Reasonfreaks

Posts Tagged ‘recycle’

CycleOn is a real-time playback system for ReCycle REX loops. This combinator based instrument patch is designed to create live performance and DJ Style effects using Propellerhead Software Record + Reason 4 (both applications are required). The combinator is the creation of Kurt Kurasaki (Peff), and features graphics by Bitplant. The Peff 035 – CycleOn Combinator Refill comes with about 120 preset patches and includes content from Loopmasters, GW Childs, Goh Nakamura, and Tim Bulkley.

Download the refill for free here

Recycle! is the tool for the serious loopist. And especially Recycle! 2.0 since it supports stereo wav and aiff files to be converted to the very popular REX format. Recycle! 2.0 has it’s own format: Rx2. But that’s not the only thing that has changed since the previous version (1.7) of Recycle! There are many interface changes and there are 3 effect processors added to the Recycle! toolbox. As if that wasn’t already enough you can now preview the loop in at a new tempo or/and pitch. And your loops will be compressed in non-lossy compression which saves up to 50% space!

For people who use Reason, Recycle! is just essential stuff. If you want to take full advantage of the Dr.Rex you need it to make Rx2 files from your own loop collection. Either home brewed or from your sample cd’s. And you don’t need to be an audio professional to start working with Recycle! It’s very user friendly and almost al the functions can be found very easy. If you own a hardware sampler you will also find Recycle! to it’s perfect companion. You chop up the loop in Recycle! and when you’r done you send the slices to the sampler and load up the midi file in your sequencer. As easy as it sounds!

Minimum System specifications:

Power MAC
Cd-Rom
16 Bit soundcard
16 Mb Ram
Os 8.6 or later
Midi Interface (for use with external sampler)
SCSI Interface (for use with external sampler)

Intel Pentium Class CPU 66 Mhz or faster
800×600 256 Color or better
Cd-Rom
16 Mb Ram
16 bit soundcard
Win 98 or NT 4.0 or later
Midi Interface (for use with external sampler)
SCSI Interface (for use with external sampler)

Working with Recycle! 2.0

When you have some loops which you want to use in your songs but they are not in the right tempo or pitch, Recycle! is just the perfect tool to make these loops ready to be used in your tracks without having to work for hours on timestretching and stuff like that. Recycle! can slice up your loops into all the individual building blocks it was build of. For instance: A drumloop is usually made out of various drum sounds. Namely a kick, snare, hihats etc, etc. What Recycle! does is placing slices (markers) on the exact beginning of each of these sounds (sounds which are on top of eachother are also in the same slice). It can do this automatically or if you don’t like the results or if the loop is to complicated you can manually add slices to the loop.

When each sound is ‘sliced’ you can start to put up the tempo or/and the pitch of the loop. And the timing stays rocksolid. What actually happens her is that the slices (markers) form a midi file which drives the individual sounds which were seperated by the slice. If you raise the tempo the midi file will play faster and this causes the sounds to be triggered faster. At the same time the pitch will also rise (if you want it to). So you will get a very accurate timestretch without timestretching! Very usefull!!

You can also load in a piece of music and cut out a loop yourself. Just place the L and R handle around the exact loop and choose crop loop. Now the loop will be cut out, ready to be processed by you.

New in Recycle! 2.0 are the 3 effect processors. Which can add real-time effects to your loop. That way you can totally change the sound of your loops which will only give you many more options while working on your loops. Let’s have a closer look at these effect processors:

This is what the name suggests. An envelope with wich you can set the amount of stretch, attack and decay for each slice in the loop at once. The stretch function makes sure that when you lower the speed of a loop you don’t have the ends of these sounds to be cut off at once. This is very important if you have a loop in which there is no space in between the sounds. Recycle! will calculate a tail to each slice according to the last few bits of the slice. The attack can be used to fade in slices when you still have pops and clicks after setting the slice in the best way possible. The decay is used to make the slices shorter (rapid decay). There are some very tasty presets available!

This is really a compressor. You can use it to give your loops more or less punch. The transient shaper re triggers on each slice. So you have very accurate control over the sounds. There are a few very good presets available for if you don’t have a lot of experience with compressors. And these are quite good i must say!

