I recorded the initial beat-vox with an Apogee MiniMe (I/O box, set at default 16-bit, 44.1 kHz, Stereo) connected to a NEUMANN TLM 103 microphone to my Intel Core 2 Duo powered notebook (a very simple setup). For best recording, I put the microphone on a tripod in a separate room with a windscreen, and close the door while recording. In Sound Forge 9, press record, which will bring up the recording dialogue box. You can press record again at any time and begin beat-voxing into your mic setup. I did this for about a minute or so, until I felt I had enough to work with.

The MiniMe recorded a stereo track, but only in the left channel (mono). You can get rid of the other channel all together. Click Process > Channel Converter… and find the preset [Sys] Stereo to Mono – Use both channels (100 %), and press OK. Your track is now one channel and ready for the next step.

Press play and listen to the performance. Tap the "M" key on beat while playing to place a marker at the start of a beat, and 4/4 there-after. You’ll most likely be able to find five or six good loops in the full recording. The tempo of each does not matter, as SF9 and ACID Pro 6 will automatically adjust to the size and time of loops you create.

Now you can start selecting the beats you want to use in the marker sets you found. It helps to turn on SF9’s Selection Grid Lines, in the Options menu. This will add three alignment bars in the selection to help you line up a 4/4 beat. Turning on the Looping Selection icon in the toolbar will help with adjustments. Once you find a beat that loops perfectly, press Ctrl-C to copy it to your clipboard and press Ctrl-E to "Paste to New." Then press Ctrl-S to save that new loop. You can repeat this step as many times as it takes to get your favorite performances subtracted from the raw recording.

In ACID Pro 6, find your audio loops in the file-system below and select all the audio loops you created in SF9. Right-click-drag them into the empty left bar and let go. A menu will pop up with various ways you can bring them into the project. Click Add as Loop. All loops will automatically be synced with the master BPM for the project.

Pick one of the loops that you want to work with and dissect in AP6. I chose Loop #6. With the Draw tool (pencil) on the toolbar, draw two bars of it. Turn on Loop Playback in the toolbar near the file system. Press F9, to zoom into the track for dissecting/editing. Finally, make sure your grid spacing is at least 16th-notes for now by right-clicking a blank area of the track, selecting Grid Spacing and clicking 16th Notes. Don’t forget to save the file ( Ctrl-S).

Now comes the easy part. Select the start and end points of all "blank" or "excessive" space. Press S (to make a slice). Slice it into nice, manageable chunks, which should appear as a bunch of One-Shots, or individual hits when done. Sixteenth-notes are good enough for this level of editing. Press play and you’ll hear a cleaner beat, without the rest of the breathing or noises that might have happened. It’s ripe for processing now. It won’t be a problem if some of the beats or one-shots are off. You can select the beats that are off, press and hold down ALT, and you’ll be able to move the wave data left and right with the mouse to line up with the bars.

This is the creative part, where the 16th-note, 32nd-note, 64th-and-beyond note handcrafted glitch editing comes in. (Tip: Turn on the Metronome in the toolbar during playback to help you keep the beat while shredding.) Select either the hit of the beat, or the trail, depending on whether you’re pre-glitching or post-glitching on a particular beat. Use the Slice tool (press S), to cut the part you want to stutter. Select that slice and press Ctrl-C, and paste it somewhere else by pressing Ctrl-V. Copy and Paste will be your new best friend during this step. Keep on beat as much as possible, and don’t be afraid to try triplets or syncopation. Have fun with it, as long as you keep on beat, and rhythm.

Now that you have the main brew, it’s time to add the spices. These are the flourishes, modulations, pitch shifting and reverse hits. Select a hit that you want to reverse (use in moderation), right-click and in the menu click on Reverse. This will be instantly reflected. Remember that this is all non-destructive editing, so your original loop is still completely unaffected by this sophisticated mutilation. To add flourishes and pitch shifting, select one of the pieces and either press + or –, to go up or down. Since this is a mono track, you can also play with the Pan envelope and pan each slice. You should end up with a pretty complex-sounding loop by the time you’re done with all of these gems.

With the splicing and glitching done, you can add effects to the track (or, if you like, different elements of the same beat to different tracks with various post-effects). Or you can just render it out as a new loop for use in your musical creations. You can also change the BPM of all tracks. Either way, this comes in handy for remixing and will give you Matrix-like audio effects for otherworldly vocals. It’s handy to add a compressor or a mastering plug-in like iZotope Ozone3 on the master track for the loop. The fun part is when you mix and match it with the other loops that you’ll create. In this example, I have five more loops that I can cut up and glitch as far as I’d like. After I’m done, no plug-in can take credit for the results!

Justin Lassen
Composer/Producer/Remix Artist

Justin Lassen is an accomplished dark classical composer, producer and remix artist with more than 10 years’ experience in the video game, music and film markets. He’s a longtime user of Sound Forge, as well as Sony ACID Pro 6, SONAR 6.2 Producer Edition, FL Studio 7 XXL, and Project5 2.5. He has produced remixes for such artists as Madonna, Garbage, Blue Man Group, Lenny Kravitz, Robert Miles, Majandra Delfino, Nine Inch Nails, Linkin Park, Evanescence and Tweaker, and has worked on various projects for game and technology companies such as Interplay, Novus Delta, Cakewalk, Intel and Carbon6. In 2003, he released the critically acclaimed chamber suite, And Now We See But Through A Glass Darkly.

Justin says Keep in Mind…
For the past year or so, I’ve been doing the memorable "glitch"-themes/beat-voxing for an Internet TV show called GadgetGossip!. I’ve been doing "glitch" editing since before it had a name, genre or mainstream acceptance. People always ask me how this is done, and how they can get started doing it themselves, so I decided to create a step-by-step tutorial. I’ll focus here on the creation of the tracks for our "Rolls-Royce Phantom" episode. These are raw live-performance beat-voxings (vocal percussion) that I then slice and dice by hand, without the aid of do-it-for-you plug-ins like Stutter and Beat Repeat.