Sully Renoise Interview

I watched all of these last night and thought it was super cool to see some of his workflow inside of Renoise! It's such a dope program & I love it get some exposure on RA 😊.

At 9:44, the technique Sully demonstrates for his breaks is well-known and is still probably the best way to achieve intricate break chopping, especially when working with multiple breaks or ones that have a lot of variations like in his track. Time-stretched hits, reverse hits, ping-pong loops, reverbed hits, longer sections of the break, shuffles & individual hits etc.

This is all done in one sampler instrument and spanned up and down the keyboard just like you would on an Akai s1000 hardware sampler. Each key triggers a different chop or section of the break.

Special Request talked about this technique a while ago in a RA interview

"Yeah, fuck it. I'll tell you the secret to it all. Say you've got a breakbeat and you chop it up into loads of different permutations and different start points. Then you map out all those variations onto your keyboard so that each key is a different version of the same break. You need to make sure they're all the same tempo and play at the same pitch, even though you're playing higher and lower notes on the keyboard. Some samplers call this non-transpose mode. Then you trigger all the different breaks with the same MIDI channel so that every sample cuts off the other note.

This is how you get things to roll. Remarc used to do all his drums like that, with this mono-triggering technique. Once you do that, you mess about with pitches and the effects on each slice of the break. It's like opening the gates of Valhalla."

Some other notes from the videos:

Use Multi-sampled rides for realism.

Instrument Modulation - Note stepper or key tracker to note on comb filter for variations per hit of a drum. When you pitch up and down or just play another hit it will change the comb filter setting to give you a different resonance.

As he puts it 'recreating the humanisation of a real drummer but in a synthetic way.'

Waveshaping a sine or 808 bass to add harmonics.

Call and response between the different elements. Bass vs inst vs drums.

One final point is that, even though his tracks are very detailed and the programming is quite intricate, there is only 8-12 tracks total for the tunes he showed. Seems he follows a fairly old-school mindset of limiting the total number of tracks & keeping things simple in that sense.

Cheers everyone,

George ✌️