5 TIPS TO SPEED UP MPC WORKFLOW AND THE ULTIMATE TIME STRETCHING

all right welcome back to create educate and inspire and based on some comments we've had on other videos in this video we're going to go over some of the top tips that i have for using the mpc if you're new to the mpc the workflow can be a little bit different getting around from the different screens so these are my top five shortcuts and little tips that really helped me when i was getting into the mpc workflow so we're going to jump in with the mpc live 2 and go over these top five tips the first two workflow tips are pressing and holding menu and pressing and holding main they also come into play a lot together so by default when you hit menu you have this entire menu going on right here and you just hit the touch screen to go to program edit however if you press and hold the menu button all of these pads correspond to what you see on the screen right here so if i'm in main and i really quickly want to go into my program edit which is probably the most often used menu i go into i just hold menu and hit this and then i'm instantly inside of program edit so if we take a look here this pad corresponds to sample edit this pad corresponds to program edit and so on and so forth now this is extremely handy when you're let's say doing sound design on multiple different tracks which then brings us to pressing and holding main which allows you to quickly switch in between tracks so if i press and hold main i now have a visual representation of all my tracks that i can work on and i just hit the corresponding pad to quickly flip in between them so i really quickly just flipped over to the arp synth [Music] and let's say i wanted to do some sound design on this well if i hold menu and then hit the second pad i'm instantly in the program edit now i'm here i can do some cut off [Music] but if from this screen i wanted to flip over to another program to really quickly do some additional sound design on a different program i can just hold the main button hit my chords and when i release i'm still inside of the program edit so this really allows me to quickly navigate between all of my tracks while staying in the program edit screen which then makes sound design and refining the tracks a lot faster so main i can come over to my lead which [Music] quickly back into my art let's say i wanted to jump over into my drum program and edit that now i'm inside of the drum program and i can quickly come over to chords let's go back to the drum program and then hold down this and i can just jump really quickly into the color of the pads so that right there holding down the menu and the main are two features that i'm constantly using just to speed up my workflow menu program edit main switching through my tracks really quickly while staying in the program edit so sound design through multiple tracks is seamless so for the third tip let's go over into the main screen and if you look over at the left right here there's a little eyeball on the screen now what this eyeball is is a shortcut into all of the parameters such as panning volume solo mute read or write automation all of your effects that you would typically go into by going to the mix and then the mix going into the different programs to then see all that but you don't even have to go into that mix page you can just hit this little eyeball up there and it's going to show you the shortcut so within this shortcut window we have four different icons on top the far left one is for the individual pad the next one is for the program the next one is for the track and then the final one on the right is for the master which is the little crown there to show that it's a master now if we hit pad and since we're in an actual instrument it's going to say pad channel not available for the plugin but let's hold down main and quickly jump over to our drums and now we're going to see that we can go through each one [Music] each one of these different pads and instantly change the volume change the panning and see what effects are on that specific pad this is extremely helpful when you want to adjust the levels really quick you don't have to go into the mix and then hit mix again and to go into the pad mix you can just do it all from this screen right here so instantly i can grab this guy i can bring it down bring that guy down bring that guy up bring that and i can also do that with the panning right here so kick and snare i'll leave centered i'll actually bring the volume of that back up this got back up let's go over to this hi-hat let's pan this to the right [Music] and let's pan this one to the left now whenever you're adjusting the pan or the volume if you hold shift and then turn the knob it's going to be in finer increments as opposed to the larger steps so if i want to bring that one back so that's for the individual pads right here on the first icon now when i go to the icon with the four little pads on it this is for the entire program [Music] so this shows that on this entire program which is 80s drums i have a reverb on there i can adjust the volume of this program right here but now i can quickly switch into the other tracks either using just the knob while this track is selected or i can hold down main jump into my arp now i can see that on my arp synth i have these three different effects and without leaving the screen i can quickly tap onto this and then come in and start editing my effects then just hit back to main and i'm right back to this program overview in the shortcut menu the next one over is going to be for where the midi is being routed so i can see that i'm on track 5 which is arp synth and it's using arp synth which is my fifth program and i'm accepting midi from all ports and i'm not sending midi to anywhere specifically however if i let's say had an external keyboard set up i could select only that external keyboard to control this so even while i'm in a drum program that keyboard that i have connected could then be controlling just the arp synth and i could essentially have access to drums and a synth at the same time by accessing the midi routing from this window right here then finally on the far right we have the masters you can see the master's coming out through output one and two we have the volume and we can choose to put some effects on the master if we like once we're done if we want to see more on this screen we can just hit the hide right here and that's going to hide the shortcut menu but i find that once i've gotten used to this shortcut menu being open on the main screen i'm not particularly leaving this out of my equation this is constantly on it's a really quick easy overview of what i'm working on and