AKAI MPC LIVE II - How To Make Your First Beat!

i don't know why i haven't done a video on this already [Music] the sequence what is going on guys djif here and i'm back at it again with another video talking about how to make your first beat on the mpc live 2. i've had this for quite a while and i have a playlist compiled with some stuff that will get you started but this video is to specifically target the beginners and the intermediates that want to learn how to use this efficiently so with that being said the time stamps are built into this video the links will be in the description box just in case you might be thinking about buying one of these and you needed some clarification so let's begin so i know a lot of people are going to say hey my mpc live 2 is all black how did you get this well a link will be in the description box this is a special edition of the mpc live 2 and i'll leave it at that but everything i'm going to tell you in this video works on the black version so the first thing we need to do though is turn the mpc live 2 on youtube need jesus not in that way guys calm down what you need to do is reach here to the left side of your mpc live too and turn it on power it up and what it's going to do is go through a process of booting up which it'll say in pc and then it will load up the templates that you can choose from so now you have your template screen which is like that on every mpc in this current generation and you can choose an audio track clip pop future house trap and so forth but we're going to start from a empty template so go to the bottom left side of your screen boom and touch that screen and now you're at the main screen this main screen has three different categories on here and this is where you're gonna live at you have your sequence area where you can set up the bpm and it's actually different each entire time you switch up sequences but we're not going to get into that into this video we're going to just set it up for success so let's set it up to about 60 no we're going to go right about here i'm going to go to overdub and let's hit account by 74 bpm where you're going to use that you can set up your bars to be two to how many bars you want so by default this box is on two bars and you can also transpose it up or down by a semitone or for those who don't know what a sippy tone is by pitch okay the next part is your track part of your main screen which you have control over different programs so what is a program so you have a program called a drum program which is on right now by default and you also have a plug-in program where you can load up different plug-ins like tube synth you also have electric and baseline and just like the name suggests so electric is a piano or bell synth and tube synth is a va synth a virtual analog synth and bass line is what bass lines absolutely and if you have version 2.9 installed on your mpc live 2 right now you have access to the new drum synth which this is version 2.9 by the way you also have key groups clips midi and cbn gate you can also control the transpose of each in individual program that you have select this third and last one right here on this main screen is where you select your program that you have loaded up now let's talk about loading up a program we're on a drum program right now so let's get some drums so hit shift and browse and you can select your drums or hit that main screen to go back to the main screen there you can double tap and it will pull up the browser that's what i usually do that's how i'm programmed to use the mpc live 2. so the next thing you want to do is pull up some sounds in which you have default drums that you can use but we're going to go ahead and use just select sonic boom which comes with your mpc live 2. i have a video on how to install that so now let's browse some sounds you'll notice that you have a lot of sounds you can hit stop to stop the preview or you can hit this little play button and you can hear them you can also choose to turn off the preview automatically and just use this and you can turn up or down the volume i like to have it low what that's a lot of programs to search by so how would you search for your programs fast well luckily for you akai has all the drums organized by their specific genre so i can type in hip hop and get that all hip-hop sounds [Music] or or i can type in trap and so forth whatever respected genre you want to do we're just going to use trap as an example in this video because it takes advantage of all the features on the npc i'm going to use this decap exp demo kit pretty good kit just for these videos here and now i can go back to the main screen by hitting the main button right here and we can use it so i don't hear any sounds what am i gonna do i don't know what to do yes i do you will go over here into the third part of the main screen and select that program right here and you have to do that anytime you select the sound [Music] now the next thing i want to show you is this on the pads if i tap the pads lightly and if i tap to pass hard that's called velocity and certain people might not like it [Music] for whatever reason well it's called full level now no matter how hard or how soft i hit these pads it will be at full level just like the name suggests the next thing i want to show you is this right here on this main screen and that is setting up your metronome because some people might not have a metronome when they hit like overdub and play stylus now that you hear that it's called a count and that's the metronome sound but you can choose to do a counting on record or play on this main screen here i like to have it on record you can change the rate and you also can change the sound so let's hear the different sounds tambourine let's hear metro click which is