Did you know that you can use Splice Studio to change not only the speed of your entire song, but also of individual clips? Here’s a little tutorial to help you master all the options you have now for speeds.

1. Changing your song’s BPM

The first thing you need to know is how to change the BPM of a song. BPM stands for Beats Per Minute; the higher this number is, the faster your song will go. If you click and drag up or down on the BPM in Splice Studio, your entire song will speed up or slow down accordingly.

2. Changing the speed of your sample.

The next great thing to know is that you can change the size of a single clip to make it faster or slower. This can be useful for making clips match speed. For instance, maybe you have some great drums that you want to speed up to match a vocal line you have. To change the size of your clip (and therefore, the speed) just click your sample so that you see the little white square at the end. Grab this square and drag left or right to change your sample’s speed.

3. Choose your sync.

When you change the speed of your clip, you have a couple of choices for how to sync it to the rest of your song. By default, the sound will sync via time stretching. What this means is that the clip will go faster or slower but the pitch will stay the same. For example - if this were a vocal sample, it would sound like you were simply speaking faster.

The other option is to sync by matching the pitch. Choosing this option will allow the pitch to change when you change the sample speed. For example - again, if this were a vocal sample, you could use this option to make someone sound like a chipmunk, or (if slowed) like a monster. This is just silly with voice but with something like a synthesizer, you can use this to get the melody in a different key, which can actually be useful. Syncing by pitch uses far less resources from your computer, also, which can help reduce skipping.

You may also choose not to sync the clip at all, and it will remain as it was uploaded.

To get to these different options, just double click the sample to pull up the sample editor. You will see the options on the left:

A little tip: This page is also where you can CUT a sample, too. That’s how people pull just one word out of a sampled sentence, for instance.

I hope that helps clear a few things up for you. Just think - now you can break your song down in the middle and go to half-time, and then speed back up again, all using the exact same samples. How fun is that?

Hey everyone, Bram here! I’m taking over this blog for today’s tech post

We’ve been getting a lot of comments about the note editing in the sequencer, and well, once we thought about it, shift-clicking for adding notes wasn’t the best idea in the world. So, I just got dirty with the flash code and changed the way it works. To add and edit notes it now works like this:

• To add a note, just click. Drag to give it a length or just click and release to make one of those really short ones.
• To select a note, click on it.
• Select more than one note (selection rectangle) by holding down shift, click in an empty space and drag.
• Extend a selection by holding down shift and click on a non-selected note. You can do the inverse as well: remove notes from the selection by shift-clicking a selected note
• Change the length of a note (or notes!) by selecting the note, then click + drag the small rectangle at it’s tail
• Remove notes by selecting them (as above) and hitting delete or backspace.

That’s all for today! Cheerio!

Hellooooooooooooo. I’m already getting questions about why I’m not on your friends lists anymore. The answer is that in the beginning, I was auto-friended to everyone, to help get this party started. But now that you guys are friendlier and have better ways to find one another, we’re discontinuing that.

So, if you’ve never sent me a friends request in the past, but want to be friends still, now is your chance!! I’m still here and I still would love to hear from you.

My page is here. Be my friend?

Hello! I’m thrilled to finally be announcing that the new Splice 2.0 is officially OPEN FOR BUSINESS! First, we want to thank every single person for hanging out so patiently while we moved your files to the new site. You guys have been really wonderful the last few days and we appreciate it!! Secondly, we really want to thank all of the users who have been helping us beta test the new site. Your feedback and patient bug reporting have been so valuable to us and to all of the users on Splice. You rock.

There are a ton of new features in the site. We’ve been listening very closely to your feedback since our original launch and I think that you’re going to appreciate the changes we’ve made.

Welcome Home
Your new home page helps you to manage your Splice experience by giving you better access to the information that’s important to you:

• See who is linking to your music using the referrers link
• Manage your incoming friend requests all from one page
• Quick access to your favorite sounds, songs and people.
• Catch the latest Splice Blog headlines as soon as you log in
• Quick access to common features, such as uploading and recording
• Manage your mail and license preferences and more from the new ‘Account Settings’ page
• Geotag yourself - show us what part of the world you’re in and meet local friends

A Bright New Face
Improved profiles for people, and new profiles for sounds and songs!

• More space to tell the world about your music, your goals, your dog… it’s all up to you.
• Html editors were added to make it easier for you to include your photos and videos
• New people tags make it easy for you help people find you.
• “Become a fan” option lets you bookmark your favorite users without becoming friends
• “Send to a friend” let you share your favorite Splicers with the music fans in your life
• New Song and Sound pages let you upload an image and detailed information for all the music in your profile.

Explore Your Community
We know how much good music is showing up on Splice every single day, but we wanted to make it easier for everyone else to find it, so we’ve created some ultra-improved explore pages that make it easy for you to see what’s hot. You can search songs, sounds and people many different ways now, including:

• Top Rated
• Most Remixed
• With Most Fans
• Most Discussed
• Most Played
• Most Downloaded
• Recently Featured
• Most views
• A NEW forum gives you a great new meeting place to hang out and talk with your fellow musicians
• NEW flagging options let you help us keep copyrighted sounds OUT of the library

So that’s all well and good, but what about the MUSIC? That’s why we’re really all here, right? Right! So - deep breath - here’s what’s happening on that side of things:

• Sound Case: The sound case is a brand new feature. As you are browsing through the site, you can gather up sounds you want to try in your next song, and they will be temporarily saved in your Case, which you can access easily from the sequencer.
• Work in Peace: That’s right! You have been begging us for private drafts for ages, and we’re making that happen for you. Save your WIP posts until you have some more time to polish them up, and then save them. Shy people rejoice!
• Virtual Instruments: Create melodies directly in Splice using our Cheap Piano and Synth. More instruments are coming soon.
• Real-time Effects: (This is the really fun one!) Now add effects to your tracks - try a delay, or a flanger, or add some distortion. You will be amazed at how much mileage you get out of a single sample now.
• Choose Your License: While we have had nothing but luck using a standard Creative Commons Attribution (BY) license, we wanted to provide our users with more options for how their contributions to the site are used. User can now select from a range of CC licenses, as well as a Public Domain designation. Don’t worry about how they work together - Splice does the math on that one and lets you know which licenses are available for your finished product. You can read more about licenses here.