it just allows me to have faster access to the key parameters that i need to access without having to go into let's say the mix or the mute i could just stay right here with this open okay so the fourth tip for your workflow is the magic erase button right here now if you're not familiar with the erase button when we hit the erase button it allows us to erase several different things we can erase all which basically takes anything that's programmed into this track on this sequence and wipe it all out we can erase all of our automation we can erase specific notes or we can erase all notes except and the way i use this is typically when i'm getting into sequencing so if we look in our sequence right here i have one sequence and this sequence right here is everything within this track this is basically the chorus of the entire track so let's have a listen to it now i like to use a method called subtractive sequencing where what we're going to do right now is we're going to copy this sequence to all four of these open sequence slots and then we're going to go back and start muting things and deleting things in each one of these to build our intro our first verse our bridge and then our final chorus so the quickest way for us to do that is let's just come to the main let's hit this little pencil guy we're going to go copy sequence from 1 until 2 do it we're going to copy sequence from 2 until 3. do it we're going to copy sequence from three until four do it now if we go back to next sequence we can see that it is all copied and there's are all going to be the same which is everything that's going on in the chorus now we're gonna go back to this first block right here we're going to call this the intro this is going to be our first verse we're going to have a little bridge right here and then we're going to have this as our chorus now within the mpc workflow one thing to note is that the mute state of each track is attached to the sequence however the mute state of a pad is attached to the program an example of that is we're in sequence one we're going to call this the intro and i'm going to come into the mute and this is the mute state of my programs so i just want the chug guitar and the bass for my intro so i'm going to come in and mute everything else and when we play this [Music] we can see that this is just the only two tracks that are playing however if we go into our next sequence right here and then go back into the mute everything is unmuted in this because remember the mute state of a program is connected to the sequence however if let's say on this we just wanted to add some drums and inside of this drums we just wanted to add some high hats to push it so in theory what we would do is we'd go into the drums we'd hit this again now we're in these drums and i want to mute the kick the snare i want to leave the hi-hats i want to mute the claps and all these other elements and that would sound like this [Music] but what happens then if i switch sequence into this one right here and go back in you can see the mute of those individual pads is still muted because remember the mute state of a pad is connected to the program however the mute state of a program is connected to a sequence so that's where this magic erase button comes in so let's just recap real quick before we start erasing things we just took the chorus of this song and copied it over all four and then came into the intro right here and muted things let's unmute all these drums actually so we came in and we muted all the other programs except these two this bass and this chug then when we go over to the next sequence which we are going to come into the main and quickly call this our verse we're going to d mute the drums but if we play this right now all the drums are going to come in full bore [Music] and we don't want all these drums to come in that quickly we want just the hi-hats to come in so we have a couple of ways we can do this if we look at the grid mode right here we essentially just want these four to be in here so i could one by one go through and select this shift cut go through select this shift cut that takes too much time that's where our magic erase button comes in so we're going to come into erase and we're going to say we want to erase everything except accept notes hi-hat hi-hat hi-hat hi-hat now this will erase everything except these so let's take a look at the before which is the full pattern right here we're going to go into erase and accept these and i hit do it and instantly we have [Music] i'm going to undo that actually and another way we could have done that instead of using the accept notes we could just say you know what in this particular scenario i want these notes to be deleted so then i'd i'd select everything except the four that i want do it and we're going to get the same result so it's two different ways of doing the same thing whichever is faster but instead of going through and individually selecting a track the erase button comes in extremely handy when you're doing this kind of sequencing so we've have our intro and remember with our intro all we did was simply come in here and mute some of the programs except for the bass and the chug then when we go into the next sequence which is our verse we de-muted the drums but we came into our main menu here and use the erase to erase all notes except these hi hats and now let's go in to the next sequence which we haven't named which we're going to call the pre-chorus we'll just call it the pre go back into the mute state and i don't want any drums i want to bring in the chords and the arp and i don't want any of this stuff and i want to drop out my bass so now i have [Music] and now we have our pre-chorus and then when we go to the next one which we haven't done any changes to this is going to be our full-on chorus so let's come to the main and let's rename this chorus so i i guess tip number four is essentially using the erase button but then also using the style of subtractive sequencing where we're going to make the busiest part in one sequence copy it across all of our different sequence slots and then just start deleting elements to build us into this final chorus so if we have a listen right now we have the intro and then we're going to switch over to the verse [Music] pre-chorus [Music] so that is how i'd use the erase button to make subtractive sequencing extremely easy and taking the idea of a chorus and really quickly as you saw there within a couple minutes we have an intro we have a verse we have a pre-chorus and a chorus all right so tip number five we're gonna jump into our chorus and into the drums tip number five is something called sample cycling now traditionally if