Akai MPC Key 37 - Beginners Guide to Recording A Beat

welcome back to the channel my name is Douglas and in today's video I'm going to walk you through how to record a beat on the NPC key 37 now this is going to be kind of a two-part video in this video we're going to cover making the beat itself and then in the next video we'll talk about turning that beat into a song using the song mode on the NPC ke37 and creating different versions of our beat to then stitch together into a song so if you're interested in that stay tuned because that one will be coming next but in today's video I'm going to walk you through the basic of creating a beat and we're going to talk about some of the fundamentals behind how to record in the NPC ke37 and I'll try to give you some tips and tricks along the way and this is my workflow for recording yours might be a little bit different so there's a little bit of personal preference here but hopefully this gives you the fundamentals that you need to get started so over here on the NPC ke37 the first thing we're going to do is turn the keyboard on of course and then we're going to open an empty project this is just going to open up an empty project if we over to our track main screen here this is kind of where we're going to live throughout a lot of this video Let's cover just a couple of really Basics before we jump into recording so three things I want to cover first one there's two main ways we can record in the NPC q37 one is Loop recording or beat recording where we set the amount of bars and then it just Loops through those bars and we can add tracks and record that's what we're going to be doing in this video the other way that we can do this is increase our bars to the point where we can record a full song without looping that's more like linear recording I'll cover that in a different video but that's where you might record a whole track to the song and then do the next track and do the whole thing at once rather than creating a beat that we stitch together into a song so that's the second way we're going to be focusing on Loop recording in this video so that's number one number two let's just look at the control surface here and cover a couple of Basics so we can modify parameters by tapping on the field on the screen we can double tap on the screen to come into a more detailed View and sometimes it gives us a number pad sometimes it gives us the ability to modify let's say the insert effects or things like that or we can scroll with our big encoder here to increase or decrease the value or we can tap down on the encoder to get to that same place as when we double tapped so little bit of navigational stuff there there's the transport controls right here record is going to record and replace any notes you have on the track overdub is going to record but it's not going to replace notes unless you play those same notes again otherwise it's going to keep the notes you already had recorded and add to it stop of course stops play plays and play start starts at the very beginning of our beat now you'll notice as we get into record that I'm usually going to start with record and play start which is going to start me at the beginning and as soon as we loop back around it automatically is going to switch to overdub and there's a little LED light over each of these you can see which one is active at that time and then the last thing I wanted to cover here is you'll notice the labels on the buttons there's usually labels above and then labels below to access the function that's labeled below we hold shift and then we press on that corresponding button to access the function below that so if we're going to go into let's say our track view instead of this main view we can hold shift and that jumps us to our track View can get between these here as well if we wanted to go to grid we can tap on this or we can tap on this grid button and then we can always come back home by tapping home or tapping on this main button here these are very handy because they allow us to access some of the most common functions right here underneath the screen so really cool so that is number two and then number three let's just debrief really quickly on the difference between a project a sequence a track and a program so think of your project as your whole song we're building everything inside what's going to be a project and then within the project we can have multiple sequences now think of sequences as if you laid everything out linear your whole song out linear and then you chopped up that song into an intro verse one verse two chorus each of those might be a sequence now within the sequences they all share the same tracks so again think of it linearly let's say we've got eight tracks in our song and we chop those up into the Verse Chorus etc those tracks are shared across all your sequences but the tracks themselves within a sequence may have different notes they may be muted or unmuted so the sequence allows us to kind of block out our song and we're going to be in one sequence here we're going to record the you know the fullest version of a beat that we can so in the next video when we compile a song we can strip that back for our other sequences that we're going to have like the intro and the verse and things like that now in order for you to hear the notes on a track you need to have either a plug-in program or a drum program or something like that Associated to that track so if we look on the screen here this is the whole project then we have the sequence that we're in then we have the track within that sequence and then we have the I guess the source of the sound for that track down here now you're allowed to have eight plug-in programs and you can associate those to one or more tracks so again plug-in program or drum program we have different track typ types that we can select so we could select drum to get our drum programs and plug-in to get our plug-in programs but those are associated to track so project sequence you can have many sequences the sequences all share many tracks and then those tracks are associated to a plugin of some sort to be able to hear the notes that are on the track so we got that stuff out of the way