Noah Beresin, aka Xaphoon Jones, is a producer, notably for rap/electronic artist Chiddy Bang, out of Philadelphia. Chiddy Bang (Beresin and Chidera "Chiddy" Anameg) is currently finishing their debut album, The Swelly Life, out via Virgin Records/EMI Music on September 19th. The two have a single out, Opposite of Adults that is getting play on Top 40 Radio and is in rotation at MTV.

Beresin chats with Gearwire about his use of Propellerheads ReCycle 2.1.

“I use ReCycle 2.1, and I've been using recycle since about 2008. What I like about recycle is its simplicity and its control,” he says. “I was working in reason, in logic, and using an MPC 2000, and I needed a format for slicing samples, rearranging them, and incorporating them back into the music I was making. I had tested out Logic's EXS24 and at the time I was doing a lot of drum programming in Reason, so I decided to give recycle a try.”

There are features Beresin wishes ReCycle offered but he isn’t insistent on the issue.

“One thing that might be nice would be a time stretch without pitch, or a pitch change without chaining its speed,” he says. “Though in a way, ReCycle helps me preserve an old school sound by not allowing me to do that.”

Beresin took us through how he uses ReCycle on a “typical track” (we brought up the term. Not him!)

“For a typical track, first I'll load a song I want to sample into a basic audio editor. I'll chop it to just the length of the song I want to sample. Then, I'll export it as a WAV and open it up in ReCycle. First I'll just listen to the loop for a while and adjust the start and end points till its on point. I'll crop the loop, and then use a pencil tool start drawing in slice points,” he says. “I dig how recycle will let you choose between drawing your own slice points, or using the sensitivity slider to pick out the louder slices. (Great for drum loops.) Then I'll save it (it saves as a rex2 file) and open it up in Reason's Dr. Rex Loop Player. From there I can work on it as part of any Reason project. Kaboom.”

He also says that ReCycle plays well with other software.

“It works great no matter what program I'm working with. The REX2 files open flawlessly in Reason, and in Native Instruments Maschine, which I've just started working with,” says Beresin. “If I have to work in other studio environments, I can use recycle to export each separate slice of my REX loop as its own WAV file. This is great when I want to build my own sampler instruments in Logic or Pro Tools.”

And there is more Beresin likes about ReCycle.

“What I like most about ReCycle is it allows you to have a great deal of control over how you chop your samples, but it still forces you to use them in an old school context. I find that a lot of independent tempo change (changing the audio's speed independent of its pitch) really degrades the audio quality, and as a result, the tune often feels forced,” he says. “By forcing yourself to work within dependent pitch/tempo change, there may be some songs that simply won't work because of the new tempo or the key change. But as a result, the ones that do work sound smoother, and more natural, as if you sped up the vinyl record yourself.”

Beresin has just finished producing the Chiddy Bang record and they are already planning the second release. He is also working on tracks for D.C. rapper, Wale and remixes for some artists from the U.K., including Eliza Doolittle.