Akai Force Workflow Basics - Clips and Scenes

so there are a lot of people out there that are curious about the basic workflow of the Akai force so in this video I'm just gonna give you a very simple brief overview of the basics on the Akai force check it out what's up everybody my name is Matthew Stratton helping you create music and on this channel I like to do setup videos tutorials and overviews with the Akai force so first things first whenever you open up the Akai force you're gonna get this screen I want to show you how to change the screen but to empty project go to preferences so to get to preferences go to menu click this gear up here once you push that go to project default once you get the project defaults you'll get this screen you can see right here new project dialog by default is on demo you could turn it off or you could put demo template recent select that one and go back to your preferences go to new and this is going to give you a different dialogue whenever you open up your Chi force all right you can see the new dialog here so every time you turn on the Akai force it's going to give you this dialog so you can use project templates you can use demos you can open a recent project you can open an empty project or right here you can actually set a user template I'm just going to go ahead and open a recent project alright if you don't have any recent projects go ahead and just open a demo so you can see right here this is the project I've been working on so no matter what project you load up you're going to get this matrix screen as soon as you open a project and if you're on any different area of your project just push matrix it's gonna bring you back to this screen and this is kind of like the home screen of the Akai force so you'll notice a few things on the matrix the top right here is going to give you the names of all the different tracks alright so let me go ahead and cover tracks for a second so you have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 different tracks that you can see at a time in the matrix mode so the vertical columns are tracks so these 8 tracks correlates to the pads down here the vertical pads down here are actually tracks you can see down here it says 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 down here ok and then these buttons down here with the numbers are actually considered tracks select buttons the buttons under there are actually considered direct assign buttons you can see the representation of tracks at the top you can see the names of all your tracks up there alright and down here are actually clips so these boxes actually represents eclipses so you can see up to eight tracks at a time and eight clips at a time all right so that's what this 8x8 matrix stands for so this is a track these boxes are Clips horizontally is actually called a scene so a clip is basically a short sequence that contains audio or MIDI and you can only have one clip at a time playing within a track you can see these areas are grey in the background here and then you have colored areas so the color areas are actually where clips are reloaded alright so you can see where the clips are loaded there's a play simple and the name of the clip so if I press any of these clips it's gonna start playing just that clip so if I press this one it's gonna start playing that clip now you can see this white box goes across so that's where the playhead is in that clip so if I want to stop that clip from playing I could push stop just gonna stop that clip or any other clip from playing and that stops it immediately and there are other ways to stop the clips so basically all these clips are quantized if you have them set the quantized I default they're quantized by one bar so if you push stop it's going to immediately stop the clips all right quantized stop them so if you look at the controller you see we got the thicker pads in the center here and underneath those are thinner pads okay so there is actually track select here so the track select actually has numbers on it that's gonna select your track okay and then underneath that our track sign buttons so the track of sign buttons correlates to a few things they correlate still over here these four buttons so these four buttons correlate to track a sign and whatever mode that is selected in all right and then the tracks are assigned buttons down here also correlates to your assign a and B to your cross fader so if I push the track of sign in to stop clip mode it's going to enable me to stop a click per track so if I start this clip with the pad I can stop it down here with the track of sign now you notice you can stop immediately it actually took a little time to stop because it's actually quantized alright and you can actually play clips from multiple tracks at the same time you just can't play multiple Clips within one track at the same time so if I play this clip and I play that clip both of these are gonna start all right and you can see how it's blinking that means they're both active if I press stop all it's gonna stop all the clips whereas these buttons right here are just gonna stop whatever one you want so if I had this one going and this one this one I could just stop that I could just stop that and I could just stop that you can see how they each stopped individually based on these buttons down here and then if I push stop all it's just gonna stop all of them at the same time so if I have all of them going but stop all is gonna stop all of them simple enough all right so when there's no tracks active if you push play it's actually not going to play