Akai Force: Beginner's Workflow Tutorial Walkthrough

hello and welcome to the channel i hope you're doing very well um quite recently uh a member of the akai force facebook group um posted something saying that they would find it really helpful to see a beginner's kind of step-by-step tutorial or walk through where someone built a track from scratch showed the steps they went through but also explain their thought processes behind the decisions and the choices they made that sounded like an interesting project to me so this is my attempt at making that video i thought that doing it for a whole track might be a bit too long um so instead what i'm going to do here is build up the basis of a track so a main loop which you would use for a for a verse or an intro and break down everything i do and my thought processes behind the choices i make all that kind of thing i will put time codes in the description so you can skip my waffling if you want to and cut straight to the parts you want to see so anyway let's get into it this is how i go about building a track on the force okay um i started with a empty project and i've done two things off camera and that's choose two samples the only reason i did that off camera so you didn't have to sit and watch me um auditioning loads of different sounds um so i've chosen a drum loop and a vocal sample the only reason i chose these two samples is because i like the way they sounded there was no other thought process behind that so i have them loaded onto two drum tracks on one single pad so this is what the drum track sounds like sorry the drum loop sounds like and this is the vocal sample like a drug you're my drug now i normally start this way with samples a couple of samples to get me going i always start with a drum sample first because this gives you one important piece of information which you use going forward and that is the tempo of your track of your project now if we look at this drum sample here which we can look at by hitting menu and then going to sample edit we can see that this sample is a 120 bpm sample so the first thing i'm going to do is hold down the tap tempo button and change the project tempo down to 120 so now that sample matches exactly the tempo of our project so essentially we could just use that as a loop now we could press play and it would it would work perfectly as a drum beat however i'm not going to do that and the reason i'm not going to do that is by using it as a loop we can't put any variation into the drum track we only ever get this one loop we can't change it at all so instead what i'm going to do is chop that loop up so i can sort of play it as a as a drum program or a drum kit which then allows me to create variations as the track builds so to do that we're going to press menu and go to sample edit again um and because this sample is at 120 bpm which is our project sample sorry our project tempo it's actually quite easy to chop this using the built-in regions function because it will because the sample is already on the beat the force will put the regions in places that we want them to be so if we go into into pad mode by pressing this button here we can see these pads represent the regions that force has created [Music] not quite they're not quite where we want them to be but if we take this down from 16 to 8 suddenly we get this [Music] it's a much more usable kit [Music] already there we can see that there's a groove or there's something we can do with that which will sound interesting so i'm quite happy with that and we're not going to make a masterpiece here this is just for demo purposes so now we've got these slices where we want them to be we need to turn this into a kit and we do this by pressing shift and we see convert come up so we're going to hit convert new drum track using slices we we want that that's right but i'm just going to tab down here and use pad parameters instead of non-destructive slices as far as i understand it that means you can make changes to the pads if you want to and if you then copy and paste them you they they won't be persistent changes in the new pads you create i believe that's how that works it's how i always do it it always seems to work fine so we're going to do that so if we go back to matrix mode you know we see we've got a third track that's appeared this is the kit we've just created this one here which has our original sample we don't need it anymore so i'm going to delete it get rid of it so our drum track now i'm just going to double track tap on it and i'm going to re-label it so i know what it is done so now we've got a drum kit so let's go back and look at the uh the vocal sample now just like the um the drum loop gave us a piece of important information which was the project tempo this sample gives us some more information that we need to know so if we click on the sample to examine it again we now know the key we're working in which is c minor now with both uh this sample and the drum sample we could have changed the tempo we could have used warping or pitch correction or time stretching as this is a beginner's tutorial i'm not going to do that keep it simple so just like we did with the uh drum loop i'm going to chop this vocal sample up the reason being i don't want it to just run as a loop i want to be able to trigger these words like a drug um wherever i want to put them and to do that the best way to do is chop it up so this won't work uh or the sorry the threshold method that we use for the drum it won't work as well with this sample because it's not as uh on the b as that drum sample was so instead i'm going to use the