A lot of people ask me, 'Why do samples loaded into the Ultrabeat sample bay, sound so different from what they do when played through Finder or Quicktime?' so I figured it was a hurdle quite a few ran into and therefore decided to write this quick tip. The short answer: They sound different, because the default settings in Ultrabeat are not meant for samples.
Well this is a problem I faced for a few days when I started using Ultrabeat and believe it or not, the fix is a lot easier than you might have thought! The reason people don't seem to know about this is probably because it is overlooked in most cases.
Here is what you need to do:
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Open an Instance of Ultrabeat (Stereo or Multi, that's up to you). By Default the first voice, "Kick" will be selected so the controls you see will be for the Kick Voice of the UltraBeat Instrument.
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Right click / ctrl click on the blue volume slider near the bottom left labeled "Kick".
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On the pop-up menu, select "Init" then "Sample".
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Turn the "osc 2 vol" up to 0dB using the big knob to the right of the sample bay.
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Turn the "voice volume" up to 0dB using the big knob on the right-hand side.
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To repeat this for other channels without going though all these steps again, just right click / ctrl click on the blue slider labelled "Kick" once more & now select "Copy (Voice & Seq)".
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Finally, right click / ctrl click on any of the other voices you want to load samples into, and simply select "Paste Voice".
Now once you are finished, I suggest you save it as a preset so that you can recall it at any time and in any project. I hope you find this useful in your workflow.
A final note: There is an inherent characteristic of Ultrabeat which might bother some. It shaves off the first millisecond or so of a samples waveform, sometimes causing the voice to sound like it has less attack. Currently this is not something that can be worked around in Ultrabeat.
