Akai Force Fridays - Where to start? (i.e. making a beat or track)

hey my name's Jonathan Haidt all and I make music as pink Buddha and welcome to force Fridays where we go over tips and tricks on how to use the force today's topic is going to be about getting started like what do you do you just got this thing maybe you've been using it for a while how can you get started making music on this thing now don't cry but this is going to be the last of my explicit tutorials for the force I'm going to move on to make some other videos on other topics and I will certainly continue to use this but if you're new to this series you can catch the rest of them by this link so let's jump in I think a great place to start on the force is by simply pulling up one of the demo songs deleting the tracks off of there and then using that as a template for making your own piece let me show you what I mean so I'm going to pull up this hip-hop one here because that's kind of more of the music that I create now you have this demo song I could run through it [Music] turn off that metronome anyways that's the demo track what you can do to easily clear this out is you just hit this delete button over here and then you can just slide your fingers on here to delete all these tracks can certainly leave them in there if you wanted to but this is a great way to get started now I have well this first one's blank because it was a loop so I'm gonna delete that track to the second one here is a drum kit so I can leave that in there a second one here another drum kit then let's change the octave on that [Music] nice uh bass fourth track on here is another drum one and the last one was a loop so that's obviously gone so I'm just going to delete that track so have a couple ones here to start with and it already has some nice controls built in to the master buss of these knobs the filter this mix what you think Heston which I don't really know what that does it doesn't really change anything and some EQ over here allows you to kill the high mid or low frequencies kind of a nice performance setup here okay I'm going to lay down a beat first and I'm gonna play through like a verse and then go into a chorus I prefer to kind of record my stuff in an entire sequence just so it has a better flow and doesn't just feel so chopped up and then I copy and paste and trim it down so that it's on two different sections but I'll show you what that looks like but let's go ahead and record this section here that's a good tempo chord arm this track [Music] okay it's a good pasta to stop let's go to this clip you know I just realized that I forgot to do was turn off the timing correction I hate that it's always a default to be on 100% and don't like how that sounds so I don't really want to record it over again I'm gonna go to edit and then humanize this a little bit just to make it not quite so dry I'll just do a very small amount and I'll make it slightly a little after the beat just by one okay so now I have sixteen bars here when it changes to sixteen so everything's all set okay so I have the full song setup here I don't want both of those to be on the same loop so what I'm gonna do is copy this twice and then for the first one oops it's turn off record arm here so now I'm going to go back to the first loop and simply shrink that down to the first eight bars you can just leave it like that if you want to or I might press trim now it's going to just cut out the second half so it's just the first half go to the second one here through this down to eight bars again but I need to put the start point at measure 8 so now it's just the chorus part I'm also going to trim this and now it's just down to the core so I have the verse here on the chorus so what I don't really like what's happening here that I did that humanized the bass drums that I hit both on the same time are a little loose now so I'm gonna click on those individual lines right there you can just go down if you want to press shift and quantize you'll automatically quantize those notes there I'm good also go to timing correction and do it that way too then click on the next bass line there and do the same thing quantize so now my bass drum should be a lot tighter [Music] the other thing I hear is not all the snare drum sounds are even so I can go to this button right here that shows me the velocities actually I'm going to go over to step sequencer mode if you missed the video that I did on that you can click up here and that allows me to go to the these particular sounds I'm going to move through the bars to find that one looks all pretty good what about this one oh see there it is say although that one is there so I'm going to raise this up so that all my snare velocities are at the same time I want to go and look at the ride cymbal because some of those were a little too low maybe I want to just spice this up a little bit here listen it out I'll pull this one down here okay let's listen to some of these I want them all the way up like that I want to kind of bring them down a bit okay that's pretty good go back to the first one here because this hi-hat sound I felt like it was a little bit sparse and a little too inconsistent [Music] you can turn it's on this way too which is kind of a nice way to quickly enter and add some notes let's pop back out to the matrix for you I got to drum parts going on I think this was drums here yeah so let's go to this bass sound I'll put it on fullscreen here [Music] unlike that tuning so I'm gonna go shift on the note here and take it off of chromatic I'll just leave it on a major scale so [Music] it's more like that alright I'm just gonna play something in and see how it goes I usually like to keep my recordings open-ended and not just to a set length if you want to see the video I did on set length you can click up there but I like to keep it open because it gives me a little bit more freedom to try out my ideas and then I can just go back through and grab the portion that I want and work with that oh cord arm this track I didn't have the partway for the course so I'm going to go ahead and fix that now and just simply take this down to 8 bars and then I'll record on the other track here so I can just click on the screen up here hit the wrong note originally [Music] one of the other things you can do is start to mess around with the individual tone of these sounds so I might want to go into this particular track I'm gonna go to track edit one of the things I didn't like was that some of the bass notes are a little too clicky and I want them to be a little softer so I'm going to go into the am mode here and change the attack to be a little slower maybe like 20 milliseconds it's not quite so clicky then maybe go back to some of the original sounds like add some distortion on there [Music] and I might do the same thing for the actually let's go into