manual or the lazy chop some people call it where you basically trigger the sample then you hit the pads as the playhead moves along where you want the chops to be you can then adjust those as you see fit like like a drug you're my drug so you can see here we've now got like a drug you're my truck we've got some chops they're not perfect that doesn't matter at this point we're going to do the same thing we did last time press shift and convert new drum track using slices and pad parameters now if we go back to matrix mode same deal we've got a new track that wasn't there before and this is our vocal chop so we're going to clean these up in a minute like a drug same thing we don't need that original track anymore which is this one here the unlabeled one so we can delete that and we're gonna rename this vox [Applause] shop so we know what's on it so at this point we've now got a drum kit to play with and we've got some vocal chops okay to clean these sample chops up the first thing we need to do is select the vocal chop track then we hit menu and sample edit and we want to make sure pad is selected not trim because that lets us change the individual pad slices now by default um force maps the q-link controllers uh to uh track volume but if we hit knobs and hold it down and then press screen we'll see that the q-links now match the controls that are being shown on the screen so we can use these to edit our start and end points so let's do this one first we obviously don't want that bit at the beginning like that's pretty good i like we've got a little tail left that we don't want there so let's bring that in like like like like pretty perfect move on to the next one again we're going to move the start point in a little bit do the same with the endpoint like um i'm gonna do the rest of these this is a really simple process i'll do the rest of these off camera just so you don't have to sit and watch me twiddling knobs okay i'm back they've all been cleaned up you're my so that's the last bit of admin we needed to do really i'm gonna save the project now that i've done all that work so we don't lose it to quick save you can hold down shift and press save and now we can get on with actually making some music so uh first thing i'm going to do is just create a simple drum beat just so i've got something to work to i can then think about where my bass parts and the vox or the vocal chops need to go to build a sort of a foundation groove now when we chop this drum kit up um because we used um eight regions rather than 16 it means each of these pads instead of having just a single one shot on it it's actually got a little phrase and this means that you can put a groove together without being a particularly good finger drummer because i'm a rubbish finger drummer because you don't have to move quite fast so i've had a little play around with this while i was off camera and came up with something like this sounds great to me so i'm just going to record something like that in um so the first thing i'm going to do is on this track the drum track i'm going to double tap to create a clip now i've got fixed click fixed clip setting switched on at four bars i'm also going to turn the metronome on while i'm recording so basically to record we we have record arm select under this track we see a little um warning light that tells you you're recording if we press recording to clip and play we get a little counter now you'll see here this is the thing that tripped me up when i first started using force nothing's happening it's because we haven't told the clip to play you'll also notice that we've got no metronome so to switch that on we're going to go to shift metronome let ourselves get ready and then when we come around to the start of the bar we'll have a go right we've got a little mistake there so let's correct that so if we hold the clip button down now we will see the notes that we've recorded into this uh this clip and we'll just play that so we can see what's going on okay so two things immediately obvious this note here needs to move and this one needs to move to the beginning of the measure so to do that we're going to go to grid press select just tap so that nothing is selected and we're going to drag and just select this first note here we're already on nudge nudge let's just move things left and right so we're just going to go one left so it's now on the beginning of the measure we're going to do exactly the same with this other one that was out of time click that now when we play this it should sound right nope missed one this one needs to be moved as well my timing was bad perfect so again good practice just save that because we've done a bit of work on it so now i'm going to turn the metronome off because i don't need that because i've got the drum beat to play along to and go back to matrix mode so now if i launch this scene we've got a drum beat we can now have a look at adding something to this to give us a bit of a groove in fact i'm going to turn these drums down a little bit so i'm going to click mixer and just bring them down a touch there we go to uh matrix mode in note mode i've selected the vocal chops so what i'm going to do now is listen for something in this drum beat a little bit of space to put something in this that downbeat there sounds to me like it needs something in it something something in there that sounds pretty good so let's do the same thing again create a clip it's automatically played now you see we're out of time here we want these both to be running at the same time so to do that just press launch and it will automatically sync them back