Core concepts
Five ideas everything else in rip chopper builds on.
You can use rip chopper for a long time without reading this page. But the app makes a handful of quiet promises, and knowing them changes how you play.
Sources and clips
A source is a whole video (or audio file) you brought in. A clip is a slice of one — a start time, an end time, and everything you’ve decided about how it should play: its volume, its envelope, its speed, its place on the canvas.
The important part: a clip remembers where it came from. Chop a clip out of a source and you can re-chop it later, swap its audio for the isolated vocal, or trim its boundaries — the original frames are never thrown away. Cutting in rip chopper is an opinion, not an amputation.
Pads and banks
The playing surface is a 40-pad grid, mapped to your keyboard’s four letter rows or to a MIDI controller. Each pad holds one clip plus its performance settings.
Pads come in banks — pages of 40 — so a project can hold far more material than one grid shows. A common shape: the chopped verse on bank 1, the chopped chorus on bank 2, your own recorded loops on bank 3.
Voices and polyphony
Every pad press starts a voice: one playing instance of a clip, sound and picture together. Hold five pads, five voices play — that’s polyphony, and it applies to the video too. Every visible voice is composited onto the canvas simultaneously.
Press the same pad again and its old voice is cut off by the new one (retrigger). Let a one-shot run and its voice ends on its own. Loops keep their voice until you toggle them off.
Mute groups
Sometimes you don’t want polyphony. A bassline chopped across eight pads should be monophonic — each new note should cut the last, the way a finger sliding on a string can only be one place at a time.
That’s a mute group: put pads in the same group and each one chokes the others when triggered. Try the difference:
Tap pads quickly. With the group on, each hit cuts the last — the monophonic feel you want for hi-hats, basslines, or one singer who shouldn’t harmonize with themselves. With it off, everything overlaps polyphonically.
Mute groups do one more, sneakier job: they’re also the canvas’s layer system. Group 1 draws under group 2, which draws under group 3, and so on — so the same gesture that organizes your sound organizes your picture. See Canvas & visuals for that half of the story.
What you see is what renders
The deepest promise in the app: live playback, the preview output, and rendered files are the same performance. The canvas you watch while playing, the preview window you might feed to a projector, and the video file you export of a captured take are all driven by the same clock, the same envelopes, the same layer order.
If it looked right when you played it, it renders right. There is no “…but in the export” in this app, and an enormous amount of its engineering goes into keeping that sentence true.