Your favourite way to increase a short sample finishing in an abrupt, unwanted stop

[Doug1978]

Hi everyone

I'm sure there's a few ways to do this, but my mind's gone rather blank at the moment.
What's your favourite way(s) to increase the length of a short sample that ends with a very noticeable abrupt stop (that you don't want).

The two ways I can immediately think of are:
1) edit the sample in something like Kontakt, stretch the middle part and cut out the abrupt 'plop' ending. Then go for a fade out.

2) remove the abrupt ending, increase the release in something like Kontakt or with a transient designer plug-in, and then go for a fade out.

Any other ideas, or faults with the above, would be very gratefully received.

Also, out of interest, are there any simple vst plug-ins that just increase the release of a sample?

Many thanks
Doug

[arkmabat]

Hide/mask it with something else playing at the tail end.

[fmr]

Create a loop and use it for both sustain and release portions. That way, you can make it last as long as you want, and will program the duration in the sampler instrument itself.

[Gamma-UT]

To be honest this is more or less the same answer as arkmabat's but it might be possible to find something timbrally similar and use that for the sustain, which is the old rompler trick, if the sample doesn't loop well. The brain tends to notice attack sounds more. You can get away with murder on the sustain/release just as long as the effect you want is synthetic.

An extreme example is the voice to guitar blend on Pink Floyd's Sheep ("We fell on his neck with a scream" or thereabouts IIRC) although obviously the original sounds are both sustained over a fairly long period so maybe not the best example.

[Sendy]

Bidirectional loops They sound kinda funny too which is a bonus to me.

Failing that, good old timestretch and fades.

You can also give any sound "infinite sustain" by convolving it with white noise. Tends to bring out a certain sound, but it's a cool effect.

[camsr]

Delay, or reverb, with the same sample's attack portion faded in.

[sonicfire]

Delay, or reverb, with the same sample's attack portion faded in.

+1

[BERFAB]

Delay, or reverb, with the same sample's attack portion faded in.

+1

Unfortunately, I usually don't want to effect the rest of the sample, just the end. But a delay tail is what I want. So what I do is, instead of putting a delay on the sample, I will do the following:
1. copy the sample onto another duplicate track
2. eliminate all but the last beat or two of the sample.
3. create several copies of that last beat.
4. "delay" the copies by moving each one forward by an 1/8th or 1/4 or 1/16th - depending on the type of delay I want to create.
5. lower the volume of each of the copied beats
6. Alter the panning of each of the copied beats to mimic a 'tap' effect.

done.
-B

[BERFAB]

The other thing I do to mask a cutoff is to simply insert a cymbal swell. If you don't have one, you can easily create one by taking a cymbal crash hit, eliminating the attack and fading in instead. Then throw on reverb and re-sample with clean fade in and fade out.

It' s most popular on ballad-type transitions, but it also works surprisingly well on up-tempo and EDM.

Cheers
-B

[Doug1978]

Excellent!
Many thanks arkmabat, fmr, Gamma-UT, Sendy, camsr, sonicfire and BERFAB for those won derful suggestions.
I'll give them all a try tonight.

Cheers.

[Rah]

A good lazy way for me that often works is to reverse the sound, fade it out, then layer/crossfade with the original sound

[Rah]

You can also give any sound "infinite sustain" by convolving it with white noise. Tends to bring out a certain sound, but it's a cool effect.

That sounds interesting, must try it.

[xoxos]

load the bastard into adze (or stoooner if you don't want to pay me any money) and stretch it around with the FFT, record that to audio to make more content with the same spectrum, then paste bits of that together and envelope it in a wav editor.

pending just loading it into stoooner doesn't immensely make everything in your world perfect already.

[Doug1978]

Great stuff rah and xoxos - I'll give those options a try too (and I'll try out stoooner first before Adze).

Many thanks

[Jace-BeOS]

I'll give a thumbs up to mixing on a reverb tail, and convolution. I've done this many times for old Soundtracker ST-02, etc samples. If you have a sample editor that lets you automate mixing and effects, it's pretty easy to only affect the end of the sample. Or you can use automation of effects in a DAW. Loops have less success in my experience. They can sound rhythmic when long, and develop weird pitching when very short.