Is there anyway i cant match the bpm of my chops without it distorting the sound of the original chop, i feel like ive asked this before and if so sorry about that but i feel like im going to need to start using ableton, if so how is the ableton 404 match up?

Bpm time stretch will add a lot of artifacts in the sample on the 404, you thing I noticed is that you can get away with much bigger bpm changes when raising the bpm of a sample versus lowering it. So if you made some chops that are all at different bpms for example 82bpm, 85bpm 84bpm etc.. you can stretch the 82 and 84 bpm sample up to 85 bpms without altering the original sound too much. Ableton works well with extreme sample stretching way better than the 404, so that might be you answer for a good clean sound. You can also make chops of guitar riffs and string sample stabs etc.. and play them over a beat without timestretching, as long as you drop the sound/sample on beat it will sound fine. You don't always need to chop in perfect sections and beat match everything to get a dope track going. Good luck

Thanks for the tips man, yeah i pretty much have been using whatever bpm chops i have and trying to make them fit usually it goes well. What i find myself doing is literally finding a a song i want to sample collective my chops/ then continue to play with the chops to see what kind of groove or melody i can come up with, then if i really want to get fancy i use the pattern sequencer with no metronome/bpm and just record it live then i play the recorded melody/chops and finger drum over it to find a cool feel. But ive notice the same about raising the bpm other than slowing it down. Ive been trying to go with the whole downtempo feel but find it a little hard with the sx404 without ableton. Ive seen some dope shit come out of sp users but at the same time they are lot more experienced than me and have used more than just the sx404 to make their beats. Im really trying to learn how to make some dope tracks only using the 404 and so far im doing pretty well but as a producer you always feel like you can do better. THanks man. Appreciate the help.

^^^this is why i got an sp.

perfect timing is boring! the mpc/sp way of working is an artform--and not a dying one, thankfully. i try to introduce randomness into the process wherever possible. prefer to go with my ears when chopping and leave it a bit messy. bangin on some pads without a metronome usually leads to some happy accidents.

ableton is great too and sometimes i chop up some loops and trigger the clips much like a sampler, but with re-pitch warping on (90% of the time) just to get a little unpredictability into the mix. just not a fan of time-stretching artifacts.

my first post/reply here. greetings from chicago.