A sampler is four operations — slice, repitch, stretch and reshape — and almost everything anyone has ever done with a record is a combination of them. This page renders its own source loops into memory and then performs those operations on the actual audio data, so what you hear is real digital signal processing rather than a description of it.
Onset detection running on the real sample data — short-time energy, differenced, peak-picked against a moving threshold. Drag the sensitivity: low finds only the loud hits, high starts picking up ghost notes and hats. Then rearrange the slices into something that is not the record any more.
Now rebuild it. Sixteen steps, each holding a slice number. Click a step to advance it to the next slice, right-click or shift-click to clear it. The order is the composition — this is the entire technique behind chopped-up house and hip-hop, and the reason a four-bar break can produce a hundred different loops.
The MIDI export writes a Simpler-style clip. Each step becomes a note starting at C1 and climbing — slice 0 is C1, slice 1 is C#1, and so on, which is exactly the layout Live's Slice to New MIDI Track produces. Slice your own break in Live, drop this clip on it, and your arrangement plays on their audio.
The source loops are recorded at 94 BPM. Your project is at whatever the transport says. There are four ways to bridge that gap, they sound completely different, and choosing wrong is the single most common sampling mistake there is.
Repitch — playback rate changes, so speed and pitch move together. This is what a turntable does and what Live's Re-Pitch mode does. It is the only method with no artifacts at all, because nothing is being invented; the trade is that a big tempo change becomes a big pitch change.
Push the grain size to 15 ms and then to 200 ms with granular selected. Short grains smear transients into a metallic buzz; long grains preserve tone but audibly stutter on drum hits. That trade-off is the entire reason Live has separate Beats, Tones, Texture and Complex modes — each one is a different compromise on that same axis, and no algorithm escapes it.
The most useful skill in sample-based production and the least taught. Take a single hit — one chord stab, one drum, one syllable — and build eight bars from it alone using pitch, reverse, gating and envelope. Nothing else enters.
Bit depth and sample rate are separate destructions. Reducing bits adds quantisation noise that sits underneath the sound — grit. Reducing the sample rate folds high frequencies back down as aliasing — a metallic ring that tracks the pitch. Both are applied here to the actual sample data, offline, exactly as a bitcrusher does. Two bits at full rate and sixteen bits at 1/16 rate sound nothing alike, which is worth knowing before you reach for a preset called "lo-fi".
Try this: pick a chord slice, set the pattern to Tresillo, pitch spread to 5, gate to 30% and the filter around 60. That is a complete eight-bar loop built from one hit, and it is how a lot of house records that sound sample-heavy were actually made.
Which algorithm for which material, and what the controls actually do.
| Mode | How it works | Use it for | It breaks on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beats | Chops at transient markers and retriggers each chunk at the new tempo. No pitch change, no smearing. | Drums, percussion, anything with clear hits. | Sustained material — you hear the gaps between chunks as stutter. |
| Tones | Granular, tuned to preserve a single pitch. Smaller grains locked to the detected period. | Monophonic material — a bassline, a vocal, one instrument. | Chords and drums. Two pitches at once confuse it. |
| Texture | Granular with user control over grain size and randomisation. Deliberately smeared. | Pads, atmospheres, noise, anything you want blurred. | Anything needing rhythmic accuracy. |
| Re-Pitch | Just changes playback speed. Pitch follows tempo, like a turntable. | When you want the pitch shift, or for small tempo moves. | Big tempo changes — the key moves with it. |
| Complex | A phase-vocoder-style algorithm handling multiple pitches at once. CPU heavy. | Full mixes, chord loops, anything polyphonic. | Nothing badly, but it softens transients. |
| Complex Pro | Complex, plus Formants (keeps vocal character when transposing) and Envelope (transient handling, ~64 default; lower for tonal, higher for percussive). | Vocals, full loops, anything where quality matters more than CPU. | Very large stretches still smear. And your CPU. |
A sampler is not a shortcut. The operations on this page are trivial to perform and take a long time to use well, because the skill is not in the chopping — it is in noticing which half-second of a four-minute record is worth chopping. That part is listening, and the only way to get better at it is to do it a great many times.
Source loops are synthesised in an offline audio context at 94 BPM, then processed as real sample data. Onset detection, playback-rate changes, granular stretching, bit and rate reduction all operate on the buffers themselves.