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I have a sample part (piano chord with lower bass notes) which is 150 bpm and I want to use it in 140 bpm project. Stretching this sample in Cubase to fit into my project adds an artifacts and some strange noise, which is specially noticeable on lower parts of this sample. Is there any methods or tips to avoid this?

not really, timestretching any audio more than a second or two will pretty much always introduce artifacts.

What i usually do in these situations is to have a fuckabout with eq's and fx and stuff so as to mask the artifacts slightly, make them a part of the song!

add a reverb fx, and set dry to 0% and wet to 100%.

Make the tune in 150... fuck off with the listener or dj. Theyll pitch it down if they like.

Load up Reaper, insert sample, slowdown the playback with the playback speed slider, export at new tempo

Bomshaka!

FL has this nice way of choosing a timestretch algorithm(take that steinberg!) and usually one of them sounds a lot clearer than others. Also cherish the artifacts and take them as effects rather than nuisances.

Brisance wrote:FL has this nice way of choosing a timestretch algorithm(take that steinberg!) and usually one of them sounds a lot clearer than others. Also cherish the artifacts and take them as effects rather than nuisances.

+1

piano usually sounds pretty fucked when timestretched, I'd try to make something of it rather than smooth it out.

if you did want to smooth it out tho, ableton is definitely one of the best ways.

If it's from a well known piece you could always look up a MIDI file of it or try to find the sheet music of it, put that into the sequencer and use a piano VSTi.

OK thanks, I'll try what you suggested and let you know. I dont think I'll by ableton to do this

alvin18 wrote:OK thanks, I'll try what you suggested and let you know. I dont think I'll by ableton to do this

No, but you could download the demo and use a audio recording prog like audacity to record the output of Ableton if the demos save feature doesn't work...

Genevieve wrote:If it's from a well known piece you could always look up a MIDI file of it or try to find the sheet music of it, put that into the sequencer and use a piano VSTi.

Great idea!

Hurtdeer wrote:
really? Piano vsts sound awful and you'll lose a lot of the feel of the original player, which is part of what makes sampling. Part of what makes piano pieces interesting is how the player is interpreting that, and if you program that in from a score, that'd be lost

ok, so personally I hate emulation based synthesizers that do guitars/pianos/orchestra/whatever since- and i mean even with the top of the range eastwest stuff- it always sounds so dull and lifeless to me. I find time stretching out an original sample would sound much more interesting

Now that's just being too anal about a minor difference. You could always play it in by midi keyboard or carefully manipulate velocities and timing..

You could be right, boils down to personal taste.

cubase has various options - MPEX2 is the best quality. Even that has a slider for monophonic-polyphonic, try playing with that.

you could always pitch it down a couple of semitones first, and transpose your track. Use pitch shift and untick preserve time. I do this a lot, and it means you only have to timestretch a tiny amount, get it as close as you can using the semitones (so its still easy to play midi along with). Dont use the 3rd option on the select tool, that sounds shit.

if its single notes, you could also chop em up and move em manually, will have some gaps, so could either use the 'close gaps' function or cover in some reverb.

personally, the whoel point of samples is the feel, grit and beauty of that moment in time. Reproducing with midi is just not even close... IMO etc.

Hurtdeer wrote:

futures_untold wrote:

Genevieve wrote:If it's from a well known piece you could always look up a MIDI file of it or try to find the sheet music of it, put that into the sequencer and use a piano VSTi.

Great idea!

really? Piano vsts sound awful and you'll lose a lot of the feel of the original player, which is part of what makes sampling. Part of what makes piano pieces interesting is how the player is interpreting that, and if you program that in from a score, that'd be lost

ok, so personally I hate emulation based synthesizers that do guitars/pianos/orchestra/whatever since- and i mean even with the top of the range eastwest stuff- it always sounds so dull and lifeless to me. I find time stretching out an original sample would sound much more interesting

All depends on the producer's priorities. Let him decide if it sounds good to his ears or not and what the producer wants a sample for, I would say.

Benn Jordan aka the Flashbulb composed 'Passage D' on a piano, but entered all the information into his sequencer and the end result is good: link to Passage D fan video