Mutegroups and Same Note Retrigger

Hi Ken,
OK, maybe I can help or inspire you as we use various repeating samples in our group.

First of all, the retrigger feature you use is mainly for making natural instruments sound more "fat" by mimicking a resonance box (the body of a guitar, the woodwork of piano etc). Not fit for the hip hop way of using samples.

In mode=once/onc2 you can repeat, but it has disadvantages (fixed length, so you need to stop or restart in artificial/inconvenient ways ... as you noticed).
Because... a loop is loop, not a onetime sample.
So you have create samples with loop markers. The "more info" page spends quite some words on it so I won't do that now, please read that first.

Once you have good looping samples, you can create drones, background vocals, guitar riffs, drum grooves, whatever. For the drone, you also find an example in the demo set Hans supplies (but it's below as well).

Now it's time to play with loop/loo2, mutegroups, notefill and making exceptions via fixed notes.

Given your idea in your post, I thought of loo2 in combination with mutegroup.
You can have drones/tones and/or vocals ("Yeah, Yeah, ....") to repeat, change tone if needed and stopped by pushing same key a second time. Working snippet (so with more some more parameters not relevant here) of a drone and background vocal:

Code:

%%voice:2=PipeOrg-monoloop
%%voice:6=Talking test
Principal8-%midinote*.wav,%voice=2,%gain=4,%mutegroup=2,%transpose=-24,%mode=loo2,%velmode=sample,%release=60
talking%rnds.wav,%notename=C4,%voice=6,%gain=1.0,%mutegroup=7,%velmode=sample,%mode=loo2

Here the pitch of the samples will change as %fillnote=Y (default). For background vocals this can be an issue as also the tempo changes. In this example we want this tempo effect for the song where we use it (talking at different pace...)
And if you want a scratch like "stutter effect", for instance have the "talking" lyric to go like "ta-ta-ta-talking", you can define a fixed override:

Code:

talking%rnds.wav,%notename=C#4,%voice=6,%gain=1.0,%mutegroup=7,%velmode=sample,%mode=loo2,%fillnote=N

That way, when you press C,C#,C,C# consecutive, the same sample will be restarted ("retriggered", it's a confusing term in this discussion).
Of course this extra note is not necessary without mutegroups,

If you have programmable drum pads, I think you can have even a more convenient solution via %mode=loop.