Akai Force Fridays - Step Sequencer Tips (despite some of it's awkward features)

hey my name's Jonathan needle and I make music as pink Buddha and welcome to force Fridays where we go over tips and tricks for how you can better use the force if you've missed the other ones in the series you can click on the playlist up here to catch the rest of them and consider subscribing if you don't want to miss out on the other ones so today we're going to go over some ways that I like using the step sequencer and how you can incorporate that into your music making on the force now if you watch some of my other videos you should know that I'm not going to go through this step sequencer and go over every single knob and button and exactly what it does because I've watched a lot of tutorials that are like that and frankly it doesn't help me get down to actually making music instead what I'm going to do is give you some tips and tricks for using the step sequencer in the context of actually making a track so that what I share with you is very practical and you can apply it immediately and maybe I should just start off by saying that on the force there are way too many ways that you can use the step sequencer I push and hold down the step sequencer button on a melodic track there are eight different ways you can use this it's way too many I pretty much only use the drum the melodic and sometimes the lanes that's it the mono 8x8 I've tried messing around that I literally just don't understand why they put that in there it feels so unuseful same thing goes for the poly 8x8 I also just find that to be completely useless that said the other ones are pretty great so I'm just going to show you today how I use the drum sequencer mode the melodic sequencer mode and that's it so to demonstrate all of this let's make you track together I'm going to go to my drum track initially click on the step sequencer mode and switch to drums and I find if I'm going to use the step sequencer it works better to insert a clip first before I start to enter the notes so I'm going to go to clip and then change this to four bars and create a new clip little point of explanation here the pads on the left hand side or my drum pads okay and the ones on the right hand side are the velocity settings so the dark red is the loudest velocity so if I want all the notes that I'm entering to be the highest velocity possible I could click on this one here and it would go in accordingly this goes from loud all the way down to soft this blue one means that it's going to be as loud as you hit the pad which I like in particular because it's an easy way to enter in a number of different notes and start to put some of your expression in right away I usually like to enter the hi-hat part first give me a sort of beat to work with and I don't want to enter all that in by the step sequencer I feel like it just takes too long I think there's a faster way if you use the R button and I'm going to make sure this is set on no-repeat which it is and at sixteenth notes when I hold this down it's going to play sixteenth notes let's go back to my track here and I'm going to go ahead and hit record and enter in all the hi-hat notes okay so to get to the second screen you might have noticed that we see four measures up on top but here we kind of ran out of room so to get to there you have to hold down the step sequencer button and then jump back and forth between the two pages by these buttons here it's a little awkward I really wish that there was a just a simple even just using these arrow keys here to jump back and forth between those pages but that is what it is alright so here are my sixteenth notes I might even go through and make sure that I have all of these at a really low volume check the velocity that looks pretty good I'll come back to the velocity settings in a little bit now that we have a hi-hat part laid down I could come over here and hit the bass drum part and go ahead and click in the bass drum beats that I want to enter and then click on the snare sound that I want to use put those ones in maybe do them a little bit higher velocity level let's see how that works here whoops I was on the wrong page I go back to page one that's why I think that's a little bit awkward here let me turn this off and go back to hitting it again okay let's listen to that now I don't really like how that sounds so I'm gonna go in there and erase some of these and start over go to the second page here get rid of my snare drum parts and these bass drum parts now I know I said this already but I don't really use the step sequencer that much for programming in my beats I'd rather play them and get the feel of it and then use this for editing so I'll show you how I normally do that because that last beat sucked okay so with the high up part already down let's go ahead and enter in the bass and the snare part I'm going to start recording and then just play them in and you'll be able to see the notes appear above here [Music] I kind of wanted to enter another base part so I'm gonna pop one in here and see how that sounds maybe a little louder when I add on this ever sound here to the snare just to give it a little bit of oomph to it alright so that's a decent beat I can see the whole clip up above and then scroll through the individual parts if I click on the bass drum I can see the bass drum hits for the first two measures any of the snare beats here high hats etc and on the second page if I go to that here I can see the notes here as well so hopefully that was helpful to watch I tend to go back and forth between playing the notes and then looking at them and using this as a way of editing you could certainly go through and enter all these beats yourself if you like to program them in this is how you would do so let's move on to entering another part and then I'll come back and edit this a little bit more all right now that we got this basic drum part down let's add some other melodic parts to it I'm going to go to my matrix view click on track number two I've already loaded on here a sound now I really don't recommend using the melodic step sequencer to enter parts because it is just so excruciating ly slow if you're going to go to that you'd have to click on step sequencer go to the melodic one here now the notes are down below to move that octave up a little bit I would need to hit the note click on the one that's here I didn't have a track in there first so let me go to launch here and delete this to start with I'm going to enter a clip and make it just two bars then go back to the step sequencer I'd have to enter my note and then click up here to trigger the first one and you can see the notes that I just entered I suppose this is manageable if you really don't feel comfortable trying to play