hopefully that didn't bore you too much but I'm telling you all of that as if you're a beginner you're just learning to use the NPC and so hopefully that's helpful in getting you up and running to learn the fundamentals before we jump in and have some fun so let's do that now let's set up our sequence so first let's pick a Tempo and we can do this by tapping the tempo here we can go in and we can scroll to choose a Tempo or we can double tap or push down on the encoder let's go with a tempo of 96 and then there's a little do it button so now we've got 96 the other thing I want to just kind of look at here is the metronome so hold shift and tap on the metronome to get to the configuration piece I want to enable this for now on record and play and I'm going to bring my volume of that metronome down just so I can hear it a little bit it keeps me kind of in time and we could change the sound of that right here so we could come in I'm going to leave it on NPC click now we could just hit play you can hear the metronomes just there kind of giving us a little tick to keep us in time the other thing I'm going to do is increase my bar bars to eight now this is how many bars it's going to go before it Loops back around so we want to do eight bars as part of this song the shorter your number of bars the less variety you're going to be able to get in that beat so I feel like eight gives me enough kind of variety before it Loops back around and it gives me more when I go to create the song Stitch these together so we'll go with eight that way we have a nice full sequence so now that we've set up our sequence we've got 96 beats per minute eight bars and we've got our metronome turned on the other thing to keep in mind here is this TC button which is the timing correct functionality what this is going to do is quantize or timing correct the notes I'm playing within the time Division I have set here so I'm going to stick with 11/16th where this really gets a little messy is if you're let's say you're playing a piano track and you've got notes that aren't necessarily all in time it's going to try to put those in time which could sound messy so sometimes you'll see me turn timing correct off when I'm recording a specific track and then we'll turn it on for other things like drums now there 's a couple of ways we could approach this we could record the drums first the bass first I like to kind of get some sort of hook and I'm going to be upfront in this and I have not done any preparation or planning I have no clue what beat we're going to record so we're going to do this all on the Fly I like to kind of use the sounds to inspire me and we're just going to kind of play around with some different sounds here to come up with a hook to our song little bit of um maybe some Rhythm or riff that we can then build our beat off of so again no idea what this is named or what this song is even so we're going to do this together and hopefully it's not a complete disaster so let's come in here and we've got our track one right here and we have plug-in program one assigned to that so we're going to start off with something that we can get a riff on so the way that we can change the sound we can just tap on here and come over to our sounds and these are all of our plugins that we have available for us hype has a ton of great syth type sounds pads things like [Music] that you can click through these the different pages of sounds that there [Music] are it's kind of a cool one so I usually kind of just click around on a few of these another plugin that I've really been loving the sounds on is the mini D it's got a great number of sounds in here I kind of like that it's got a bit of a an F then a g let's try recording that I'm going to come back to my main View so you can see what's happening here there's a little white line up here and that shows us where we are within our track so when I press record and then play start it's going to start me at the beginning and it's going to give me a four beat coun in on my song here so we're going to just we're going to try this out [Music] together [Music] and you'll notice it looped and automatically changed to overdub just going to listen to that to the end and make sure with that riff that we're happy with the way the timing correct is on that I like that so let's go ahead and name this pluck pad and I clicked on the wrong thing but this little a with the cursor we're going to say pluck pad do it and we're going to call our plug-in program that as well pluck pad so again to name your track and your plug-in program where this is helpful is if we come over to let's say our track mute view this is showing us right here our track name pluck pad really helpful if we come over to our mix view we see that here as well on our plug-in program so very helpful to have these named both of these so that no matter where you are in your track mute or your mix you're able to quickly see okay this is the track and this is the adjustment I'm making to it so I like that one one thing that we could do and we're not going to do it in this video because it would just take too much time we'll do it in the next one is the insert effect so if we tap this little I right here this brings for this track it expands our little view here we can add insert Effects by tapping in this effects block here you can add four insert effects per track really handy and we're going to actually do that once we put the song together and we'll talk about some of the mute solo and the insert effects there so I'm going to come back to that we're going to click on this little hide icon right here and let's go to our track two now that I have a bit of that riff I like to go to base next some people like to do drums I'm going to go with a bit of a bass sound and I think I want something that's maybe a little Punchy we've already got this pluck that's a little kind of Punchy here we're going to start to build some Rhythm into this track so on our plugin program we're going to move over and you'll notice that we only have the one plug-in program here so to add a second one we're going to tap on that and now we can define a different Sound Source for track two rather than using using