i cant believe you havent chopped anything w/o drums before!!! i barely ever chop stuff with drums...barely ever man.....i could tell you, but id have to kill you... nah you do it like this....
you need a wave editor to this mind, or something that chops anyway....
you need to make sure the sample loops properly for this to work, so make that happen first....anything can be looped...ANYTHING
so once it is looping in time, forget about it being smooth, if it is great, if it isnt fuck it, fix it in a bit....count how many bars the sample is. for this example are going to use a four bar loop and our tune is 95BPM
so.... looping in time, yea.... get it looping in time. Next we need to match the tempo of the loop to the tempo of your track, so what you do is work out how long 4 bars is in seconds in your tune... so for a 95BPM track 4 bars is 07.120 seconds...
now go back to your wae editor and time stretch the fucker to 07.120 seconds.
so now your whole loop is in the same tempo as as your track.
no to chop it further you need to split the track into more equal pieces....say we want to chop it into 4 pieces.
so i our head we are counting 1,2,3,4 whilst the sample is looping round....if you hae soundforge at this point, you can press "M" every time you count a beat. This roughly marks your chop points, which should all be of a similar length now.
Next you zoom into your markers and adjust the cut points so the chops are smooth. Basically take your marker and move it to the correct point, if it is a melody that is not completely off beat, this would most probably be the start of a note , if it is off beat and the marker lands right in a block of silence, then you are just going to have to trust your ear or your original marker point. Do this for all 4 sections, making sure the markers are in zero crossing positions.
At this point all of the sections should be about the same length of time, but as we known, humans are not quantise grid perfect, so the sections will all be slightly different lengths but the sum length equaling the correct length of the total loop, in this case 07.120 seconds.
We need to make these sections quantise grid perfect now, so there are not clicks or pops when you put them in your sampler/track. SO we pull of each section into its own window/area, so we have 4 seperate 1 bar loops now.
We go back to the DAW and work out exactly how long each 1 bar should be. in this case, at 95 BPM each bar is 02.526 seconds long. Go back to the wave editor and time stretch each section to 02.526 seconds...
et voila! there you have it! a 4 bar sample cut into 4 perfectly timed sections, assign them to seperate keys or pads in your sampler and BOOM, you can move around and rearrange without any clicks or pops....
obviously this is a very basic method but you have to get the basics going on before you can do more advanced chops...but it is all maths and once you get the method down, only your maths can let you down....
and before anyone says anything about killing the groove, you are only quantising the start of each section, what goes on in the middle of the sample is still un touched....and also, shuffle and swing in a daw ignore the 1,2,3,4 because shit dont swing unless there is something striaght to swing off!
