When you experiment with the use of vocal and audio samples for slicing, you begin to experience a new sonic property of your sound. With Ableton Suite 8 you are able to slice an audio sample along grid or warp marker points to a drum rack. Simply right click (ctrl-click for MAC users) any audio sample in the session or arrangement view and you will see the option for “slice to MIDI track.” After you select this, you are given an option for slice length as well as presets. Each drum slice is mapped to various macros, depending on which configuration you choose. You can then easily adjust the ADSR of the sample as well as loop, start point and length of the sample. This makes for some interesting new manipulations as well as the ability to arpeggiate a long sample with a MIDI sequence. If you would like a template file, leave a comment and I will make one for everyone to download.

You can watch a video tutorial that I stream live below.