Setup

First I believe we need a sample (no really). Download this one of a girl saying "All your base are belong to us". Now open Madtracker, click the sample dialogue (1) and load the sample (2+3).

Playback

Click on the first channel/track in the pattern editor (1), make sure Edit is toggled (2) (if not click it or press space once) and press Q on the keyboard to start a sample playback from the beginning of the pattern. Adjust the LPB to a higher value (3) (making the pattern play faster for precision, you'll see why soon enough), I'd choose 8 for now. Then press play (4) to check that everything is in it's right place.

Get Hexed

Before we continue I advise you change the Madtracker display to use hexadecimals instead of plain numbers. Why? Because, as an old Fasttracker, I do and changing will make it easier to follow this guide. Open the config (1+2), select the display pane (3) and check Hexadecimal (4).

Breakin'

Now for the fun part. Each channel/track is divided like this: Note (1), volume (2) (00-80), panning (3) (00-FF), effect number (4) (XX) and effect parameter (5) (XXXX).



The effect number for set offset is 9, so use your arrow keys to move the marker into the second column of the 4th section and press "9" (remember to make sure Edit is toggled). This is a short sample and from experience I'm guessing that "Base" is on 40 (ie. All 00, Your 20, Base 40). To check my theory let's move into the third column of the 5th section, press "4" and play the module to hear where the sample starts.



Now select that line by clicking it (it should highlight like in the picture above) and copy it by pressing ALT+F4. Paste it to row 08, 0C and 10 by moving the marker into those positions with the down-arrow and using ALT+F5. Then go back to the first line, press delete, move back up and then "Q" to insert a regular playback of the sample. It should look something like this (picture). Press play.

All done

And there you have it, the basics of breakin' a vocal sample using sample offset. As everything else, the end result depends on how much time you're willing to spend. Hopefully this tutorial will give you enough information to start experimenting on your own but to give you some ideas I made a little more just playing around with the numbers (picture).

Timestretching?

In closing I'm going to show you how to do timestretching, if you haven't figured it out already. It's the same principle as breakin' only now we have to to issue the offset command a whole lot more. Insert a new pattern below the current one (1), press SHIFT+F3 to empty the channel of commands, press and hold Q to fill the entire channel with sample start (2) and increase the LPB to 16 (3).



Now for the tedious task of programming the offset. Basically, you want to issue the offset one value higher for each sample start (picture). And don't worry if programming it now seems horribly slow, you'll probably discover a way of doing it faster (Hint: copying blocks is a nice thing). After you're done press play to check whether you have to add additional lines to the pattern or not (I'm betting that 40 lines isn't going to be enough).