frustrating and 2) not the best result for the effort.
The Flip
I didn't want to spend too much time on the challenge, which was convenient because I didn’t have much time to spend on it. Instead of a lot of planning the type of beat I wanted to make, I just jumped in and started looking for instrumental sections. I figured (rightly) that the sample would guide the flip. I settled on the following three bars:
Below is the main arrangement of the sample. The three tracks are in a buss which has a filter and an LFO on it. The filter gradually opens as the beat unfolds, and the LFO comes on at the end to do some fast volume automation, creating a flickering effect that you hear a lot in trance (LFO tool is totally worth getting if you can, but you could easily draw this automation in to the volume).
Track 6 has a filter with the resonance set to bring out the bass in the sample (don’t remember why I colored part of it purple…). Track 5 is more or less the same sample, but pitched up an octave. Track 4 is also pitched up an octave, but I’ve changed the warp settings to give it a similar flickering sound to what the LFO does. Layering it over track 5 creates a more interesting (to my ears) texture than just track 5 alone.
Above all this is a smaller slice of that 3-bar sample that starts clean and then gets flanged.
The beat
I wanted some basic beat architecture before I got too deep into the arrangement of the samples, so I chopped out 4 bars of Dilla’s “It’s Dope” and put that underneath what I was working on. That beat fit really well as it was, so I figured why not just use it. In order to customize things a it, I used Ableton’s “Convert drums to MIDI” feature to get Dilla’s kick, snare, and hats in three separate tracks. Next, I subbed in my own kick sample, changed the snare and layered in a clap on top, and changed the hat sample too. To create a little more of a give and take in the hat pattern, I duplicated it, cut out most of the hits in the duplicated track, and then panned the original and the new track to create a sense of dialogue. To make things fit the sample, I ended up adjusting some of the velocities and nudged some of the MIDI notes, but otherwise kept things close to Dilla.
Final steps
I added some extra percussion and a bass line that closely tracked the original but with a larger low end. The busses with the samples are all sidechained to the kick and the backbeat buss (which I think has a compressor on it). There’s some sends to reverb and a little delay, and a little harmonic excitement on the master, but otherwise that’s it. This was fun, didn’t take too long, and I’m looking forward to the next beat flip challenge!