in either clips because none of the clips are actually active if you push stop it actually stops the play but then you could just launch the clips immediately whereas if you have play going and then you push a clip it's gonna quantize the start at that clip okay simple enough there alright so you have your tracks okay going this way and you have clips within the tracks this way you could only play one clip at a time per track but you could play multiple Clips across the tracks and then the horizontal rows are actually considered scenes so you can see on the right here there are a bunch of launch buttons so you can actually launch groups of clips together at the same time within a scene so if I push the launch on any of these it's going to start a scene alright you can see here here's here's a scene you can see up here there are actually play buttons as well and it starts at number 1 2 3 4 going down so if I tap here or tap here it's the same thing alright so if I launch this scene here which is seen for it's gonna start all those clips at the same time ok so I can push the stop off boom stops all the clips at the same time alright so if I launch scene 4 I can go straight from scene 4 to see maybe 6 all right scene 7 back to scene 4 I can go to whatever scenes that I want to all right push stop all that's going to deactivate all the clips ok so I hope this makes sense so one of the ways that I look at scenes is maybe one scene can be an intro one soon can be a course one scene could be like a break or interlude one scene could be like a verse a breakdown so I grew up working in bands so that's how I see things like intro verse courts etc you can look at them however you see fit that's how I see them like an intro verse chorus bridge breakdown etc so the last thing I want to cover before I end the video is to cross fader and I just want to give you a basic insight to the cross fader you can see there's a sign a and assign B and there's a and B on the cross fader so if I put the cross fader all the way to the left that's going to be a if I put it all the way to the right it's going to be in the center it's a and B mixed evenly alright and you can see up here I actually already have some things assigned to the cross fader so you can see number one I had that assigned to a number two is in a number three is in a and number four is in B and then all the other different tracks are not assigned to the cross fader so if your track is not assigned to a cross fader it's just gonna play normally no matter where you have the cross fader at if your track is assigned to a cross fader it's going to determine if it's assigned to a if it's going to play a or if it's to sign the B if it's going to play when the cross fader is on be alright to assign the cross fader if you push and hold assign a or b I'm just gonna push assign a you can see down here these are actually lit up because they're assigned to a so they're little orange right here this one's assigned to B so this one's lit up red and if I wanted to deselect these I could just push them now these aren't assigned to anything if I push this one that's going to sign it to a if I push it again it's going to on a signing okay so now if I want to reassign that if I push and hold a I could assign track one to cross fader side a and I can just sign let's say track four to be so if I push and hold be and then push a sign button the track of sign button it's going to sign it to be so this one's on a and number fours on B so if I launch this clip on track one you can hear that if I launch this clip on track four you're gonna hear that with that because my cross fader is in the center alright if I put the cross fader into a you're only gonna hear track one because that's the sign get a I put the cross fader back to Center you're gonna hear bow if I put the cross fader on B you only want to hear track four alright and if I wanted to unassign if I push and hold it's on B and select that it's going to unassign it from B and if I want to unassign this from a push and hold a push track a sign boom completely unassign so now it doesn't matter why I put the cross fader so I hope this made sense to you if you have any questions ask me in the comments I'll go deeper into the next videos about the workflow it's going to give you a very brief simple overview of how scenes and Clips work and if you found value in this video go ahead and push the thumbs up below if you want more videos about the youkai force consider subscribing to the channel I will be doing more tutorials about the Akai force but in the meantime if you haven't checked out my playlist yet go ahead and click or tap the screen on the left that's going to take you to my first Akai force playlist so you can go ahead and check out my first videos about the Akai force if you want to see my newest video go ahead and click or tap the screen on the right that's going to take you to my new video my name is Mathew continue to create music and we'll talk soon

Channel: Matthew Stratton

Views: 25,653

Keywords: MatthewStratton, MatthewCreating, akai force workflow, akai force, akai force ableton, akai force demo, akai force review, akai force tutorial, akai force tutorial series, akai force update, making a beat with akai force, akai apc live, akai mpc live, akai pro force tutorial, akai professional force tutorial, force tutorial, akai pro, akai professional, akai pro products, akai tutorial, matthew stratton, akai force matrix, akai force clips, akai force scenes

Id: wj2TP1Ud87Q

Length: 10min 30sec (630 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2019