Akai MPC // How to Use Motherducker

what's up YouTube oracular music here um today we're going to take a look at the aai NPC and specifically one of my favorite tools uh to use in the NPC and that is the mother Ducker plugin um so we're going to have a look at how that works today so let's get into it so mother Ducker what does it do and what is it used for well you'll often see mother Ducker input on your Kick Drum so your kick would be your trigger source and mother Ducker on what you want to duck under your kick whether that's your main sample or whatever and you'll often hear it Ed so that your kick and Baseline doesn't Clash transients or frequencies when they hit at the same time uh it's a neat little tool with all sorts of use cases actually but I just wanted to throw this video out there for anybody interested in how to apply mother Ducker and add just a little bit more Dynamics to their beats uh without getting too technical we're going to look at some parameters here okay so how to apply it um I got my drums here um my kick drum so like I said your Kick Drum you're going to want to put the mother Ducker input uh you're going to find that under Dynamics so we'll scroll down here into the input and then on your sample or whatever it is you want to duck under your input it's going to be the other option which is just mother Ducker okay so if we look inside here um you're going to see a few parameters there to give you a little bit of control over how much compression um to your signal that you're going to get uh so basically you have an auto function here which um I tend to leave it on auto and just kind of adjust from there but you could totally turn that off and adjust everything from scratch um I leave that on um so let's take a listen here to our I just got a little snippet here a little Loop um without the mother Ducker applied [Music] okay so that's without our side chain compression without our mother Ducker um so if we flick those on you should start to hear the mother [Music] Ducker so I've exaggerated it there a little bit um just so you can see kind of what it's doing um you'll notice the our little duck there um the more intense U that you're you're applying it so your threshold here um that's deciding when it's going to kick in um so obviously the lower the decb there um the sooner it's going to kick in and the more intense so you can kind of listen to how I Work It In from from it being um less intense to more intense [Music] and that really is um mother Ducker in a nutshell there um but you do have those other parameters so we'll talk a little bit about those um so your attack the attack of the mother mother Ducker the side chain that's kind of going to allow you to adjust how soon you're going to hear it um I leave that pretty low because I like my kick to punch through and then get right back to the signal but you certainly could raise the attack and the mother Ducker would uh take a little bit longer to kick [Music] in [Music] right so I leave the uh the attack pretty low generally um it's the threshold that that really let you dial in how intense the the side chain is um you do have a few other parameters there um your release um that's going to affect how long it takes once it ducks to get back to the signal um almost like a curve sort of if you could visualize that um so we'll play that and you can kind of hear what the release is doing as I raise [Music] that you know if we really crank it up you can hear it's ducking and it's taking a long time for that signal to come back so we'll lower it all right so it really does depend on exactly what you're trying to do um you know those are the the the three main parameters that I like to play with uh your knee you can also play with that all the way to the left is like a a hard knee all the way to the right is a soft knee and what the knee controls is is how gradually or abruptly the side chain reacts to your sord Source uh or again in the way that the shape or the ramping up of the compression how that works um you sort of think of a hard knee being more immediate and a softer knee more like a dimmer switch that eases it in um so with all those parameters there you're you're bound to find something that works I mean your every signal is different depends on what you're working with so you're going to your results are going to vary and you're going to play around with that to taste um but yeah person I just like to leave it on auto adjust the threshold and and then work the attack and release and and knee from there something else that's worth mentioning as well is you do have different buses um you know so you could set up different sets of ducking um so you could have different elements ducking different things so we could have our Kick Drum maybe our snare or whatever you want um triggering bus one um so if you're Kick Drum and your your snare drum was in bus one as it is you would be ducking everything that's in bus one now if you wanted to say your high hats or something to that effect um to trigger a duck on something else then you would apply the input change the bus to say two and then you would choose another element or another Channel and your mother Ducker you would set to two so um yeah you could kind of get uh a whole different Dynamic going on there with by triggering different elements so that is Mother Ducker um you know not something that's super complex to apply um but very effective in my opinion um it's very much like the glue of your beat um as long as you don't overdo it unless that's the kind of sound you're going for but um yeah just dial that in with the threshold and the release and the attack and all that um and you can really get something going especially when you have a nice tight kick and it really starts punching through when you start putting that um that mother duck around there punching through your base or your main sample line um you can really make different elements pop that way uh so thanks for watching um if there's anything else that you guys would like to see me cover uh doesn't matter how big or or how small I will do my best drop that in the comments uh give a like And subscribe um cuz I do plan on doing more videos in the future again thanks for watching [Music] peace

Channel: oracular

Views: 3,150

Keywords: Akai, Akai mpc, Mpc one, Mpc, Mpc live, Mpc live 2, Mpc x, Mpc key 61, Mpc key 37, Beats, Music production, HipHop, Hip hop, Sampler, Making beats, Tutorial, Mpc tutorial, Akai mpc tutorial, Akai mpc tips, Motherducker, Sidechain, Mpc beginner, Mpc tips and tricks

Id: wlq1Fy56K04

Length: 8min 51sec (531 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2024