hey,
i just watched a video that explained how to chop samples and maintain the same bpm with each sample. the video made it look very easy till i got busy and it went to sheeat! i was wondering how you guys are making chops. i understand the whole, chopping beats and measures and all that stuff, but without a steady tempo, how would you make chops. i just chopped a bunch of jazz piano and i got a bunch of different sounds and samples, but it was hard to program them cause some were short, some were long and it was really confusing. so, im actually looking for tips on how to make some good chops. any advice?
thanks
"keep it funky"

Buy a metronome if you having trouble keeping time in your head. You also have to remember that drums or bass don't always lead a jazz tune, a horn player could hold the structure or timing of a song while his sidemen solo in and out.
There is a lot of modal playing in jazz, so you can sample a few notes and re-arrange them in a myriad of ways regardless of structure because they have inter-related frequencies. Hope that helps

start with a 2 or 4 measure loop from the sample that u like the most... if u find that your loop starts off normal and then speeds up for some reason... just increase ur bpm and break up the loop into sections in order to speed up the process of notes/sections to be played... in other words, make ur chops where the beat falls off tempo.... fiddling with the bpm is key

Yes traditional jazz is hard to chop, alot of it is too slow or fast. Learn how to count bars, and the pitch on your turntable will be your best friend. Use the samplers tap tempo before you sample and adjust the pitch to get it around the bpm you want. Also sometimes really fast or slow jazz you can double time the bpm,( if its 180 the cut the bars or bpm to 90, or vise versa.

hey thanks guys, that helps me alot. im starting to realize that bpm play a big part in sampling. im used to grabbing every one of my moms cd and going to amazon.com and sampling everything that i can get my hands on a figuring it out later. but all i ever ended up with is about 5 gigs of unused samples cause they are cut all over the place. so thank you for the help. ill try to maintain my bpms and pitch my records to get em close then sample and chop it. thats a good tip.
peece
SPRING
"keep it funky"

If you're talking about single shots here, you will hardly need to take bpms into account. When it comes to loops though, make sure the start point is good too. It's not just bars that need to be just the right length, the start and end points matter too.

Anyways, as for single shots, it should really be very intuitive actually.