up sounds good it's gonna record into that so we record on the track then press record and we're now in there that was a mistake undo if you press undo it will just undo the last thing you recorded [Music] now at the moment that vocal line is too much we wouldn't want that running all the time because it would get too repetitive the only reason i've recorded it now is it gives me a sense of what the rhythm of the groove is going to be later on and also when i start putting some melodic stuff in here i think a pad or a bass line i know what notes i need to hit so at the beginning of the track this won't play but i have it recorded in at the very start so i can work round it so that when it is going to come in all of the other elements that i've put into the track will fit with this vocal that's going to come in later okay we're ready to add some melodic content into this track now not very interesting to watch someone scroll through hundreds of presets so off camera i've picked three sounds and i'm going to explain to you why i've picked those three patches all those three presets um so we've got here a bass uh chord and a pluck which will make sense in a minute um before we play anything though um our sample is in the key of c minor um so we need to change our um uh scale mode for our sims uh synth patches to that scale so that everything we play is going to be the right notes so to do that we press shift and hold it and then we hit the notes button this dialog comes up and we can see we're in scales already which is what we want our root note is c which is what we want and we're in natural minor so we're actually in the right key already which is good so we can close that so now everything we play will be in the right key so the first patch i've got here is a base patch which sounds like this it's quite simple and it's not a very dynamic or evolving sound but i've chosen that on purpose because our drums are actually quite busy if we listen to this now there's quite a lot going on with our drums so i don't think we want a big sort of um [Music] highly modulated evolving sound we want something quite simple that sits quite nicely it will allow us to create kind of a pocket groove because this is sort of turning into a trip hop kind of song if you want to edit a synth patch the way you do that is to hold the edit button and then just click the track select button and it brings up the ui for for the synth you're working with this one here i'm just going to add a little bit of cutoff to give us some more high frequency information because that will make it cut through the mix of it better so if we go back to matrix mode now i've got our vocals mutix we don't want those at the moment i'm going to create a track like we did before we go into record arm you can see our warning light has just come on hit record and then just come up with something see what happens and again force has done its own trick of not actually launching the clip so let's do that so let's let it go around one time and just record something in that sounds right it's not gonna win any uh awards but this is just a demo so if we now bring our um we unmute our vocals we can see how that works together sounds okay our levels are a bit out [Music] so we've got the beginnings of a little groove there now um let's just save that so if we just listen to that for a second and see what it needs we've got quite a bit of space there so after the base has played one little loop there's a gap and we need to put something in it and that's where our chords are going to come in so for this sound [Music] i've chosen something that's quite um high frequency uh because we've got a lot of low frequency information with the drums and the bass the vocals are sitting in the mid so we want something that's going to be a little bit higher in the mix so let's just play this and see what we can come up with [Music] that's quite nice the way that heart evolves starts to introduce some tension so that's going to work quite nicely as we perhaps are building up to a breakdown or a drop or something like that because the rising nature of the part suggests that something new is going to happen so let's give that a try see what happens so we're going to record arm we're going to create a track and when we're ready [Music] my truck [Music] so we've got the beginnings of something now we're just saving the project we've got um a drum beat which works quite nicely with the bass the vocals which we don't want all the time um we will drop them out and when we start to build this into an arrangement and we've got a chord part which has added some uh some tension which we can then release by going to a drop down so um let's move to our third uh synth track which is just a little pluck so we're gonna fill some gaps and create some uh texture with this i haven't figured anything out in advance so this might not work [Music] sounds quite nice let's do the same again we're going to record arm and just put something in see what happens [Music] um not very happy with the um way that that is triggering um doesn't sound quite right so what we're gonna do i think is we're gonna solo that track so we can only hear that select it and i think a delay will make that sound a bit better so let's just whack a delay on it [Music] and edit the delay [Music] quite like that it's on muted and soldered let's mix the volumes and bring the vocals so now we're going to select the vocal and we're going to go to pan and volume which allows us to move the left and right positioning so we're going to solo that track and just listen to that on its own so we're in