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How to Freestyle With Chopped up Samples

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When I DJ, I don’t just let the music go by without morphing it and changing it in some way. It’s no fun to go to a party and only hear the same stuff they play on the radio. That’s why I chop up nearly every song into 12 samples that can be added, erased, and changed on the fly. There are many ways of doing this with warped tracks, but for this project I am trusting that you can keep tempo in your head.

Necessary Items:

• Song
• Trigger Finger or Control Surface that supports a midi out

As you can see above, I have the main track (in this case Steppin Razor) playing on the right on the “B” crossfader. All samples on the left are chopped up and ready to be used.

On the Trigger Finger, I have each assigned to a different pad. When I hit a pad, it plays, but on the wrong side of the crossfader. This is because the original song is playing on the other side (the one people can’t hear).

The entire crossfader is mapped to a knob on a different control surface, however there is one pad on the left of the trigger finger that instantly snaps over to A and another snaps to B.

To freestyle, all I have to do is hit the pad that sends the crossfader over to A and hit the samples I want to fire off. When I release that pad, it snaps back over and continues the song.