in the notes but I just encourage you to try playing it and then go back and correct them I think it's gonna be so much more musical that way than entering in the notes but this is how you would do that if you were going to enter them in I'm gonna go ahead and just play it and then we'll go and use the step sequencer as a way of kind of editing and looking at that alright so I've already entered the clip so it's empty right now I'm gonna play along and figure something out alright that's good now let me get that recorded [Music] now I made a note in there that I wasn't really happy about and that's this second one we zoom in here for a second and follow along want to delete one of them okay I want to add a little bit more to the second part here I'm gonna hit record again now this note here I hit too soft but I'll come back to editing this in a bit alright let's maybe add one more part to this I'm going to go back to matrix and go to my third track which is this path sound and play something in for that [Music] okay so the step sequencer on that one I'm not going to use again let's do a little bit of editing on this track and I want to show you something the step sequencer is particularly good for now for as much as I've ripped on the step sequencer for entering in notes it is really great at adjusting the automation or fine-tuning some of the other details when I go to the drum track again I have all my notes here and I can click on this little button here to pull up the velocity and look at it but all of them are mixed together it's not really practical to kind of get in there and and plus a super small and you have to use your finger on it I don't really like doing that what you can do instead is go to menu and then click where it says step sequencer now what that brings up is a page that is specifically good at editing some of the event details and let me show you what I mean here by that I'm gonna take the hi-hat part first so I'm gonna get onto the hi-hat sound I used and some of these velocity notes or maybe just a little bit louder than I want them to be I can put these knobs on to screen if you haven't seen the video I did on knobs you can click up here and check that out but if I leave it on-screen it then allows all these knobs down here to adjust the velocity scale here now these are for the first eight steps so I need to click on the knobs again to do the other eight steps here and then that's only one measure so I can go to this bar view right here and it's going to scroll through all four bars of my drum track if I'm looking here I might want to just pull down some of these ones here so that the high hats not quite so loud go back to the first couple ones maybe I'll pop this one up a little bit louder and then bring down the offbeat hi-hat sounds even more switch here to this so I'm going to bring down this when I go up a little bit more bring this down let's hear that sounds from the beginning oops I'm in bar number two go back to the a little hard to keep track of sometimes where you're at what I'm trying to do is get the hi-hat notes in between to be a little bit more like a ghost note so I'm going to turn all these ones down like this let's just listen to these first two bars so you can hear and I'm talking about hi-hat sounds a little bit too loud for me still so I'm gonna go to menu and click on pad mixer so I can adjust the individual pad volumes for my drums there's my high out sound and I'm going to turn my hi-hat sound down a little bit more [Music] I wanted to I could also insert a effect on that track I could even put a compressor on there just to help this to be a little bit more flattened out okay let's move on to the other sound those plucked strings and we'll go back to the sequencer view here the step sequencer now using the step sequencer above for melodic parts is a little trickier because it only shows the velocity settings for the note that your happen to be hitting down below so if you have to find that note first of all and I think I'm not even in the right octave here we may need to go up well there it is okay so this is the right note and if I wanted to go in and change the velocities there I don't really use this screen when I'm changing velocities because I can just go into here and edit them when it's really only one note at a time where I don't like to use this screen for adjusting things like velocities is for the drums when they're all mixed together it's harder to get out but if it was just this situation I can come in here and adjust it individually so for example this one note here is too soft so I'm going to go to the Select tool and select it and then press on velocity and turn that up a little bit more so it's more in line with everything else now that we've made the adjustment to the velocity on that one particular note let's introduce some other fun changes you go here to the velocity button and you click on add new and this is where you can get into any parameter on this particular track that you want to I'm going to go actually into the instrument itself by going on the plug-in and then finding the cutoff if I go to the pencil tool I can draw in a curve for the cutoff let's listen how that sounds and actually I'm just gonna solo this particular track so you can hear specifically what's happening to it now drawing with this pencil tool is rather in exact because you're just using your finger so one of the things you can do is go back to the step sequencer mode by clicking on menu and then step sequencer and here are the things I just drew in with a pencil tool and I can use these knobs to again make further adjustments to them if I want to really get in there and fine-tune it [Music] so let's say I wanted to the first the second note to be really quiet BAM boom boom it's like about right where is that here we go so then you can use the step sequencer here to get in there and really fine to those knobs whereas in the clip view it's a lot harder to get in there and make those specific adjustments here with your fingers and the fun thing is you can really add almost anything so if I wanted to come in here again and add a new part I can come in to this delay and I think I want to change the delay where is that thing delay mix I felt like it was a little bit loud on some of those parts so let's listen to this again especially on those two notes right there I'm not sure if I like it as much so I'm going to come in in here put this a little lower just on those particular parts bring it up again [Music] let's go back to the cutoff I want to have overall the cutoff be a little higher that's Kanak were to do in this clip view so if I go back into step sequencer and you can use this knob here to kind of generally lower them if you like the curve that you already