you wanted a loop to play you would put the loop in and you would rely on the built-in time stretching algorithm within the mpc if you wanted to speed up the track and slow it down the problem is is depending on how much time stretching you do you're gonna start hearing artifacts within that loop you know a lot of the times i find that moving maybe two to five bpms is okay but once you get past that two to five bpm you really start hearing some grainy distortion inside especially in high hats and tambourines and percussion loops so what we're going to look at right now is a method called sample cycling so let's go back to our first tip which is holding menu and going into the program edit and we're going to select this hi-hat loop and we're going to go into samples now if we have a look here you can see that within every single pad in a drum program you can have up to four samples so if we look at layer number one we have a shaker loop layer number two we have a shaker loop layer number three we have the same shaker loop and layer number four we have the same shaker loop so what we've done is we laid the shaker loop into four different slots now you'll see as i switch through these four different slots different parts of the loop are actually highlighted right so number one here i have the highest transient of this loop which is going to be the predominant downbeat of the shaker here i have the second part of the shaker which is a little lighter here is the third part and actually in this fourth one let's adjust this just by dragging this over here and over here there we go now you can see i have four different sections of this loop laid out on these four different layers now if we go back into the master can see here well what kind of playback happens on this layer play typically it's selected as velocity but what we're going to do is have this as cycle and now what that means is that when i'm hitting this pad it's cycling through all four of those different sample slots and those four different sections of the same loop so let's mute everything but the drums and let's go into the drums and mute everything but the shaker loop so the reason why you want to use sample cycling is because when you're using sample cycling you can do drastic changes to the tempo and maintain the tonal characteristics of that loop so here's that shaker loop and you can see we can start adjusting this tempo drastically 20 30 40 bpms we can even speed it up and we're not hearing that time stretching artifact so that is a trick that i use to not rely on the built-in time stretching within the mpc especially when it's something that's a four beat loop such as a shaker or a tambourine so as we cycle through this we're going to hear it going through those different layers and if we go into edit sample we can actually see the playhead jumping to those different layers now another cool way to actually use this too is if you have a four chord progression loop you can do the same thing with a four chord loop so here let's unmute this and let's go back into our program edit we're in the drums this is a four chord progression loop and instead of relying on the time stretching within the mpc which whenever you have melodics and the melodics are being time stretched heavily you're going to hear a lot of that time stretching artifact so here as we hit this [Music] we hear that this is just cycling through the four chords that are within this loop and if we want to see that in action we come to main edit sample we can see where we're at here so this would be the first chord second chord [Music] and this is really handy in a couple scenarios one if you're trying to do a live performance and fit all of your melodic elements inside these 16 pads this allows me to have my entire chord progression on here and just trigger it while i'm doing my finger drumming so let's unmute everything here so we can do a little finger drumming so kick snare hi-hat i can simply just go [Music] really quick easy way to play a full four chord without using up four pads so that's one reason why i'd use that also to save space while i'm doing a live performance and i'm going to be using pad muting i can essentially have four chords of a piano four chords of a pad four chords of strings all here just going through and sample cycling [Music] and all i have to do is mute that one pad and i'm muting that entire track and all four of those chords without using four different pads to trigger the single cord of each one of those so it would be you know chord one of the piano chord two the piano chord three of the piano chord for the piano or pad port one pad core two i can have all of my piano all of my pad all of my strings doing all four of those chords just within a single pad [Music] so for sample cycling let me show you how you do that so if we come back into menu program edit let's say this is a brand new pad we select layer one we click on the sample right here and we're just gonna load in the sample for each one of these layers so i just click and i'd load it in i'd go to the next layer i'd click right here i'd load it in i'd go into the next layer right here i'd click and i load it in and then within each one of these layers i simply just drag my start and end just to isolate that first chord coming here to the next layer i drag it to set that second chord third chord and fourth chord and then [Music] all right there you have it those are my top five workflow tips to get you up and running with the mpc now i think this is going to turn into a full series because workflow is something that as you use the unit more and more you're going to find little ways that really help speed up your workflow and so in the future i'll be coming back with more advanced tricks and tips on the mpc but on that note if you like this video please like and subscribe and make sure to hit the little bell notification down below so when new videos are posted you get notified thank you so much for your support and i'll see you next time [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] more

Channel: CREATE EDUCATE INSPIRE

Views: 4,072

Keywords: Akai, mpc one, mpc live 2, mpc live, mpc beats, mpc beats tutorial, mpc 2.10, mpc x, mpc one tutorial, mpc live 2 tutorial, mpc one retro, mpc 2.10 update, mpc studio, mpc expansions, fisher live, fisher losing it, fisher im losing it, fisher coachella 2019, fisher live 2021, fisher set, chris lake live, chris lake turn off the lights, chris lake set, chris lake fisher, chris lake mix, chris lake live set, tech house, tech house set, tech house music, tech house live

Id: R75hudsT85k

Length: 26min 14sec (1574 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 15 2021