AKAI MPC // Learn the Sequencer/Grid Edit/and Song Mode

what is equally as important as the sounds that we pick for our song well I think that sequencing and stitching together those sounds to make a nice arrangement is pretty high up on that list what's up guys oracular music back again with another Akai MPC video and today we're going to be having a look at sequencing on the aay NPC grid mode song mode all that stuff anything that's going to help you guys turn those ideas into finished tracks let's get into it if you're watching this video today I can maybe assume that you're just starting out with your NPC or you have been playing around with it for a while and you're just looking at getting some more insight on how to build up your track and how the sequencer works and getting those sounds together into a cohesive Arrangement uh to get to your finished product so first off we're going to look at our main screen here uh if you look here we start off at the top with our sequences which are made up of tracks which are filled with information from the programs you use in those tracks so in other words you start with your sections of your song and then the layers that exist in those sections and then the sounds that you build those layers with whether that's a program a plugin a key group or what have you whichever you choose to make up your track will live here in the program section so just for demonstration of this video I do have some sequences developed here just to um give you an idea of how to stitch those together but for now if you are completely new and you're just wondering how to get sounds into a sequence and onto the sequencer we will have a look at that so I'll go to an empty sequence and then I will have an empty track and then for that track I do have a plug-in loaded up to record onto that track so in order to lay down something on your sequencer we will need to have a look at the full view here and I will show you how to record that in so you're going to hit your record button and play [Music] [Music] start [Music] so we can see that it automatically looped we seen our timeline here this white line play that again as I'm talking just to show you we can see it and once that hits it will loop back and how soon that decides to loop back is based off of how many bars your sequence consists of so we've laid down a track and let's say we want to add one more or many more what you'd want to do is create a new track still in the same sequence so we're developing as many Sounds here layers that we want in this one sequence so I have another track and I would select my next plugin that I would like to use my next program it is important to say that you would want to create a new program or put a new program in context for every new track so again record play [Music] start [Music] now you'll notice after you record and it goes through the amount of bars and it Loops back as we mentioned you'll immediately switch over to overdub mode here and overdub that is when you would want to say you liked what you recorded but you'd like to add a few more notes in there or layer on on top of that without having to re-record or lose what you've already done so let's have a look at that if you hit record and play start it will wipe out what you've already done overdub play start will allow you to to layer over [Music] it [Music] always be sure after you're done recording to come down and make sure that your recorder overdub lights are not on so you don't lose what you've done so now that we have that you might be asking yourself I can hear everything that's happening but where is the actual information that's telling those sounds to play and when that's what you'll have control over inside of the grid edit which you will find in my case right here on the quick toggles on the side I think by default yours may be there as well so we're going to go inside there and we're met with what a screen that might be familiar to some of you guys and that's our midi our midi data and our piano roll okay so the grid edit will show you the midi notes of your program and where they sit on the grid and inside the sequence you can adjust where the notes are played by using our little grab tool here and sort of highlighting the notes that you wish and you have a function here called nudge and we can move those around on the grid as we wish um you can also adjust how long the notes are with your editing start or end points grab it and adjust it that way okay um you can also adjust the velocity at which the notes are played at we can see it's set to Velocity here bring up your arrow there and we're met with another little section on the bottom that pops up here so whichever notes you grab with the Grabber here will be highlighted at the top and then you will select your function that you you wish so velocity in this case we'll get into more maybe in another video about applying different things in this section to get control over your your notes that way with some Automation and different effects but for now we're looking at velocity which is a pretty important factor in creating Dynamics in recording with your plugins so or drums for that matter um make sure you're on the automation tab when we're adjusting the velocity we will grab our notes and we can see that our velocity is moving up and down there from 127 down so grid edit very important lots of functions in there so talking about um notes landing on the grid inside the sequencer accuracy is one thing but here is where you want to explore time control so in my case on my MPC I do have a quick function here TC you can find that in the menus as well or you have may have a dedicated button depending on which NPC you have so there you can see Global timing correction is on and it's at 116th notes okay so you're going to see we have different time signatures here electronic or digitally produced music heavily relies on the use of time control to snap those midi notes into the grid and you see the different signatures there the higher you set this the more increments you have for notes in between each measure and the more precise you can be and the lower that you set it the easier your