the mixer and I'll put it on there I usually like to turn off the Maximizer it's fine to have on there but when you put it on insert number one can't really put anything in after that so I like to have some low five stuff in there I'm gonna go in and to harmonic this Lofa one here let's hear all that sounds [Music] add a little grit to these drums and then let's put a filter on this one - air filter I think is a good one to use a little bit of Drive there - you had Drive in a few different places just a little bit add some nice grit and then I'll pull the cutoff down just a tiny bit more okay great then I'll put the little compression on here just to pull it together air compressor is really nice although it always starts off crazy low on the threshold and way too much output [Music] great okay what I want to do now is get this bass sound to be sidechained by the bass drum so I'm going to go to the pad mixer here and on this one al one I'm going to click on one of these inserts here and then you go to the mother duck or input select that and I want that to go to bus number one so then I'm going to go back to the mixer on our bass track come here and I'm going to insert the mother duck er I don't love that name by the way click there it's coming from bus number one so now the kick is going to be triggering this compressor which will duck the bass sound whenever the kick hits this makes that a little bit more extreme all right let me let's put in another track so you go up to this plus button and I'm going to put in plug in and go to menu and track edit I think I'm going to find let's go to tube scent this time go to presets and I want to go to pads and then just gonna I'm actually start playing while I leap through these [Music] I like that that's cool all right let's go back to my matrix here [Music] okay go to my clip let's trim this up to eight measures here go to our track and I want to probably change around some of these nuances here especially with the filter if I have this on screen I should be able to find the filter in here somewhere let's go to drive here I wonder what that sounds like [Music] okay once you got something laid down you can also experiment with recording some automation so now that I have this pad sound I don't just want to keep it static so I want to modulate the filter a little bit while doing so so I'm gonna hit record and then going to change this around better alright let's start this off Ian [Music] [Applause] [Music] and if you want to change those you can go to the menu and - step sequencer and you can change that a little bit I think in the beginning I'm gonna go back to bar one mm-hmm it wasn't hiding it from me so you can use this knob on the right I'll turn the whole thing up okay I like how that sounds better go back to my matrix view I don't have anything for the first first so [Music] [Applause] [Music] being able just do that one note there or something you can record that Sutter Automation right in the beginning so I think I might do that here [Music] I don't like the automation very much on that we'll work with it a little bit okay go into the mixer let's put the mother Ducker on here again it's going to be coming from the same kick drum sound here as well [Music] [Music] okay anyways that sounds pretty good the other thing you can do is if you're starting off with the force and you get this far is to split out the drums on two separate tracks let me show you how you can do that I'm going to delete tracks 2 and 4 because I didn't actually do anything with them and well now for anymore but number three and then I'm going to copy track number one put it over here on let's do three other ones here and then get rid of the track on number one so now I got the same drum track here on the other ones but what I'm going to do is go into this one here and I'm gonna leave my bass on this one and I'm gonna get rid of the I can either delete the notes here the hats that I didn't want to put in there or I can go into the clips and then just delete the hi-hat parts that are being played either one of those works for now I'm gonna go to I'm just gonna delete them for ease of you so I'm going to delete all the ones except for the bass note so if I'm going back to the matrix for you and go down to mute here I'm gonna meet these other two drum tracks [Music] so it's just the bass drum part and then I'm gonna go to this other track delete so now I'm just gonna put the snare on this track I could delete all the parts that I don't want come in here and let's just do the high hats and the rides on this one so I think get rid of these other parts if I listen to it all together [Music] so you see it sounds basically the same now why would I want to do that well the advantage of it is that you can either from the mute button down here control these to turn them on and off if you wanted to be more instantaneous or you can simply if you the record arm is off which it is you could hit one of these other buttons they would turn off the that particular track from planes so for example if I wanted to not have the snare in there [Music] or I could use the mute buttons down below here to mute those individual parts so listen when they're all playing [Music] so it just gives you the ability to control and need certain parts I don't like to initially record things that way because I'd prefer to play all my drums and at the same time and program them as a whole but I often times break it out this way so that I can use these trigger formats or to be able to play stuff like this and then turn parts on and off to make it more of a performance all right so helpful to watch me kind of put together a piece from scratch on the force again to summarize I just would use one of the demo tracks pull it up to lead the stuff out of there so that at least you have a basic framework with which to work lay down a couple parts either in smaller clips or you could do it in larger ones like I did and then trim them down add some individual effects to the channels and then to the hole add some automation in there potentially split out what you played into more tracks so that you can mute maybe certain drum parts or you could certainly do that with the instruments as well and that's a great and fast way to get up and running on the force right away if you like this kind of content maybe consider hitting the subscribe button to get other videos that I put out about making music

Channel: Pink Buddha Academy

Views: 8,296

Keywords: akai force, akai, force, force fridays, mpc, force tutorial, force tips and tricks, force lessons, making a beat, beatmaking, beat making, where to start, getting started, lessons, making music, music tutorial, mpc tutorial, jonathan haidle, pink buddha, tascam model 24

Id: Cz_Th-8mYC4

Length: 25min 9sec (1509 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 25 2020