The eq within Recycle! 2.0 is a high quality one. You have total control over your frequency’s. You can boost and cut frequency’s in the whole spectrum of sound. Very usefull to give your loops just that little bit more low or high. Also here you will find some very nice presets. Check out the Serious LoFi preset!!

A very nice thing is the option to change the colours and look of the wavform area. You can have the wavform shaded or plain in the colour of your choice. Also can you set the contrast level. Usefull for when you have to work for a long time with the program without starting to get square eyes.

After you have loaded in your wav or aiff file you can start making slices immediately. However it’s a smart thing to click the preview toggle button right away. There you will have to set the number of bars of which your loop exsists (1 bar is 4 beats). Recycle will now calculate the tempo which you can see in the upper right corner in the tempo section. This is also the point at where the 3 effect processors can be used.

When all this is set you can use the sensitivity slider (sens.). Which will add slices to your loop automatically. The further you move this to the right the more slices will appear in your loop. Most of the time Recycle! finds very good spots to place the slices. But sometimes you might want to manually add or remove slices. This is when the toolbox comes into play.

Recycle has a bunch of tools with which you can slice up your loops. There is the pointer, hide tool, lock tool and pen tool. The arrow is used to move slices. The hide tool to hide slices you have made but which aren’t exactly the ones you really needed. The locktool will lock slices so you can have the sensitivity bar search for more slices while these stay present. The pen tool is used to draw in slices. All tools except the pen tool can audition slices by pressing on the wavform.

As you can read. Recycle! is a pretty powerfull tool with which you can make loops totally ready to be used in your songs. You can load the Rx2 files into many sequencer software programs like Cubase and Reason. And you can use it in your hardware sampler ofcourse. Recycle! 2.0 supports even more samplers then the previous version. Akai s5000, s6000 samplers are also supported now.

Conclusion

Recycle! is essential stuff for all samplist’s. When you work a lot with loops, either self made or from sample cd’s. You cannot overlook Recycle! It’s a great program which really works! No more timestretching drumloops. But not only drumloops. You can throw almost any loop at it and it will handle it. The effect processors in Recycle! are of a very high quality and will give your loops what they might still miss. You can export the loop into a range of formats. Recycle! is even usefull for sounddesigners who make multisamples. Recycle! proves to be a very good cutting help for long takes of multisamples. If you need to know the exact tempo of a loop just load it into Recycle! and you know which tempo the loop is in. For Reason users Recycle! is absolutely needed to get the most out of the Dr.Rex. A very good and highly professional looping tool which will help you to make music even better!

Homepage: http://www.propellerheads.se

Recycle! must be one of the main tools of choice for the loop maker. I couldn’t imagine making loops without the use of it. Recycle! 2.0 let’s you make stereo files while the former versions only allow mono files to be sliced and processed.

If you want to make files for the Dr.Rex loop player. You need to use Recycle!

Recycle! is a very cool and super handy loopslice tool with wich you can do amazing things. There are several ways of getting a loop to be sliced in the right way. In this tutorial i’ll explain you how to slice up a loop and make it ready for the Dr.Rex loop player.

Recycle! must be one of the main tools of choice for the loop maker. I couldn’t imagine making loops without the use of it. Recycle! 2.0 let’s you make stereo files while the former versions only allow mono files to be sliced and processed. Also a new addition to 2.0 are the effects. There’s a transient shaper (compressor), the envelope and the equalizer. These tools are very handy to tailer your loop right to perfection. The compressor is very handy to make your loops sound louder while maintaining the level. You can also get really over the top effect processing out of it suitable for creative shaping of your loops.

Slicing a loop
When you have a loop that you want to use in the Dr.Rex (or cubase etc, etc) you need to have it sliced to take full advantage of the effect of the REX format (Rx2 when using Recycle! 2.0).

Almost any loop can be sliced by Recycle! As long as it has some sort of rhytmic element in it. When you want to REX a loop exsisting out of legato played strings or something you will find it very hard to slice the different notes. Read the rest of this entry »