set and then you just want to kind of tone it down a little bit this is a great and easy way to do that so let's take this off I just want to go a little bit on those particular notes all right now another way that I could have done this is by going into the track edit and I could have changed the cutoff here itself I'm gonna be on the screen view so I can make sure I can change the cutoff here and then just recorded a live and adjusted it in the step sequencer later as you might be able to tell I definitely favor recording things live and then adjusting them later that might not be your style so you might like to put in the stuff and adjust it all manually there's nothing wrong with that I just prefer to make it as musical as possible and for me making it as musical as possible involves playing it and then making corrections later so if I wanted to adjust a cut-off and do that I would simply hit record and then move the cutoff button here [Music] so now I have new automation for the cutoff on this track based upon the adjustments that I just made and again I could come in here and adjust this if I wanted to like going back in the step sequencer and going to the cutoff and adjusting this if I want to move it up a little bit just a tad be not quite so muffled the step sequencer has this presets that has some patterns drawn there you have to put them in first so if I draw them in all the way like this and just to give me something to work with I could have done this over in the clip one as well but or recorded it live there we go all eight bars come back to the beginning now this one here if I put it in it starts to draw in some shapes already now let's just do this one to start with then you got to go the next bar put that in again but what I don't like about this is every time you switch to a new bar and you push this again it rotates between all of them so you have to kind of go back and hit it again if you really want to have something to be similar let's listen how this sounds [Music] can you mix them with everything else I [Music] don't really like how that sounds but they have other patterns here that we could do maybe something I didn't mind the first one as much maybe the second one we'll change it to this I [Music] hope that you're noticing that this is a little awkward and slow for programming in automation if you're doing that entirely from scratch I would again recommend going to the individual track and I could get there by doing track edit change the knob to track so that I can see where's my cut off on this theorist okay go back to my clip so I can watch it and then just hit record [Music] okay now I have a curb that's drawn there see how fast that was it's just easier if you recorded live if you don't like it then go in and make some adjustments like we said before if it was a little too low I could come in here to the step sequencer and adjust the automation amount for the cutoff on these individual bars it's something that's pretty fun for the drums it definitely starts to get a little extreme but if you go in here and you click on this section right here and I go to add something new and actually go to the track itself I can change the tuning for that and then go ahead and draw in some different tuning and check out weird this can end up sounding if you were gonna do something like this I would definitely go into the step sequencer mode and it makes some fine-tuned adjustments to that because I was pretty crude because you'd be able to go to that individual track I have to click on knobs here to get back to the screen but it gives me the actual adjustments I can see the numbers here so if I wanted it to be whole step lower initially on that first bass drum I could adjust that in a very fine-tuned degree these ones are way too low I can either just draw me in a little higher it's not very precise although I can see the number up there I can click on the other knobs and then just simply adjust these like this like so it's kind of fun if you really wanted to make them really extreme you could do so like this you [Music] can get a little crazy with that you might be starting to recognize that you can go really deep with this and you can even take it a step further and that you can adjust things for individual paths there's a little pad number up above here and when I play these different notes it changes and so if you want to go in and affect maybe put something for a particular path layer I can go into pad number 87 and change any of these particular parameters for just this pad and then put those notes in there so let's say I did the filter cut off just for this pad and you can also adjust that in the clip view here so if I click on velocity and then go to the pad filter cutoff it's going to be specifically just for this pad and this view point here isn't really great for jumping around in it so when you're adjusting the individual event layers like that I usually jump between the step sequencer when I want to maybe just do the pad and come to the cutoff for that one if I want to get really specific but the limitation is you can only see one bar at a time whereas the clip view you can see your whole phrase by zooming in and out you can certainly zoom in closer if you want to but if you happen to have a 16 bar phrase you could look at the entire shape and that's a limitation I see to the step sequencer is you don't get a chance to do that so I hope this has been helpful for you in seeing how you can use the step sequencer in a very practical way I certainly could have gone through and just shown you what each button did but a lot of the functionality for the step sequencer I think is pretty useless especially all these other different viewpoints that you can get into so the ones I tried to show you were the most important ones that impact how I actually make music feel free to share in the comments if you have some other tips and tricks that you tend to use you can share with the group and if you found this to be helpful consider hitting the like button and the subscribe button

Channel: Pink Buddha Academy

Views: 8,550

Keywords: akai force, force, akai mpc, mpc tips and tricks, force tutorial, force guide, step sequencer, step sequence, beat making, making beats, beat making tips, beat making guide, making music, producing music, jonathan haidle, pink buddha, facebook akai

Id: m2lpLSoEhp0

Length: 30min 54sec (1854 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/pratik_pkr808]

I am a regular follower of Force Fridays. The previous week's video had tips and tricks for using the step sequencer on the Force. It's kind of awkward to use, in a way. Jonathan Haidle shows some ideas in the context of creating a short track. It's a part of the series - Akai Force Fridays. Y'all will love this.