Whew! Is that enough for you for now? I think that should keep you busy for a while. We’re waiting to hear your feedback, so feel free to comment here, in the Forum or to email us. If you get lost, you can get some help, and -naturally- you can always come ask me personally.

Last but not least, don’t forget to enter the latest contest - and especially don’t forget to vote in it. You’re picking the winners from now on, so just like you did with all these features here, make your voice count and show us what you like. See you there!

We’re in the last phases of getting ready to open the doors here. Be patient a little while longer and your shiny new site will await you. In the meantime I want to repost something I blogged about a long time ago, to give your hungry music brains something to digest while you’re relaxing in the cool shade of our blog. It’s Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music. You can learn SO MUCH from that site, not to mention that it’s really fun to go exploring there. Be warned - there is a bit of language on the site, but if you can handle it, you’ll come out with a better musical education than you might get elsewhere.

Fartlord has been busy while the site is down. He made a video to help promote Splice. I smiled when I watched it and you probably will, too. Thanks, Fartlord!!

Hey everyone! Thanks for waiting so patiently while we get the new site up. We are currently converting all of your sounds and songs into the new Splice format. It takes a little while to change over so much information, so sit tight and we will be back as soon as possible.

I know some of you are hanging around without much to do while we have some downtime here, so I have a little present for you: A short tutorial for the new sequencer. This way, you can study hard and be ready to go when we are.

Don’t worry - the quiz results will be graded on a curve.

In case you missed it, Splice is going to be down for a day or two while we upgrade to our new version. You can read about it in the blog or, if you’re the impatient sort, you can just skip to the youtube video about it.

We will see you soon!

Hello everyone!

I wanted to tell you guys about some major changes ahead for Splice. We launched the original site near the end of the summer last year, and since that time, we’ve gotten a LOT of amazing musicians (and their fans) to join us in creating music together. You guys have been great users - not only because you participate and support each other so well, but because you are constantly giving us great feedback about what you like about the site and what you’re still waiting to see.

We’ve been listening.

I am really proud to announce that we will soon launch a brand new version of Splice. You had so many great suggestions for us that we started from the ground up and built you a whole new site that’s faster, cleaner and better than ever. There are so many new features that it would be impractical to list them all here, but here are some big ones that I think you will enjoy reading about:

* Private Drafts: SO many people have requested a more private space where they can work on their songs in sessions BEFORE sharing them with the world. Now, you can do just that.

* Delete your own sounds and songs: If a sound or song has not been used by another user, you will be able to delete it out of your page without a moderator’s help.

* Easier Friending: Manage your friends all from one page

* Easier Searching: All new explore pages make it easier than ever to find the best music on Splice

* Upgraded Forums: These will speak for themselves, but you guys will love them - they are embedded right into the site, much easier to use than the old one, and allow images and links.

* Flag unauthorized material: We know that users are growing frustrated with the ever increasing amount of copyrighted material on Splice. We know it makes it hard to find REAL samples to play with and make music out of. You will be able to flag suspected copyright violations to bring them to the attention of staff moderators, who can then more easily remove them from the site. With a little help from you guys, we can keep that stuff off our pages and continue teaching people about Creative Commons and why it works best for Splice.

And of course, the biggest upgrade of them all: Our new sequencer. We will be writing about the sequencer a LOT in the next few weeks - it’s really the most advanced thing of its kind out there, and deserves several posts of its own. Until now, all you could do in the Splice sequencer was line up samples and play them in various sequences. Imagine, though, what happens if you can take one single sample and manipulate it in real time to sound completely different? The biggest change in the new sequencer is exactly this: realtime effects. Turn that sample on and start twisting knobs. Or better yet - what if you could create your sample entirely in Splice, instead of making it somewhere else and then importing it? If you had a little place to create melodies, which could then have effects, what could you make? I think you are going to find you’re getting a lot more mileage out of your sounds soon, and that IS something to be excited for.

Check out this little sneak peek of what’s coming up:

Many thanks to our user Airtone for giving us such a great song to promote!

You can expect the new site to be up and in action sometime this week, so keep your eyes peeled and your samples at the ready. Thanks to everyone who has been part of this process. Your feedback, input and (most importantly) your MUSIC have been invaluable in helping create a better place for musicians everywhere.

If you have questions or comments about the new Splice, you can email them to human@splicemusic.com.

See you soon!!

Thaumata

Ok, kiddies. My wonderfu friend talk boxfor super cheap. Now, I have a sneaking suspicion that most of you are too young to remember good funk and therefore have no idea what I am talking about, therefore, exhibit A:

(Really, the best and rockingest video of Stevie on the talk box is HERE HERE HERE, but it’s got the embedding disabled. Don’t miss it, though. It’s so awesome. Really. I wouldn’t lie to you.)

So, ready to make one of your own? It’s so simple that anyone can do it, really. Even people like me, who have no skill when it comes to objects with wires. So, I challenge you to make your own talk box. I have a set of old speakers around here, somewhere, and I know I have some duct tape. That’s pretty much almost all you need: