Sample selection and preparation.
You can have a dope sample and blow it with untidy chops just as you can have clean chops of wack samples...
I took an eight-bar loop from a track yesterday and spent a bit of time chopping it. All the chops are clean. Tidy. But out of the 16 chops (spread out on Maschine's pads in my case) there's probably only 6 or 7 (high estimate) that'll make it onto the beat and only 3 of them that make up the meat of the track I'm working.
But without taking the whole 8-bars there's no way I would've gotten any of it chopped up so clean... There's some gold in there but also some straight up shit that'll never make the tape.
I make sure my sample is cut tight (truncated) too... It's gotta be 'able' to loop nicely before I even begin chopping it up. Once you have a clean loop timestretch to tempo of drums (or intended drums - I use a simplified, quick version of what I intend and then re-do after the flip) and pitch up as appropriate (taste thing - I rarely do this). Then start slicing it up.
if the sample is a piece of music you dig and the loop is clean (can be played over and over and sounds good) and is stretched and pitched to tempo and key you're working in; it make chopping it much much easier.
