So you just got your new MPC and you want to get
going as soon as possible but you're running into all these small hurdles that all add up, and
you just don't want to read the tedious manual first (although you should)...Well, this video
is for you. I want to get you into the music making "straight out of the box". I've made one
MPC quick start video already, but I thought of some additional tips since then which I'll cover
in this video. I highly recommend that you watch the first one if you haven't already as it
goes hand in hand with this one. I'll leave the link in the description and at the end of this
video. I'm using an MPC One but these tips should apply to MPC Live 2 an X as well. At the time of
recording this I was using firmware version 2.11.7 [Music] The big jog wheel or the "data dial" as Akai calls it,
has the capability of controlling anything that you assign it to on the fly. So basically
anything on the screen that has a red outline will be controlled by the data dial, and that goes
for pretty much anything. You can go to the mixer, and adjust some volume. You can go to your
tracks and your sequences and scroll through them using the data dial. It also works with
plugin parameters, so you just go to the plugin and then select whatever parameter you want to
control, and the data dial will do that for you. [Music] While you're in the Main Mode, where
you'll be spending most of your time, it can become a pain if you want to get to
the mixer and make adjustments to the mixer, or add effects, where if you just click
this little "eye" icon on the top here, it'll bring up like a little channel
strip which you can use to do that without having to have to go to the mixer,
which is quite convenient and you can set it to go to...I think by default it's on the program
view, so you'll be adjusting your program level, then there's the...you can go tracks, you can go
master, and I think this is pad level so yeah, it's tucked away and you can always hide it
once you're done, if you need more screen space. [Music] If you're in the piano roll and you want to change
the time division that you're working in and you want to change the grid, all
you have to do is press the TC button and then select the time division
and the grid will change accordingly I mean you can go even up to a bar And then also this will affect how your
quantization and your timing correct works [Music] I believe sequences loop by default, but if they don't just press the little "loop" icon there, and it'll loop And then I've got an 8 bar loop here
but say I just want to edit a certain part of it, I can specify exactly which
bar I want to work on, so say I just want to have it play from the middle, and I don't have to
listen to the whole 8 bars every time. You can just set it there, just to say, the start
and end bar and it'll play it from the middle So you'll see if I started from one, the playhead
starts at the top, so that's a good guide to show you where you're at. What's also
cool is the piano roll shows you with a blue line on top, where you're at in terms of the the bars, so you'll see it starts from the beginning there and then, if we go back and
we change the start point to the last 4 bars, we go back it changed there. So you can
always see where you're at which is great. And I mean it's completely customizable.
You can go bar 5 to bar 6 if you want. So if you just want to focus in on a certain part like 1 or 2 bars or whatever, to
edit those notes, that's easy to do. [Music] You can assign up to 4 insert effects per program. So you've got 4
inserts that you can add there. And then also each pad and every bank has the capability of
running 4 insert effects. But what's cool is if you're on a drum program (and this applies
only to drum programs), if you go to Program Edit, and then you go to effects at the back here,
this will show your 4 insert effects, but if you press the effects button once more you go to
Drum FX, and this gives you 8 more effects per pad, which is pretty cool. They are different
from the inserts though, so you've got a list of 14 things here that you can add per pad and
they come in quite useful, especially if you do with filtering I would say, you
don't have to waste an EQ insert if you can just do your kind of low pass and a high
pass from over here, which is pretty cool. If you're finding these tips helpful, I'd really
appreciate it if you'd like this video and subscribe as I'm trying to build the channel into
something more significant. I have a whole bunch of other MPC and sampler videos in the works,
so I hope to see you around... [Music] So if you have a bunch of your chops ready here, you just put your sample
in and you chopped it up, and then you go to Sample Edit mode and, then you get this...This confused
me very much in the beginning, because I expected that if I press the pads I'll be able to see my
different chops and edit them, the parameters, but this...what was this? So I figured out that if you're
in the (let me stop this)..if you you're in the software, it shows you on the pads on
the software UI, exactly what each button and color does. And all this is, it plays this
sample, it's made to refine the chops. So if you want to get really surgical with it...This plays up until the first cut-in, and then this plays the actual sample and this plays from the
end of it. So you've got all these little...there's one that loops...they're all self-explanatory
but yeah because I expected that if you go and edit the sample and you want to change
parameters, and it should change the chops but that's what you get when you go to Program Edit.
That's what I expected under Sample Edit So it's a lot less confusing now. If you
were like me that's all that is. [Music] So say you've got your melodic sample all loaded up and chopped up, even in just a
rudimentary way, and you start playing them. They're going to be polyphonic by by default I believe,
so it means that more than one pad can play at the same time and that's not such a big deal with
one shot drum samples, but as soon as it's longer stuff that's melodic it's going to get messy...as you can see. So to remedy that we go to Program Edit and then we would
usually use mute groups, which is basically just grouping different sounds together that
would choke each other. So as for instance, let's take this bottom row and we assign
them all to mute group 1, so these guys will cut off themselves and they would
cut off other sounds in that group. But you don't necessarily want to get that granular right off the bat, so a quicker way to just get around this is, once you've got a
melodic sample in there and you just want them all to cut each other off. All you do is you go
to the "Poly" setting and you just set it to "Mono", meaning you're making it from polyphonic to
monophonic, meaning there's only one sound that can play at a time. So then they'll all automatically
just cut each other off which is sweet. And then later if you want to get more intricate,
then you can put it back on "Poly", or if you want it to be polyphonic you can do that, and then
just use your mute groups. You have 32 mute groups which, yeah ,you can get crazy
with it if you want to. [Music] When you're in the piano roll and you want to delete some notes, the Eraser is
not the best. I mean even if you zoom in it's not always...See what I mean? It's very cumbersome
so I try not to use it if I don't have to. Instead of trying to use
the Eraser to delete something, I recommend that you rather just
select what you want to delete, and then use a shortcut: Shift and "Cut" and that'll
do the same job even if you know you're not gonna paste it again. It just deletes the notes
instead of you having to, you know, select the stuff, switch the tool back to erase, then
erase it, and then sometimes it doesn't work. So just use the shortcut: Shift + "Cut" and that'll
just save you some time and frustration. [Music] If you want to copy tracks or MIDI data from
the same sequence to a different track or a different track in a different sequence. It's a little bit counter-intuitive because you would expect it to be in the track layer, if
you press the "pencil", there you would expect to be able to copy from here. But it's not in here. You
actually have to go to sequence, press the "pencil" and then here under the copy menu, at the
bottom, we want to go to "events". Because on the MPC MIDI data is called events, or
MIDI notes, they call them "events", so you press "events" and then you get this menu.