plugin program one which is our PLU pad so we're going to come over to sounds and we could choose a base from we've got a really nice Baseline plugin right here and let's see what we've got for categories let's see what is in basic we've got some of [Music] these not feeling those how about percussive want something that's going to hold a little bit I like that one a lot uh let's try some different thump [Music] ones and we can use these octave up and down so I'm not playing way down here let's try that I feel like that might get us where we're trying to go [Music] I forgot our little riff so I messed up so what I can do is I can either stop it and then just do record play start and it's going to record over what I did before my other option is to tap undo and that's going to undo what I just played so if we come over to grid I can show these are the bass notes I played undo it got rid of my grid notes there so uh maybe let's listen to this a little [Music] bit I'm not digging this base sound you're probably not either so let's come back over here and let's do I don't know maybe we maybe we have to go somewhere different let's try hype and see what we have for bass sounds in hype uh PE PE PE PE [Music] I think that might do [Music] [Music] it I like that on the timing correct I'm going to turn this off because I'm going to do something something a little funky with this so let's just turn that off for this track play [Music] start I forgot I went to the E minor there again I could undo but I'm just going to go record play start and overdo what we did [Music] before [Music] perfect I think that's good let's name this base now we've got some movement with our pluck pad we have the base there let's come over to track three so we're going to scroll over here and I'll be honest you can do this while you're recording and let's do this with track three and four I'll show you how you can do this live so we could have set up all our tracks with our different sounds and then just recorded played as soon as it started looping jump to the next track continue to record so I'll do that with three and four let's get these set up and I'll kind of show you how you can do this live all while it's recording so on track three we've got to hit plug-in program plus to get a third plug-in program let's come into let's do hype again and let's go into let's do hard [Music] PLS [Music] [Music] so we'll go with this for track three and on track four let's do a plus and let's find something that we can get some movement in here I'm [Music] hoping that'll work that'll kind of help us fill in a little bit so those are our two tracks and we're going to record [Music] [Music] these [Music] so what we can do now is you'll notice it went to overdub I can move in and out of overdub by just tapping this so I'm going to leave it on overdub we're going to move to track four now watch my playhead here when that comes around it come off overdub [Music] yep [Music] [Music] so there we go let's go in and name those just a quick little example of how you can do that we could have moved to track five added a plug-in program picked a sound undubbed it played a little made sure it worked overdub and keep recording so you do this pretty quickly uh to get an idea out as you can see so this one we're going to call we're just going to call this regular pluck and regular PLU here and then this one we're just going to call this synth pad now I think what we need to do here is get ourselves some drums in here because we've got four tracks now with pluck pad base pluck synth pad so on our track five we're going to change this over to a drum track we can do that with this little icon here and now you'll notice if I come into my sounds I've got a different view here because it's pulling up drum programs instead of plug-in programs so we've got a whole bunch of included kits here we could tap on these and load them into our project but one thing that I like to do is X out of here or just come back to my main view here and click on the assigned samples button right here in the drum program section you'll you'll see there's nothing assigned here but if we tap on browse and then under audition we can set this up to Auto audition and then as we move through oh I kind of like this one it's got a bit of that slow vibe to it you can tap on the play button there to stop the audition feature and then tap on load and that's going to load it up into those 16 pads we've got that right here if I go octave up and make sure my transpose is [Music] off so these could be these drum programs could be a combination of drum sounds I like that we can probably use that and then and I'll probably keep this let's do little play and just kind of see how this [Music] fits I like that so let's go ahead and record this I'm going to name it now we'll call this drums and I'm going to leave my plug-in drum program name the same so I know what drum program this came from and then let's just go [Music] record and you'll notice if we play start we're missing a little bit on that synth sound so if we come into our grid view you'll notice we're missing a note right at the beginning here that what note did we actually play [Music] there I think we want this note here so let's just do um overdub play start [Music] I'm G to undo that I'm going to try that one more [Music] time I like [Music] that that sounds about right so we can use this view I won't go into detail on you know much of this right now now but you can see we have the ability to edit the actual notes we recorded So now that we fixed that let's come back over to our drums now one thing we could do is overdub and do our symbols but what I like to do is throw those on another track so I can treat them differently with my effects so let's do that track six we're going to leave the drum program the same on this that way all the sounds are the same we're just putting it on a different track so we can treat it separately and have those notes split out separately so we're going to do record and before we overdub we're going to go to TC and we're going to make sure that's on that way it fixes any of my bad timing there so let's close this and let's play [Music] start [Music] hey