the track mix at the moment if we hit shift and mixer it brings us to the pad mixer where we can set the individual controls for the samples so what we're going to do is go to pan volume i'll give these two samples some left and right pan so that they're sitting in uh different sides of the mix go back to matrix here so now we've basically got a groove here this is something we can now perhaps turn into a development um so i'm just going to save our work here so if this was a track that we were going to perform we wouldn't want all of this stuff coming in at once um so we're gonna go back to launch mode for this so what i'm gonna do is take our drum kit here and i'm going to copy this track to copy an entire track and all of the information that's in it you hold copy you press the track you want to copy and then you press an empty track and it's now in there so we're going to turn this new version let's call it kit intro we're going to do something with this so we're going to start with this track um as our intro and on our original um drum track what i'm going to do is copy this pattern which you do by or this clip by pressing copy holding and then pressing the slot you want to copy it to and i'm going to delete the original one so now that is coming in on our second scene so this will sound exactly the same as it did but on this track this intro version of our drum kit i'm going to add an effect to it so we're on kit we're on the right one key intro i'm going to solo this track and we're going to add a filter to it to take all of the bass out of it so we're going to go for air filter let's play that we're going to edit our filter and we're going to first of all we're going to turn this to a high pass because all we want is the high information not any of the bass high pass filter then we're going to bring our cutoff down that sounds pretty good so now that we've moved our unfiltered drum pattern down to the second seam we need to figure out what needs to join it and what needs to stay in the first scene obviously we want the base to carry on with the drum kit so we're going to copy that down we do that in the same way by pressing and holding copy i think we're going to want the chord still now i think um again i haven't planned this in advance so i don't know how this is going to sound i think i'm going to move our pluck sound from the first scene to the second scene so i'm going to copy it down to the second scene but delete it from the first one and i'm going to leave the vocal chops in the first one but not in the second one and so we've got a bit of development from scene 1 to scene 2. but the pluck synth coming in will kind of fill the gap that has been left by the vocal chops coming out so we get some development but we don't feel like there's a hole suddenly now there's a thing on the force called launch quantization this basically controls how long force waits to trigger a new scene or a clip when you press it excuse me because all of our patterns are four bars long we're going to set our quantization to four bars so we do that by holding the shift button down i will audio on it and clicking this button here and you can see launch quantize four bars so what i'm going to try doing now is just playing the first scene see how it sounds uh immediately i'll trigger the second scene that means that we'll get four bars of scene one and we'll move into scene two and we'll just see how those things work together [Music] sounds pretty nice we've got a bit of development there it's a bit empty and it obviously needs loads more elements um what i would probably do now is create a third scene where everything come backs in comes back in again so let's just do that just so we can see how it sounds so we want our kit in we want our base sorry our vocal chops to come back in we're going to keep the base we're going to keep the chords we're going to bring the pluck back in we obviously don't want the intro kit anymore um so we've now got three scenes moving from sparse to a different version of splash to everything in let's see how that sounds [Music] well i did warn you we're not gonna win any awards for this um but i hope that kind of demonstrates a process so we've started with two samples uh created a drum kit and um some vocal chops and um i hope i've been able to explain how i choose the sounds this is the process i go through with every track except i do this this process of building up a loop and then stripping it back i do it three or four times for one track so i'll do that once for the intro and the main section then there'll be um perhaps a breakdown or a bridge in the middle eight and then we come back to a third section which will be basically all in all guns blazing and then a drop down kind of sequence where we strip it back and we revisit the themes we introduced in the in the um in the intro as a outro that's the process i kind of go through i think i'm going to leave that there i'm sick of the sound of my own voice i'm sure you're sick of the sound of it too um i apologize that this wasn't a hugely inspiring piece of music but i made it all up on the fly i will try to put a link to in the description to a download of the project files just in case you wanted to try and sort of replicate this i know the chap on facebook said he'd like that so i'll try to do that anyway i hope that was useful thanks very much for watching and take care i'll see you soon

Channel: Maxipok Music

Views: 5,211

Keywords: akai force, tutorial, workflow, arrangement

Id: hTKyO7S5ePE

Length: 32min 6sec (1926 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 06 2021