Chopping breaks has been a major practice in electronic music (reads: music made using electronic equipment) for many years now. While it’s historically been associated with specific styles such as Hip-Hop, Jungle and Breakcore, breakbeats have recently found new ways of getting into a variety of different genres. Dancefloor-oriented styles are of course playing a key role in all of this topic, however we have been witnessing new forms of deconstructed break-chops in more experimental tunes as well. With the rise of new technologies, generative tools have proven to be an interesting replacement to the (albeit tedious) process of placing the chops on a timeline by hand, favoring unforeseen variations and interesting ideas alike.

In this article, we’ll take a look at how TATAT can be used to trigger different slices of a breakbeat and explore how its melodic-oriented design can actually lead to interesting outputs even in the realm of chopped-up samples.

A little premise: what we’re going to describe here is a rather advanced use of TATAT and involves using the DAW’s internal automation system. If you don’t feel confident enough about your knowledge in these fields, make sure to check out our TATAT complete walkthrough tutorial and the user manual, as well as deepening the automation section of your DAW of choice.

1 – Anatomy of a chopped up breakbeat

“Chopping” a break means that we have to slice the sample in different parts (called “slices”) and assign them to different MIDI notes, so that it becomes possible to trigger each part separately. This can be done with pretty much all DAWs’ integrated samplers, but for the sake of this demo, we’re going to use Ableton Simpler (Live’s stock sampler, which has most of the standard playback and chopping features).
Another way is to use a single note and change the starting point at each trigger (however, in the case of TATAT and “regular” DAWs, this is a rather inefficient approach, so we won’t be covering it here). It is also important to make it so that the original sample matches the project’s tempo. This can be achieved by trimming the beginning and end of the sample (so that it creates a perfect loop), then shifting its pitch so that it aligns to the grid. Nowadays, most DAWs offer a decoupled approach between pitch and tempo settings and, while it’s completely up to the user, I feel that keeping the relationship between the two consistent gives the output a more organic character (ie. making the sample play faster would also make its pitch higher).

For starters, we’re going to take a 4-bars long “Amen break” sample and set up 16 slices (one per quarter note). A greater number of slices can give access to an higher resolution of triggers, making however finding the groove a bit more difficult. I find that 1/4th or 1/8th slices strike a great balance to work with this TATAT setup, but this depends on which kind of result the user is looking for.

So to recap:
1 – find a nice breakbeat sample
2 – trim its start/end points so that it creates a perfect loop
3 – adjust its tempo/pitch to make it align with the DAW’s tempo
4 – drop it in the sampler and set the slices.



2 – Triggering the slices via TATAT


2.1 – Basic setup

Now that we have everything set up, we can start playing around with the chops. In most samplers, slices get assigned to consequential MIDI notes, with the first one (usually C1 or C3) corresponding to the first slice. Assuming we have 16 slices and everything correctly mapped (with C1 as our first valid note), we can draw a simple MIDI map as follows:

Note: make sure to double check which note corresponds to slice number 1 in your system and transpose all the other values accordingly.

At this point, we can already trigger the slices by using any MIDI input, but how do we set up TATAT?
Since TATAT can trigger notes between a set of up to four (+ the Bichords value), the first thing we need to do is define a core foundation of the main chops (this assumes that TATAT is already correctly linked up to the sampler). For starters, let’s set things up as follows:

– sample playback mode has to be monophonic
– sample playback mode has to be set to gate (instead of trigger – this means slices are going to play for the whole duration of the input note, useful to create variable length via the Length parameter).
– Length at 100%
– Veloctiy at 100% with no variation chance
– a single tempo value (let’s use 1/8, set its slider to 100% and lower the remaining two all the way to the left = 0%)
– no bichords (dial value down to 0%)
– our selected four notes are E1 (main kickdrum), C#1 (snare), D1 (drum fill) and D#1 (secondary snare)
– since we want this to be the foundation of our beat, let’s configure the note chance sliders so that the main kickdrum and the snares to have the highest values, then let’s set the drum fill to have a slightly lower chance of playing.

If you did everything correctly, pressing play on the transport is going to play back the chops in a randomic order, without them overlapping.

2.2 – Advanced configuration


Now that the sampler is receiving the notes and correctly triggering the slices, it’s time to dive deep into some advanced settings.

First of all, how do we get TATAT to switch the set of notes and make it able to trigger other slices?
This can be easily achieved by using the Live Input mode. Once activated, TATAT becomes able to update the notes in real time based on whatever MIDI input it receives. So we can simply arrange some notes in a MIDI clip and send those to TATAT, in order to make it effectively switch the targeted slices. We can change between one and four notes at the same time, so we’re going to set up a MIDI clip which sends our “foundation” notes (E1, C#1, D1 and D#1) for 3 bars and then switches to A#1, C2, B1, C#2 (to create some interesting fills at the beginning of the fourth bar). Let’s set it to loop and play it back. We can now hear the triggered slices changing at the end of the third bar, generating a little fill and resetting the main core of the beat while the loops starts back.

In the same way, we can use the DAW’s automation lanes to draw envelopes controlling the Length, Velocity and Time values, in order to add even more variety to the fill. Let’s make it so that, at the beginning of the fourth bar, Length and the Velocity variation drop down at 50% and 75% respectively. Following this logic, we can automate the tempo sliders too: let’s automate all the three sliders so that, at the beginning of the fourth bar, the main 1/4 one drops to around 25%, the 1/16 goes all the way to 100% and the 1/8 reaches just around the 15%. All of the values go then back to the previous configuration at the end of the loop.

Bonus tip 1: automating Less is also a good idea to add variation (though it might need some calibration depending on the sound source).

Bonus tip 2: being the sample playback set to monophonic, we can roll the dices even further by automating the Bichords values. This will cause some of the slices to get replaced by their respective Bichord value. An ideal setup involves setting the two values between +1 and +2 (so that we’re sure we’re not accidentally exceeding the maximum amount of slices), setting the balance slider in the middle and automating only the chance value so that it stays between 25-50% (in order to make sure it doesn’t completely take over the main slices).

3 – Conclusion

Congratulations: you now have a generative breakbeat station! You can explore this configuration further by playing around with the sample’s tonal character, adding effects and so on! You can even balance out TATAT’s intervention in case you don’t feel like using a completely generative setup by automating the Play/Stop button and alternate its action with some prewritten MIDI clips, or take advantage of the LIV/MEM slider to create recurring sequences.