hits may find its place on the grid and leave less room for error for lack of better term I'll show you what I mean with some high hats here in a second um we will start with maybe 1/8 eth notes so I'm going to create I still have the same sequence in context that we were just working with I'm going to to create a new track and I'm going to go to a program this time as opposed to a plug-in program and I do have some drums here okay so if we go back to our grid we see it's empty because we are on a new track and a new program so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to hit some high hats in and I'm going to hit do a little trick a little quick uh run there and you'll see that the notes do not properly lay in the way that I hear them and that's because I'm at 1/8 notes but I'm hitting them in quicker increments than the eighth note time control allows them to fall there's no place for them to fall into so I'll demonstrate that [Music] so you can hear right away it is not playing back what I recorded and that is because I am not allowing myself enough increments on the grid with the eighth notes to for those notes to fall into so if I quickly go to back to time control and go up to 164 64 notes hit do it and then I could quickly use my Grabber as I've showed you grab them hit my Eraser tool and get rid of those right quick so now that we're on 64th notes I have much more spots on my grid for the notes to fall into so let's do that same little pattern and you'll see it will pick it up [Music] right so I'll zoom in a little bit there now you can even see the lines on the grid how much smaller those increments are if I move with our nudge if I move around you can see all the little sections that I can drop that into now if I go back to the eighth notes much less increments for me to play with little tip while we're at it you can also hold in the note repeat button and lay them down like this and jump between the time divisions and you can hold in your high hat and note repeat and record them um right in on the grid perfectly without having to punch them in I'll show you what that looks like and sounds like note repeat held in record and our time divisions [Music] here very handy if you're into that um trappy Trill kind of sound um and handy otherwise but just thought I'd mention that so we also have the option to record Off the Grid as they say um you really need to be on time when punching in your notes or or at least get close which is what somebody may want to do if they're trying to get a more human less robotic or natural swing feel to their recordings you can see here with notes recording Off the Grid that you'll be able to freely move the mini notes anywhere and not snap in at any point to a certain time division so we want to zoom in there we'll want to go into time control and we will turn Global timing correct off so all of this beneath that now is irrelevant it does not apply so now let me play a little um a little drum section here off the [Music] grid you can already hear them all over the place it sounds very sloppy but you can really learn how to hone in on that and work that to your advantage uh especially if you wanted to um you know like I said a more human feel uh you can see that I can move my notes now completely free they are not locked into that grid whatsoever so you could actually record like that uh for a more natural sound and then go in and further adjust that to exactly where you wanted it um you can change this back and forth depending on what you're trying to lay down for your track as needed now that we have a little grasp on that we'll go back to our main screen here and continue looking at our song this is our main screen where everything happens um learning the inside outs and all the functions of that is is pretty crucial um so now what I would like to do is just kind of focus on the sequences that I've built for the purpose of this video um it's very important to to note that you do want to create a new program for every track otherwise you'll have that new track that you're trying to make taking over what you recorded with that program on a previous track that uses that program so essentially the NPC will not know what track you want the program to send the data to once you record a track with a program when you create a new track be sure to click the plus button here and add a new program key group plugin whatever it is you're looking to load up um if it's the same plugin that you wish to use again on a new track say it's this fabric XL herpy cord we would just you could either duplicate the program so now we have another instance of it and it will allow us not to interfere with the original or you can simply click click your plus button and choose your plugin that way here's my first sequence here we'll have a listen and then we'll move on from [Music] there so that is kind of my most full sequence that I've developed so I have named it hook um I've gotten into the habit of naming my sequences to keep track of what information is in what so knowing that I Nam this hook I can almost guarantee that that's probably my most full section so when we're happy with that first sequence we can move on to the next now here is where you make some decisions Do you want to build a new sequence from scratch or would you rather tweak what you've already made and add to it or take away from it and some variation for the next part of your song you could simply go back to the first one that you recorded the first sequence hit your pencil icon and duplicate the sequence copy rename it so you don't get confused because you don't want it to have the same name as the original that you're copying and I will name it duplicate for demonstration purposes and it will go to the next available open sequence which in this case is sequence 4 because I do have one two and three already filled but now you can hear duplicate has the same information as our first one book so why would I want to duplicate this the sequence when I already have that well from there you can mute different tracks rearrange MIDI data in the grid edit or delete it Al together or add to the sequence so I've muted my drums