Akai Force Performance Tutorial: Creating Variations That Are Easy To Perform

hello welcome back i hope you're doing very well after my last workflow tutorial video i got quite a few uh comments from people saying they'd like to see something that went into a bit more depth or detail on the subject of performing with the force that's quite a big subject so i've decided to chop it up into different chunks and then this first one we're going to look at what i think is probably the most important subject which is variations within a performance i'll put some time codes in the description so you can jump around but that's enough intro let's get on with it so the idea here is to create some variations that are easy to perform that's the sort of main focus to get this started off i've created a little bass line here now the way the force works it's very easy to create a drum track like we've done here chuck a kit on it and create a pattern very easy to do and that's exactly what i've done in this first scene [Music] sounds perfectly fine there's nothing wrong with that from a performance point of view though it's a bit awkward and it has a few downsides the primary one being that if you want to perform by muting drum pads in and out you have to be in note mode with the track arms and then it's a case of using two fingers [Music] which is a little bit awkward now of course you can create custom macros if you want to mute specific pads in and out but you might want to have those knobs and pads set up for other things so what we're going to do is look at a way of doing it slightly differently which sounds better i think as well so i've created another scene which has the same baseline and the same kit in it but this time um from this kit i've only got the kick drum playing which is going to cover eventually which you can hear there now on these two tracks i've got two these are audio tracks and each one i've got a loop playing the first one this one here is a top loop which is just um sorry that was something falling off my desk which is high hats basically and then a second loop which is a snare loop playing and they're just playing in continuous loops and it sounds like this now if we switch between the two [Music] now i think that sounds more interesting one of the reasons it does is because these are are samples of real drums playing they've got slight timing and kind of imperfections for whatever better term which gives them some nice swing a little bit of groove but they've also got some nice textures as well but from a performance point of view if we're in mute mode it's really easy to create variations in a performance buildups drop downs that sort of thing just by using your mutes and your left hand and it leaves all of your other pads uh free for sorry your knobs free for other macros and it's just really easy to do and there's nothing you can get wrong really because they because they all work together they sound right if they're all in and dropping them in and out always sounds good now as a as a sort of bonus tip if we look at the mixer here and go to the i o tab you'll see that these three uh drum tracks the kick the top loop and the snare loop instead of having them go to the main out i've got them sent to a sub mix the same sub mix if we look at that which i've named drum bus and then go to effects you'll see that i've put a compressor on it now the reason i've done that is basically it turns that into a drum bus and that parallel compression over all of those drum parts glues them all together and it just makes them sound better and it's just a bit of good mixing practice if you're playing live you can send the drums out to a different bus as well if you want to anyway moving on that was an easy way to create some rhythmic variation we're now going to take a look at some melodic variation i've duplicated this scene and i've added in this track here just a little simple synth line which is a hype synth preset and it sounds like this [Music] as you heard that's quite a long sustained sound and it takes up quite a lot of space so what we want to do is create a variation of that which is a bit shorter and a bit more rhythmic so what we're going to do is copy the entire track which we do by holding copy pressing the track number and then pasting into a new track now what that's done is copy all of the information not just the the instrument but also the midi clip that's in there as well we're now going to solo that track so we can listen to just our new synth line [Music] so what we're going to do is edit that to make it sound different and we do that by holding edit and track select which brings up the ui we're now going to go to the filter and amp page in the amp section we're going to dial down the sustain and the decay and we've immediately turned that from a long sustaining sound into a short clicky sort of sound we're now going to go to the effects page and we're going to dial in some more delay mix and some more reverb mix now that sounds a little bit quiet by taking some of the body of that sound out we've lost some volume so we're just going to go to the mixer and turn it up a little bit sounds good so what we've done there is create two variations of a rhythmic of a melodic sound and three drum tracks that we can bring in and out so if we switch over to uh sorry let's go back to unsilo that new track we've just created if we go back to mute mode and mute that track we've just created and we've now got our original arrangement so if we play that sounds as it did before now at any point we can just take out our sustained sound and bring in the clicky one it's still a bit too quiet so let's bring the volume up on that that sounds better we can revert back [Music] incidentally when i copied this track over and duplicated it if you're worried about track counts you could have just copied the uh the clip into a new slot on the existing track and change those parameters on the effects in the amp envelope using automation but obviously if you do that to switch between them you need to switch between the clips you can't do it with the mutes so anyway we've now got our baseline which is we're not messing around with we've got our three tracks of drums and our two synth variations and we can basically just mess around bringing stuff in and out with the mutes and because they all slot together it will sound okay whatever we do so let's have a quick go at that so everything in [Music] we can now create a drop down by taking out our hi-hat loops and switching to the clicky sound [Music] now we can bring our snare back in [Music] in our hats [Music] then bring the original base uh soy suit back in so as you can see you can do pretty much anything with your left hand and these mutes and it will sound okay whatever you do and because it's just a one-handed operation that leaves your other hand free to do other parameter changes um to play instruments if you have the keyboard or note mode set up it's just a really versatile way of very easily creating variations in a performance anyway i hope that was useful there will be some more of these tip videos coming so if you haven't subscribed please do thanks for watching and i'll see you soon bye

Channel: Maxipok Music

Views: 864

Keywords: akai force, force tutorial, force performance, drums, akai force tutorial

Id: 2Qxv-lS6zZ8

Length: 9min 3sec (543 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 30 2021