another famous npc sound all right and so forth i'm just going to use the mpc click because it's less intrusive and that's the legendary sound you also could change the volume of it but let's lay out that drum line hit record and play start to play from the very beginning to the end of that bar [Music] so now i've laid out my first drum line and you have to if you're doing this with me there's another thing that people do and that is when they lay out their hi-hats they don't do it manually well the mpc shines and has started this and it's called note repeat this note repeat button over here you can press shift and note repeat and it will bring up this menu or you can double tap and it will lock that menu here in which you have these options 1 4 1 8 1 16 132 164 and triplets so what we're going to do here is use 1 16 because that's normal all right so let's press record and play start whoa what happened i don't hear the drums i just laid out what can i do well there's a button right here called undo and you can see it's lit up that means that i can undo what i just did and what happens when i do that and press play start the drums are back and i'm happy you can also hit shift and redo now i can just go back and over dub those drums in or those high hats so hit overdub and play start and record it [Music] and now they're in there now the next thing i want to do is something that's really important and key to the mpc and i'm going to hit this button right here which is 16 levels with 16 levels you can do velocity you see the velocity goes down control that each level of these pads c16 pads here or you could do two which controls the tune and that's what we want to do because that's how people do it in modern day music we can leave 16 levels on and since note repeat is on i can change the time signature to 132. now let's overdub that and use the different tunes [Music] now we have that in here you could turn 16 levels off i highly recommend setting your note repeat back to 1 16 because of another feature that i'm going to talk about which is time correction now you heard that my drums were offbeat but it ended up being on beat and that's because time correction or tc is quantized and that's what it's called in your daw but on the npc it's called time correction with that you also have different time divisions too which are tied into your note repeat so that's important and i want to point that out so you don't make that mistake so you have bars 1 4 1 8 1 16 1 32 and 1 64. so we're going to keep it on 1 16 because that's normal if i turn it off that means that it is unquantized when i record anything else in there but i want to take advantage of the timing correct feature i know i keep on calling it time correction i apologize and yeah let's do that you also have control over swing in here so you can swing your drums if you want to and you can shift timing which is like the mpc 3000 and so forth so let's close that because we're not going to use that feature yet the next thing we're going to do here is how do we select a track so all you have to do to select the track is go over here use this data wheel and go to an unused track so this next track we're going to use something different we're going to use a plug-in so let's select the park plug-in here and we have tube synth and as you can hear the functionality of these pads have changed because now i have access to pad perform let's talk about that real quick because we're going to lay out a melody you can have it off and it won't do anything it'll sound disgusting or you can have it on chromatic in which you'll have access to these features right here which is scale where you can select the root key which right now is on a a major and so forth you can just change it by using the data wheel and you also can change the octave [Music] you also have note mode where it locks in everything in scale so it depends on what type of scale that you have selected right here which is a major scale you can select either a major minor harmonic minor pentatonic and so forth you have all of the default scales in here you have a quartz mode which locks in the chords and you also have control over another feature too as well once you go into corpse mode and that is one three five seven which is jazz chords or you can use one three five which are fifths one four five one two five [Music] and one three five seven which are sevenths okay so you know just in case you didn't know that now you know and you also have flats too [Music] no i just won't be using that at all but i will be using one three five seven a little later you also have chromatic chords which play everything and the feature that we're going to use the most which is progressions now from these progressions here you can hear a total difference in those chords and those are set progressions there are custom progressions i talked about that in different videos and i'll have that linked in the description box as well but what we're going to use is the stuff that's default with the mpc and we're gonna make sure that we have court selected let's get out of this and you have classic gospel guitar house jazz keys let's select house since that's something that you can use too as well all right you can exit out of that screen and now here's another feature you can turn that sound down we're using the q links so let's go ahead and use that let's hit record and play start [Music] we have recorded our first chord progression and congratulations to you now i don't like that sound how can i change the sound or the plug-in well you can change that over here and select either electric or bass line but we're going to stay with tube synth and also you can see tube synth what it looks like the ui by hitting menu hold menu and press this pad right here now