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).

A part of U.S. copyright law dictates that no sample, no matter how unrecognizable, can be used without permission. Effectively destroying whatever chance aspiring musicians, without money to buy expensive hard-/software, have to produce original and legal music.

Setup

For some microstyle disco (always had a soft spot for that genre) we'll need a bass drum, snare, open and closed hat, bass and a lead. That makes 6 instruments, but since we're going to use the same one for open/closed hat and bass/lead make it 4. Download the sample and load four copies of it. Toggle the instrument dialogue (1) and rename them accordingly (2). Name the tracks we're going to use too by opening the mixer (3) and clicking the track labels (4).

Bass Drum

Doubleclick the Bass Drum instrument (1) and then the sample (2) to bring up Madtracker's sample editor. If you've ever seen a bass drum in wave before you know that it starts with a peak and then fades out with an increasing space between each curve. With that in mind zoom in (3), find the peak of the sample, make a small selection starting slightly ahead of it (4) and cut (5). You can use the numbers at the statusbar (bottom) as a reference point if you're having trouble locating it.


Now doubleclick the sample to select everything and press paste (1). Fade out the sample a couple of times from about half-way into it (2+3). Try pressing Q a couple of times. Doesn't really sound like a bass drum now does it? Press F1 to try playing it at a lower octave. Closer but still too, well, weird to classify as a bass drum.


Exit the sample editor, click the Synthesizer pane (1) and enable the filter (2). Insert 180 cutoff and 128 resonance (picture). Now try playing it a couple times. There we go. Still too much sound for me so I went ahead and faded it out some more. Play with the values pressing Q now and then to get it sounding like you want.

Snare Drum

Almost the same as creating the bass drum but now we should look for a peak followed by more frequent curves. Select the correct instrument, zoom in and look. I found one (although there are several candidates) just before our bass drum.


After the cut and paste you should normalize it and fade out. Try pressing Q a couple of times. It doesn't sound like a snare at all. Mess around with the filter settings. Make it an high-pass filter, cutoff 1900 and resonance at 80. A lower note might help too so press V a couple of times. It's getting there, but we need to add more noise. We need distortion. In Fasttracker you could increase the volume several times to distort the sample, but in Madtracker we won't have to since we have effects. Name a new track Snare Drum and make it play the sample every other bar (picture).


Fire up the effects dialogue (1) select track 5, enable effects (2) and choose distortion. Using my settings as a starting point (picture), play around with the effect values untill you're satisfied with how your snare sounds. Our beloved bass drum could use a little more kick to it as well so try adding some distortion to it when you're done. Keep in mind you won't be needing this low treshold/curvature for that unless you want to make gabber disco (oh, the horror).

Hats

On old analogue gear hats consisted mostly of white noise. With that in mind repeat the process and look for a place in the sample that has a high frequency of curves. Press F6 to use the second highest octave available, add tons of distortion to the Hats track and lay down some standard-issue disco hats using retrigger to differ between open and closed (picture). While you're at it, add a base drum on each bar.

Disco

We got ourselves a beat. However it's very static and sounds more like uninspired techno than disco. This is where that Disco track we added earlier comes in. We're going to add shuffle - old school style. An easy trick to make your track sound less "computed" and in this case that's exactly what we want. By telling the tracker to change the tempo on every note, using FT2's tempo command, the result is a basic shuffle (picture). Try experimenting with the values. Increase them proportionally for more shuffle and decrease them to, well, you get it. With a more unorthodox implementation you can use this trick to create glitch/IDM type rythms, but ssh, don't tell anyone.

Bass

For our bass (and lead) we're going to create a simple chip sound. Delete everything apart from a tiny portion of the sample and zoom in to maximum resolution. Now click Loop and select forward (1), drag the looping points so that they create as seamless a sound as possible (2+3). Try to avoid getting any clicking noises, look for places in the waveform that are inaudible (marked with white). You can press any key and hold it while you drag. Caution: Do not try this at high volume. My physical self has noticed a decrease in hearing efficiency after neglecting to check decibel levels before attempting this.


Let's make our bassline. Press F3 to go into a fairly slow playback for the sample, whether you have to go lower or higher depends on the length of your finished loop. The basslines in disco are primarly alternating octaves, there is of course room for experimenting beyond that, but for now let's just stick to the formula. Make a simple one (picture) and listen to how it sounds. Not bad, but I want an analogue filter on it and fair bit of distortion.

Routing Tracks

Two effects on one track? Well, we could use the Synthesizer pane for the filter but that would apply to our lead as well. Luckily for us, you can route/chain tracks in Madtracker. In short: we can send our already processed bassline into another track that applies the second effect. I agree, it is a very nice feature. Say you've made a nice drumloop and would like some reverb on it. Instead of adding reverb to all the different tracks (kicks, percussion, hats, etc.) you can just route them all into a single one and add the effect there. But I digress, let's start our little chain by adding the first one; an analogue filter with very low cutoff and full resonance (picture). Much better already.


The routing is simple. Open the mixer and label Track 6 Distortion (the track next to Snare Drum). Scroll back to Bass, right-click Master (1) and choose Distortion (2). That's it. All that's left now is to add the actual distortion, don't let me keep you. High level, low treshold and a little curvature to prevent from reducing the bass to noise.

Lead

As for the lead, showing you how I made mine would be pointless. You already know more than enough to start experimenting on your own. So put our little comp on repeat (1), press F6 and start creating Nintendo love.


Find a melody you like then either program the notes into the pattern or record them live. After you're happy with how the lead plays you probably should polish it a little. The instrument we made is very high in volume so reducing the Lead channel in the mixer would be my first step. Then I'd probably add some stereo delay to make it flow smoother.

Congratulations!

That's it! I hope you learned a trick or or two, but more importantly, that you had some fun. After all, that's what music is about; Having fun. And I believe congratulations are in order, because in accordance with U.S. law, you're now a criminal! By creating this little song based on a split-second sample to which you did not have the original copyright holder's consent, you broke the law. Could anyone, ever, tell that you did just by listening to the song? Not a snowball's chance in hell. But you still did. "Stupid" doesn't even begin to describe how ridiculously dumb this is. I think we all can agree that the ruling is probably the worst thing to happen to music since Trance was "invented". Oh, and please remember to come visit me in prison when I get sued for writing this tutorial (I'll be on the floppy disc in the warden's desk).