Hotpants Mega Break Instrument 🥁

I'm really enjoying the process of spending an entire day focused on one break and turning a simple drum loop into one of these massive break instruments! Each break lends itself towards little adjustments in the processing & FX making and the Hotpants in no different.

One of the biggest gripes I have with this break is that shaker/tambourine element can get quite bright and annoying. There are a few ways you could tackle this, such as with a filter or EQ, but as usual I went down the sample reduction route via the pitch up/down trick in the AKAI s1000.

This is still essentially filtering as I'm using the anti-ailising filter in the Akai's pitch interpolation method. The bonus with this however is you add more of the colour/grit/Lofi from the AKAI.

I've included a few versions of this break pitched around in the AKAI so you can hear what it does at different pitch amounts. As you can hear, +14 semitones was the perfect amount to remove the top end of the break but almost perfectly retain all the rest of the information so the kick and snare still sound fat.

The final instrument includes a version of the break with and a version without the tambourine so you can easily decide which works best for your track. 😊

I got up to lots more tips and tricks i'm going to show in a video soon but just to highlight all the elements:

• Hotpants Version V1 - Fatter break processed more aggressively

• Hotpants Version V2 - Classic roller style

• Hotpants Pitch Up/Down - Akai pitch trick for sample rate reduction

• Hotpants Half Speed - 3 versions going to super LOFI & crunchy

• Phasey Hits - Akai double trigger note method

• Long Hits - Kick & snare manual extension method

• Main Break Slices - Long slices of the break perfect for chopping

• Mono Reverb Snares and Kicks

• Rattle Snares - Photek technique

• Rolls and Fills - Experimenting with rolls and filters/delays/Lofi

• Stretched Hits - Akai S1000 Stretches of different Cycle and Time amounts

I've translated the instrument to Ableton, Bitwig, Logic, Akai s3000 & the Digitakt mk2. I also just thought it would be handy to have these as evenly sliced Digi-chains for other hardware samplers and Amigo!

Big ups everyone 🙏 - what break shall we do next?

Cheers,

George ✌️