you can see tube synth in the flesh and you can control different parameters i have a whole video for that coming don't worry about it right now now you see presets over here you can select different presets you can select synth leads plugs pass etc i'm going to go for a pad i'm going to use the emotive pad which is the safe pad to use [Music] now that we've selected that emotive pad i can just go back into the main screen here you can also select the presets right here by going to the presets hitting the data wheel and keep on going [Music] all right so now that we have some of the basic stuff set uh the next thing you're probably wondering is man i don't want to use a two bar loop i want to maybe go four bars but i want to keep everything the same way well you would hit this pencil sign over here by the sequencer part and you would hit double length and that will make it four bars and it'll make it play longer now since we've doubled the length maybe you want to do something different with the chord progression and make it a little bit more complex let's just use record play start [Music] and now we have something more complex all right so let's go to the next track and we're going to use a key group but this is going to be very important and i want you guys to pay attention because we're going to use this key group for an 808 so now that we have a key group here the next thing i want to do is go into the browser window and from the browser window we're going to select one of our sounds that we have on our sd card slot because i'm pretty sure you want to use your own sounds we're going to make this an 808 track so i'm going to find one of my 808 style like [Music] so i like that 808 that i found right here it's called big text it's a part of one of my drum kits that i made and yeah i'm going to hit the data wheel to load it up now this is very important when you're working with key grooves this is very important the first thing you want to do is hit menu and hold menu and press this pad to go into this program it's a key group and now we need to select the sample so go over here to sample this right here and select it and grab that 808 you'll notice a whole bunch wrong here main thing is playing polyphonically and you want your 808s to play mono so hit the master tab over here at the bottom left part of the screen and let's change the polyphony to mono so now if i press chords it won't play any chords okay that's very important the next thing you want to do or you might not want to do it is control either note on or one shot let's turn it to a one shot let's hear how it sounds [Music] now a note on if i hit this pad it will play all the way through if i'm holding it but if i hit it and stop it will stop okay so that might be the way you want your airways to hit or the sound that you're using to hit or not so we're gonna keep it on one shot here now let's hit this main menu and let's go into pad performance mode and go to notes now since we laid out those 808s you might want to adjust things like pitch so what you can do is go over here to transpose and you can transpose it 12 semitones down or up if you want it to be on the same scale i just want to show you how to do that so it's actually fine at zero or off all right now that you know that let's move forward to another track let's go to track number four it's unused we're gonna go back to a plug-in program and we're gonna use another sound but one important thing you need to know when you start to use another program or use the same program that you used before it's best to use the plus sign to make it its own program okay that's like the only way honestly so what we're going to do is select a sound we're just going to select a new sound and we're going to lay out a kind of a hook like melody so i'm going to go over here and find my favorite pluck and it's called wavyish and you'll see why i like it a lot i'm gonna turn it down over here using this q-link [Music] all right so now we have something going we got a little bit of some stuff to work with here so the next thing i want to show you how to do is use effects so i want more reverb on that sound here and the npc has a lot of effects so i hit this eyeball sign over here if you miss what i did boom and it will pull up this category in which you can control different things here like you can put effects into different programs of a pad which this isn't a plug-in so you can't do that and you can choose to do that on that program here or on the track or even on the master which we'll get into a little later so i'm going to go and hit this insert button and i'm going to go into my effects you can see a whole list of different categories you have reverb dynamics and so forth we're going to go into reverb i'm going to add a little bit more reverb to it so i'm going to go into air reverb or matter of fact i'm going to go and select another one i'm going to select the spring reverb because it's a little bit more wavy and you can hit this pencil sign and you can pull up that and edit it the way you want or you can use any of these presets here so i'm going to use dupe reverb i guess and let's hear it press play start [Music] so you can hear that the sound has changed a lot and you might want that you might not well you can turn off that effect in here the previous version of that [Music] i'm gonna turn it back on now [Music] now i can just exit out i can just hit the main button and it'll bring me back to the main screen and i can close this for right now and you can hear that that sound is different now so i'm gonna go on to track number five here and i'm gonna set up that exact same sound but i want to use a different plug-in program because i'm gonna change that sound up again and i'm going to just go into my categories