Tips and Tricks for Playing with High BPM

Performances, Streams & Live Coding
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Hey guys.

So i am playing around with high speed EDM genres like Extratone in Sonic Pi.

I have found I can cap out around 8000 BPM before I crash Sonic Pi using a simple kick drum set to sleep for 1.

Does anyone here have experience with playing around with samples at a super high bpm? If so, do you have any tips and tricks for altering them and playing around with them? Any pointers or anecdotes are appreciated.

Thanks in advance for all your help! :smiley:

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I finally got a prototype working. I didnā€™t add anything to fill out the beat, so you donā€™t get the ā€œWall of Soundā€ aesthetic you normally get from extratone, but the single distorted kick getā€™s the job done.

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Final Result from my experiment.

Since it is embedded, here is a link to the repo, with the samples, and the code
bit.ly/2IMQX1i

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Is that sample of the cat from the Ghost Stories anime? Hilarious, probably the best parody ever made. The song turned out well.

I think if you use samples with an already fast bpm beat, or pitch up the samples you can achieve a similar sound at a lower bpm than 8000. For instance if you make the samples 4x faster I imagine youā€™d be able to achieve this effect around 2000 bpm, however your pitch will go up and there will be too much high end. To get around this you could use an outside program to speed up the samples without altering the pitch. This can be done in most DAWs.

Also if you want this ā€œWall of Soundā€ to feel like itā€™s in flux and ever-changing I suggest you make one sample play every 1 sleeps. Then another sound play every 1.01 sleeps, another at every 1.04 sleeps and so onā€¦ This way they will slowly offset from each other over time and eventually line back up.

Iā€™d also suggest adding some randomization. It would be good if some of the samples did not play every cycle but instead had an 80% change of playing. Or you could even have the program decide between 2 samples and play one or the other this time around.

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Yeah. It is the cat from Ghost Stories. haha. Iā€™m going to make a speedcore/extratone EP using Sonic Pi that samples from that.

I was trying to avoid doing much editing in a daw, if I could help it. I know it would technically make it easier, but I want to do everything with code as much as I can. I saw an extratone video in a daw where basically thatā€™s what they did. The max in a daw like FL Studio is 522, so they max out(4 per, i think. So max is around 2000 BPM) the number of beats you can put, export, then speed up that sample.

I originally had random bpm, but it sounded like shit, so i stopped. This is definitely a prototype, even though it is completed. I didnā€™t do much mixing to the sound or automation, but I can. :slight_smile:

Thanks for the tips though! If you wanna try your hand at remixing, feel free to branch off from the repo!

Edit : I found out I didnā€™t save and upload my functions.rb file, so you donā€™t have any of the methods in the repo for the code to work. Iā€™ll upload that when I get home.