Chop your samples with Radio Music

Radio Music is the first module I soldered myself and the first “sound generator” I had. It has a special place in my heart.

Akufen and all the minimal/microhouse electronic scene from Montréal were a big influence for me. These clicky sounds and chopped samples carefully placed in the patterns to build marvelous grooves. This was my thing.

I have bought Radio Music to try to reproduce this kind of chopped sample but without spending hours editing them. I wanted to do that by feeding control voltages in it.

Here’s how I do it:

I feed the reset input of Radio Music with a clock that goes faster than the base tempo. Usually I used the clock that is two times faster than the tempo. With Pamela New Workout, you can add to this clock some skipping. Let’s say 10%. That adds some unpredictability that is always nice.

With that, you get the same sound on every trigger. What we want now is to navigate inside that sample to get other sounds. To do so, feed the start input with a random CV. This CV needs to be looped.

Pamela New Workout is great for this. I create a random CV which loops every four beats. This CV has a level of maximum 7% not to travel around the whole sample .ith 7%, it stays around the same area in the sample. When you want to change the loop, simply turn Radio Music’s start knob to go elsewhere in the sample and change the loop.

Tips and tricks

• Hip-Hop acappella works very well with this technique. You have an example in my last jam at 19:00.
• Putting different kinds of samples on the same stations (audio files) are nice. I have a station contains only badass movie punch line. It results in a mix of great words like “motherf … kill … U gonna … Sparta !!!”

Next step

Apply the same technique but pass the output trough a VCA which is controlled by the same trigger as the Radio Music’s reset.
Then why not use a VCF. Let’s explore.

I hope you will have fun.