How To Make Beats: On Computer Beat Slicing

Another great way to make beats on computer instead of building them up by scratch is by what’s known as Beat Slicing or Beat Chopping. Beat Slicing is great for creating new original loops out of sampled material or just simply slowing down or speeding up the tempo of sampled music. Its a great way to break out of your current way of thinking when making beats because it forces you to use the sample in ways that you had not thought of before.

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How Do You Make Beats On Computer With Beat Slicing?

Beat Slicing is when an audio recording is cut into shorter segments. You can then take these segments and arrange them in different ways to make your own drum pattern in your songs.

The Three Top Beat Slicing Tools

If slicing is where it’s at for you, I recommend,

Phatmatik Pro
Recycle by propellerheadz who also make Reason. Recycle is now so popular, rival software manufacturers allow you to import recycle files into their programs, using the file format .REX
Guru

Don’t forget that, nowadays, most beat making software, eg Acid Pro 7.0, with comes with its own slicing facilities.

Beat Slicing: The Good

You have control over your samples so there is no need to spend hours searching the net for that perfect sample.
For you Homies out there who do not play an instrument, it is possible to compose your songs entirely from chopped up snippets of pre-recorded samples.
It is a great way to get creative with your beat making.
You can use a chopper to get rid of unwanted noises in a loop.
The chopper allows you to quickly add or delete beats at certain points in your song to avoid your beat becoming too repetitive or mechanical.
Magnifying tools allow you to zoom into the part you are editing.
You can make beats without investing in hardware or drum kits.
You can edit by ear, without knowing bucket loads about music theory.
Make heaps more complex beats than you would otherwise be able to make while playing your own drum kit.
Most music software now comes with built in slicing facilities.

Beat Slicing: The Bad and the Ugly

Only for the meticulous. You’ve got to be very exact about where you make your cuts. Othewhise you just end up with a lot of unwanted noise.
If you like the feel of banging out your beats in real time, the time consuming process of slicing will seriously mess with your head.
Hours of staring at the peaks and troughs of a sound wave can leave you with sore eyes and a sore head.
You still have to iron out any imperfections in the original sample such as unwanted scratching noises from vinyl recordings.
You don’t have as much control as you would if you were making a beat from scratch.
You are restricted to working with the beats and sounds that already exist within the sample unless you have another sample you can splice into it.