From here you can assign basically if you want to keep it in this sequence, or if you
want to take it to another sequence, new track existing track. It's it's pretty cool, it's pretty
flexible, so we'll just go to an unused track. We'll stay in sequence one. You can even say exactly
where you want it to go, and then you have the options to "replace" or "merge" at the bottom, which
could be a bit confusing, but all that means is obviously if you "replace", it's going to overwrite
whatever is in that track already, if there is something. And if there is something and you say
"merge", it'll obviously then just merge these new nodes with the existing notes. In our case it's
a blank track so we can just, it doesn't matter which one we choose, so we'll just say replace
and then we'll go to track 7... and there's the copied data. If we go
back to track 6, there it is. [Music] There are going to be times when you're going to
want to edit multiple pads at the same time, to save time, because it can get super annoying.
And in that case we go to Program Edit and then so if you want to change the envelope of a
bunch of pads together without going individually, what you'll do is you'll click on the
little, I don't know, "location pin" icon at the top here. And this will give you the edit
zones. It currently shows that it's going to affect whatever is currently selected, but we
can change that to "All" which will select this bank all the pads in this bank, but all the pads in
all the other banks, which is a bit overkill. So I would recommend then just doing "Multiple" instead
and just follow the little light guide there if they're red then they are going to be selected.
So let's take the bottom two rows here, they're selected, we go "close". Say we
want to just make them fade in a bit more. See, it changed all of them at the same time.
So that's how you do that. But just remember before you exit this, make sure you go and deselect this
by either going back to "current", so you just select whatever pad you're selecting. Or you just
go to "Multiple" and you deselect them all. Because otherwise you're going to exit, do
stuff, or you're going to come back into Program Edit and all these pads are still going to be
bundled together / selected together, so you're going to might mess things up. So be sure to go back
and just deselect things. Another cool thing is that say you had this selected, the multiples,
and we went and we said "Current" so we're back on "Current" right, and we do something
else or whatever, and then we come back to select "Multiple" again, the MPC would
have remembered the previous selection so that might be cool or annoying I
guess, but just be aware of that. [Music] You might run into a situation where you are
were getting CPU spikes, and it might be due to you, using too many plugins or there's
too much time stretching going on, and things that the MPC has to handle in real-time and
it's got limited CPU, especially in Standalone. So what I recommend you do then is, to
go to your plug-in intensive pads, in this instance say that one. It's full of
stuff and just, for argument's sake, let's say that's kind of like not helping the
CPU and we need to bounce this. This is what it sounds like with plugins, it sounds
a bit older or more sampled or whatever [Music] And there's the clean, clinical version [Music] So let's put them back on. Say we want
to bounce this, all we do is we go to Program Edit and then we go, you'll see at the
top here, there's a "down arrow" icon, we click on that and then we select whichever pad we want. So
we want A14, you can add silence at the end of it, like an audio tail, which I don't think
is necessary in this case. And then you can just rename it to whatever, we'll just do "test" and then what
you do you just say "Do it" and that'll render that pad with all its effects into a raw audio file
which it'll put back on that same pad. So there it is. And it's clean, there's no plugins
on it and it's taking a lot of strain off the CPU. I mean you can, from here, if you
want, to do even further sound design. You can just carry on adding stuff and then just bounce
it out again, flatten it again. It's basically the same as doing sound design in Ableton or
whatever, where you just keep re-sampling stuff so you don't end up with these massive chains
of effects and it just helps with CPU [Music] If you're quite deep into a project with
loads of banks full of samples and programs and it's getting a bit crazy in terms of disk space,
because of your sample pool...because the MPC, every time you load a sample into any pad it's going
to save it into this sample pool, that is saved with your project when you save, which is cool
because it keeps everything together. But it gets a bit messy and it's going to increase your project
file size quite drastically. So what you can do to declutter a bit is just go to the Main Menu
and then you click on "Project" at the bottom, and then you'll see this menu come up, and
then you just click "Purge" at the bottom. And then you got to be careful, because you've
got the option to delete just unused samples, so anything that's not part of a track or a program,
I mean part of a track that you're actually using, or you can "delete all" your samples, which
will wipe your complete sample pool, which could be disastrous
depending on what you're going for. So just make sure you click "unused samples" and
that would...I mean it doesn't give you a "success" notification or anything like that, but it would
have done it. So that just means that when the next time you save your project, your sample pool will
be smaller, and it will take up less disk space. So that's it for today. I hope these tips help
to make your MPC start smoother. If you have any questions or even some of your own advice,
please let me know in the comments. And again, I recommend that you watch my other MPC quick
tips video as well if you haven't already. Thanks for watching and I hope to see you in
the next one, until then...totsiens.
