recording samples from turntable

Joshstrap · Post by **Joshstrap** » Mon Oct 22, 2007 7:21 pm

So I've been recording a lot of short samples for use in ableton off vinyl and I'm starting to wonder if it might not be best to record the sample as slow as possible, then warp it, and then speed it up with my tempo adjustment. the reason being that I'm not always sure how fast I'm gonna need it to playback in my track always. I'm assuming that recording it normal speed, having it digitized by ableton, and then speeding it up if need be will leave me with degraded quality vs. recording as slow as possible and then speeding it up to the same desired tempo. Am I onto something here? (I've got key-lock on my table so keeping the correct pitch isn't an issue.)

laird · Post by **laird** » Mon Oct 22, 2007 7:44 pm

Hmmm, I think this will be a hassle and the results.. not worth it. Thats my guess.

Increasing the sampling frequency of your digital audio recorder increases fidelity, especially when playing back slowed-down samples. And by recoridng slow records, you'd esserntially be doing this without, say, just recording samples at 88 kHz or something.

BUT.... Slowing down your record player is going to have the opposite effect, I think. Just like VCR tapes, I think playing back (or recording) at higher speeds is best. I'm no vinyl expert, but I suspect increasing the digital recording fidelity will be offset by degrading the analog source... it might be a little better, maybe a little worse, and definitely take a lot more time to get the pitch adjustments correct. Plus this would lock you into using pitch mode when warping, unless you resample inside Live

And I'm pretty sure that using a granular-based Warp mode to speed up and pitch-adjust slowed down samples will NOT improve audio quality.

laird · Post by **laird** » Mon Oct 22, 2007 7:48 pm

Also, records often have the bass frequencies summed-to-mono to prevent powerful bass groove L/R differences from causing distortion.

Slowing down a record during playback would cause some of the Stereo low-mids to now fall into this range that are best left MONO, and you might be adding a bit of distortion to your digital recordings as a result.

Joshstrap · Post by **Joshstrap** » Mon Oct 22, 2007 11:01 pm

Thanks for the input. That seems to make sense. One thing, though, is that My turntable has the ability to slow down or speed up records in the range of of around 10% while keeping the record in tune. Which I guess would improve quality a bit as long as I'm in that 10% range (though that is rare and the difference would have to be pretty negligable)...

MonaShaker · Post by **MonaShaker** » Wed Oct 24, 2007 6:28 am

Ive found plenty of my vinyl's on Juno.co.uk, it lets you preview about 1min30sec of each tune. I just copy the preview into Ablton and sample that.

Creator · Post by **Creator** » Wed Oct 24, 2007 8:22 am

I think it would be best to use the vinyl at zero, the way it was meant to be.
record the vinyl at 0% in the middle into something like protools / soundforge. then convert the track to mp3.
you can then drop the track as it was meant to be into ableton and warp from there.
the slower you record, remember the bigger the file will be.
it may suffer with the compression.