and I'll mute this plugin [Music] here so I'm keeping the same Cadence of my song intact but I'm also making a variation there as well without having to build that again from the very beginning muting tracks and plugins inside of a different sequence like I've done does not affect the original so in this video we have been working with four bar sequences um once we get into song mode and arranging your song you can see that you could simply duplicate or or play it twice if you wanted that part to play longer but if we wanted to take care of that right now you could get into your pencil icon and double the length so hitting that once would turn my four bar into eight bars and if I did it again it would turn my eight bars into 16 bars and so on and by doing that um the extra four bars that were added because I doubled four it will have the same information in those second four bars that were in the first so now our four bar Loop is an eight bar loop we're watching our timeline at the top here it now appears to be moving much slower because the duration of our sequence is doubled so as I've mentioned I have three parts recorded I have a hook or a main section um a verse and an intro so three sequences which I will give an example how to stitch those together in song mode so let's jump over there to get to song mode you will go into your menu on your NPC which on my mpc1 the button is here for menu and inside here you'll find something with a little music note and it says song that is our song mode section and what you'll see there is is you have the names of your sequences right here so every sequence you have in the project will appear in this screen we have intro here verse here and hook here now in order to get those over here in our song list uh that's going to be the order in which the sequences play we will want to hit record just so we have our button lit up there and then we can either tap on the screen the order in which we wish they would play if you had start placing them in and you didn't like the order and you wanted to start over you have a clear button start from scratch now I had hit record and hit the pads on the screen here the sections you could also use the physical pads to input the sequences as well intro hook reverse okay so that that is the section that I would like um I'm going to stick another intro at the very end so in this case I feel like my intro could be used as my outro as well so once you it's really about developing those sequences that you're satisfied with and have all those ready to go before you jump over into song mode um so you have enough to work with to create a full track now we will look more into that little list there right here here so we have the sequences in order and then next to it we have the amount of times that they will play so I did show you how to duplicate a sample on the main screen but you could have just as well changed that hook part that we doubled to play two times or three or four times um so you you can do it that way and yeah so let's have a listen [Music] [Music] [Music] so that was our little song that we developed there um kind of short but obviously that's where you would decide how many sequences you were going to put in there and the length that they will be until you're satisfied with the length of your track and from there this is how we're going to get our song from the MPC to elsewhere we have our export button here once once we're satisfied with the arrangement this is where you can decide um a few different things what format it's going to be way MP3 whatever it may be and the bit depth the sample rate and we also have audio tail here which would be how much uh time exists after your track ends um some people you may want that to be abrupt and have no empty space at the end Others May want say a few seconds in case they were putting those songs into a project and wanted a little gap between their tracks um and the you have the end bar here so all of those sequences together add up to 32 bars you can decide well I want my song to end wherever the song ends at 16 bars um generally I will have my sequence together to the point where I want it to be the full composition that I've created so I leave that at the end bar and you can also decide where the project starts as well but again I've already have my arrangements so I like where it starts and I like where it ends so I usually leave that as is we have the export button down at the bottom here we go ahead and click that and that will take us to uh where we decide where do we want to save that song that we've developed so I have it called song mode video here you can name that whatever you wish pick my destination I choose my terabyte there my external drive and I have it named I'll goad and click save and there we have it that was sequencing GD edit song mode I hope that was helpful to somebody whether you're someone who's just getting started here and you're wondering how to get all those sounds together into an arrangement or you know you've been at it and you were just looking for a little more insight on how that works I hope that was helpful to somebody uh with that being said I will have some more videos coming in the future maybe we'll look more at inside the grid edit and what could be done in there uh you know many more things to come that we could touch up on if there's anything that you'd like to see specifically please drop that in the comments and please feel free to like And subscribe um I will say if you are looking to engage in some discussions on all things NPC jump over to our Facebook group NPC cook and consult uh we'd love to have you there but that is all for today thanks for watching peace

Channel: oracular

Views: 1,997

Keywords: Akai, Akai mpc, Mpc one, Mpc key 37, Mpc, Key 61, Mpc live, Mpc x, Mpc tutorial, Mpc Tips, Learn Akai mpc, Beats, Instrumental, Music production, Mpc sequencer, Mpc grid edit, Mpc song mode, Song mode, Grid edit, Sequencer, Beat making, Mpc tricks, Mpc one+, Mpc beginner, Make beats, HipHop, Samplers, Type beats, How to make beats

Id: gw5Avh5M7ew

Length: 27min 6sec (1626 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 17 2024