here and it was under plucks now let's record that sound in again and let's go [Music] let's give it a little bit more distinction here i'm going to turn it up 12 semitones [Music] now what if i want to pan that sound well i can go back into that window that i just did with the eyeball and i can pan it right here where it says center i'm going to move it to the left let's hear it move to the right all right so i'm going to move on to track number six and we'll talk about something else that you need to know about and let's go ahead and create another plug-in program by hitting the plus sign so i can have it individually and we'll talk about this feature right here which is arpeggios so by double clicking on note repeat to latch it up you can have access to arpeggios and [Music] and you can control the arps in here too as well because the mpc has arps now and you can control the speed you can latch and you can also change like what type of arp it is or rhythm or pattern and so forth and you can change the rhythm pattern which is incredible and i might just try a few [Music] don't worry about the sound right now we'll change that a little later but yeah you have that option too as well uh what i want to do is go i'm gonna go back into arp because you do have different art patterns you have up down and so forth and just many different arps and stuff like that it'd be a little bit too long for me to cover in this video [Music] all right so let's add something to the master track so how would i do that i would go over here to the eyeball sign and select the king sign and i like to just do a little bit of lo-fi and the reason why i use lo-fi is it glues the track a little better in the mix and a particular plug-in i really like inside of the mpc is this right here which is in harmonics and it's called air lo-fi so air lo-fi helps with low-firing obviously and with that i could just go over here to these q links and use the bit def i'm going to change the bit depth to like 12. so we're going to lower the sample rate as well and you start to hear what i'm talking about [Music] and i like to just mess with the depth i'm not going to clip it all the way out like that though rectify and just add a little bit of noise mod to add some noise [Music] and then i also like to mess with the mix and blend [Music] last but not least is something that's really important that's like naming the tracks and that's something i should have just brought up in between this so from track number one we know we have a drum track so you would hit this sign right here and name it a drum track boom so let's name that drums i'm going to name this horse on this track on track number two then we're going to name this right here which is the 808 let's name that 808 this is a good habit to have when you're creating beats and stuff like that so you don't lose track of things right here i believe that's the bell sound wavyish and now bell two or something like that it can be anything name that build too and then over here i'm gonna name this arps and we have arps and now when i go into this screen right here which i want to show you this which is the track mutes now you'll know what you're muting when you're playing with the track music i do apologize i almost forgot one thing and it's very important and that is how to save your track after you're finished so you can return to it or do whatever so what i'm going to do here is hit this folder that will bring up the projects here and the next thing i'm going to do is hit purge because if you pull up any unused samples if you don't want to save everything and you want to make your file size kind of normal well guess what purge will get rid of all the unused stuff so hit unused samples and it will clear all the samples here now hit save as and the next thing you got to do is navigate to either your internal i use my sd card because i have a sd card inside of here and i will navigate to a folder you can also make a new folder and just title it like a chi npc whatever or akai npc projects or something like that i'm not gonna do that here but that's something i would suggest uh i have a folder that says akai npc song projects i'm gonna navigate to that i'm gonna give it a name and i'll call it traptindo tutorial no tutorial good thing about this is i'm gonna name it one well i already named the beat already but this is how i remembered here uh hit do it then hit save and it's going to save everything into its own individual folder it's important that you make a folder by the way uh just for that sake and now you have your beat saved trap tendo tutorial one is there and you're good to go so tell me how you feel about this video i definitely want to hear from you guys in the comments section how do you feel about the mpc live too i've done a review on this i think the one thing that i didn't comment on my review as far as its functionality is yeah you get about six to eight hours of portability with this and then the built-in speaker of course which i did talk about that and you can expand it by adding either a mechanical hard drive or a solid state hard drive and that's probably the biggest charm about this machine is portability and so forth and just let me know of other topics that you want me to cover and i will get to them in another video thank you for your time [Music] crabtrendo hey

Channel: Ave Mcree

Views: 93,866

Keywords: avemcree, ave mcree, akai, akai mpc, akai mpc live, akai live 2, akai mpc live ii, akai mpc live 2, how to make your first beat, how to make beats, akai mpc live ii how to make your first beat, akai mpc how to make beats, akai mpc live how to make beats, mpc live, mpc, mpc live ii, mpc live 2

Id: dH8Wyh0E3oo

Length: 31min 20sec (1880 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 14 2020