sounds pretty good for starting with nothing so let's go into name this um we're going to just call this symbol that way we've got drums here symbols here let's let's come over here I feel like we need an electric piano or something so I'm going to change this back to a plug-in program tap new and let's go into uh let's go into electric here and let's find something that's [Music] wet I like that it's it's definitely wet maybe a little bit too much so one thing we can do here is we can go into edit instrument and we can tweak things so you notice a bunch of effects on here let's come over to the delay I'm going to take my feedback on that down and time down we're going to come over to our spring Reverb and we're going to take the time down on that it's a bit better so those edits we're making to our plug-in program now keep in mind if we use this electric piano on multiple tracks what we did here would affect all of those tracks so let's just call this one EP and then we'll go ahead and record this and then last thing we'll do is record maybe a lead sound to give us a bit of a Melody not sure what that Melody is here but let's go ahead and record this it's getting lost a little bit there I think what we're going to do is come back over to our synth pad and let's just grab you can slide this fader down or we can grab it here yeah let's go back to our EP and let's bring our volume up on that a little bit and and I'm going to do record play start to record over what I did [Music] before That Base I'm not digging it super much let me see if I can find a little bit of a better base sound there let's come into [Music] here let's just you can change the sound and then keep the [Music] notes I feel like that's better it's a little more subtle so that's the nice thing is you can come back to any one of your tracks change the sound and the notes you played and recorded will use that new sound so really nice we could come in and do tweaks to that sound and stuff as well let's come over to track 8 plug-in program six and let's go in and grab a lead sound maybe we do a lead sound from the mini d [Music] [Applause] and let's just play around with this I'm going to turn timing correct off before we [Music] record [Music] n [Music] I'm not loving [Music] that that's [Music] better [Music] oh that came out way better sorry that just kind of like took me back that is amazing so let's come in here let's call this lead and honestly as I'm listening to this I feel like we need a little bit more of a rhythmic sound somewhere in there but before we do that let's go ahead and save this program because we haven't actually saved it yet and I don't want to lose what we have here so we're going to call this beat down demo actually let's give it a fun name what does this sound like this sounds like let's call it wet rain you know what that means let's go in and do it and save so now anytime we make changes and we want to save we can just tap on that save boom saves it right to our memory and we could have an SD card as well could have saved it to that um it's probably best practice but here we go one more track here to go in plug-in program and let's find something that can give us a bit more of a Prive sound [Music] here [Music] he I think we can do a bit of an [Music] arpeggiated I like that my timing's off there let's try this again [Music] I'm going to do that one more time because I feel like that wasn't [Music] perfect [Music] oh I think that's pretty good let's name this I don't even know what we call this um pluck uh it's not even a pluck what was this it was um we'll call it pure Pop I like that now we could go in let's just try adding one more here because I have this sound in my head it's not a bell but [Music] it's it's definitely not the sound [Music] but [Music] I think that'll do it so let's come over here I'm going to do high for the first four and then do an [Music] octave [Music] I think that'll do for a beat let's save this and got a little hair on my screen so come over to our mix view we've got here we could come up to the top here and we could change this to mini tracks that's going to show us our track names rather than the programs that way when we're mixing we're mixing to the track not to the plug-in program because keep in mind if we had mixed the drums on the programs it would have mixed the symbols and the drums together whereas on the track we can adjust the actual track level here by changing to MIDI tracks audio tracks same thing there um can switch between those so we've got you know all of our different tracks here got 10 tracks in total and I don't know why we didn't name maybe track 10 we didn't do anything with okay um oh we did let's call that shiny shiny so shiny and I think this is going to about do it for this video come back into mix view there now we've got shiny so when we play this we can see tap on any one of these and we can grab the volume or we can [Music] just it's pretty cool stuff in the next video I'm going to be taking this beat we've created and we're going to use song mode which is over here in our menu and song and we're going to build out a song using sequences so we're going to duplicate this sequence we're going to create variations of it and then we're going to stitch those together into a song and then I'll show you how you could maybe then record Another track over the entire song rather than inside a beat so pretty cool stuff be on the lookout for that I hope this video was helpful for you in just kind of seeing the workflow and getting started of recording on the NPC ke37 if you got any questions throw those down in the comments below thanks for watching stay inspired keep making that [Music] [Applause] music

Channel: DSoundman

Views: 3,634

Keywords: akai mpc key 37 record beat, mpc key 37 beginners guide, akai mpc key 37 beginners guide, record beat mpc key 37, recording a beat on the mpc key 37, akai mpc key 37, mpc key 37, akai, akai mpc, recording a beat, mpc key 37 tips, akai mpc key 37 tips, mpc key 37 recording, mpc key 37 sequence, dsoundman, learning to record, beginner mpc key 37

Id: omPYvNDzmC8

Length: 38min 49sec (2329 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 28 2024