AKAI MPC Live ii Sampling Tips! Beginner & Advanced

i have some new tricks up my sleeve [Music] the sequins what is going on everybody dj ab here and today let's talk about sampling because i've done this before but this is more or less a beginner to advanced technique video so make sure that you check out this whole video i will have all the time stamps just in case you want to get to a certain topic and i will tackle how to sample with vinyl how to sample with a sample pack or a loop pack or so forth so that you guys will get a full experience here i will do it on my mpc live to retro edition but it doesn't matter which mpc in this current generation that you have because the os is the same speaking of the os make sure that you update the firmware to the latest os i will have a video linked in the description box that will help you with that and playlist too as well if you have anything else that you might have in question and yeah use the comment section to ask questions guys i'm not afraid of them i do partake in making conversation in the comments so with that being said let's begin let's learn some stuff all right so let's begin with this lesson and we're going to go into an empty project and the first thing we're going to do before we do anything with the chopping is we're going to go into our settings so we're going to hit this menu button then hit this cog wheel and then we're going to go over here to the sequencer and make sure that you have instant track mutes checked make sure you have that checked because it's very important when you want to lay out your tracks or whatnot and you want to use track mutes to to hide a sample or whatever the drumline or anything like that it will instantly stop that so i wanted to show you that tip at the beginning of the video now we're going to move over here to general settings and we're going to make sure that we have audio warp algorithm on pro 10. there is another setting it's called basic and it uses less cpu it says least cpu right here i recommend that you use pro x pro 10 is not going to do much of anything but make your samples sound pretty decent uh when you time stretch which will be something i will cover in this video so let's go back into the main screen right here uh we're gonna mess with the bpm here i'm just gonna hit overdub play start get account now i'm going to lower it until i'm comfortable i'm going to go into my pocket here which is usually uh 69 bpm just going to go into something really simple sweet so the next thing we're going to do and this is the biggest thing we're going to talk about chopping up samples that are already made so something that is already a 1 bar sample 2 bar sample 8 bar sample etc etc you know this ra cup for you because that's the main thing people are going to ask me to do so i'm going to hit shift and menu which will bring me into the browser here i'm going to go into my places i'm going to go over here into my sd card which has all my samples i have a video already made guys so if you don't know how to set up your sd card for success i have that video done so don't worry about that i'm gonna go over here and just grab the sample by mxx audio here and i will have them linked in the description box because i like their samples the most because they understand how phrases are supposed to be i like sample packs that sound like samples not loops so we're in here i'm gonna go and search for a sample because that's the most important thing to do turning up we're using low five melodics three which is a very old one so you can hear they have really good samples but this is the very beginning that's the one so let's go ahead and hit the data wheel and load that sample up we can stop it and we're good to go so we're going to go into this main menu and as you can see i haven't done anything with any of my programs i'm in my drum program which is the most important thing i need to tell you guys so how do you get into your sample edit window well you can double tap on the mpc live or the npc live 2 and you will be into sample edit but however you might have a sample edit button on the mpc one which you do and the npc x but if you don't know how to get into your sample edit here i'm going to show you on the main screen just hold the menu hit pad number 13 and we're back here and you see the sample sometimes you might have to select the sample so you will have to go into your sample pool and pull up that sample which is already done which i believe that says sweet now how do you play the sample because we're in the trim window [Music] this pad how do i stop this this pad that's what the red is represented here okay you also can play different parts of that sample it's the start end now there's other things that you could do while you're on the screen too as well you can stretch it out uh using pull and pitch gesture and you can also go over here into your q links which on q link 1 will you'll be able to adjust the start point and on cue link to the endpoint and you can see right here i have a little bit of a thing that is kind of spoiling the screen but that's a part of version 2.8 but i'm on 2.9 right now so don't worry about that uh yes i kind of don't like that when i'm trying to chop samples but it doesn't matter right now but what does matter though is this feature and this is where i want to show you now if you don't like the sample uh the way it is and you want to pitch it down or up well you have to go over here to tune and you would use your data wheel so i tapped on tune so tap on tune and use this pad right here pad number one to audition you can see it gets slower now if i pitch it down it's going to get slower it's going to get higher but don't worry about that i'll show you a way to work around that in the future [Music] i kind of like that vibe though [Music] so i'm going to go over here to just like the original tune and now i want to chop the sample up so i want to show you a different way simply so you have a manual threshold in regions and bpm so you have manual first so if i was to hit a pad boom three four two two three four and i can just keep on chopping and lay out my samples manually now i do like that and it's cool but perhaps it's not my style uh you know you can go into threshold chopping which is going to chop up every part of the transient that will be noticeable will be very short this is threshold chopping is ideal for drum loops if you want to chop up a drum loop and get specific like drum samples very nice and tight yeah threshold is there and then you have regions where you chop up the regions they gave me six regions 16 regions which is cool because you can you can adjust them over here i can go 15 regions 14 12 10 9 8 and so forth but i use bpm because bpm is going to get it as much as close to where i will be able to do one thing a little later and i'll show you but uh you'll use time divisions like 116 which will give you 16 pads 1 4 will give you four pads and 1 8 will give you eight pads and you can see why i use ms audio samples because again versus that phrasing so it's like something worth me using a different chop for a certain part of a beat anyway so we have that i'm going to go over here into 116 time division and now i will talk about more of my technique when using these the main thing i want to show you is this right here now this is really easy make sure that you are on the first q link and you can adjust the start and end points it will take you back to manual mode in certain cases you'll hear like a pop now how do i get rid of that pop by holding shift and choosing zero snap which will bring it to the zero point of that sample now it's not 100 foolproof but guess what you know it will be a little easier to work with [Music] versus just going with it and also uh when you're in starting endpoints you can see that you have one one thousands uh one one hundreds right here one ten times one one time so if you go to the very bottom or the fourth q leak knob you'll go on smaller increments versus bigger increments [Music] all right so what i'm doing right now is just playing with my chops and i highly recommend that you do that uh when you are playing with your chops here uh it's really easy to do with samples versus oh well sample packs versus like uh vinyl and i'll show you how to maneuver that anyway so now we're happy with that we're going to press shift and convert boom and what i want you to do right here is to choose non-destructive slice and the reason why i say that is you'll be able to go back and adjust your samples or your chops later by going into program edit so let's hit do it over there and now i have nothing here i don't have anything and i know that will confuse a lot of people that's why you select it [Music] all right so now i can just lay out that sample all right so let's lay out a drum line and you know let's hope for the best [Music] all right i picked a sample all right here we go [Music] hey all right so now that we have that you see basically how easy it could be to chop something up and you know lay out a beat i mean that's what i do on this channel anyways but at this point here there might be things that you want to do to the sample so what if let's say what if i or you just want to time stretch it the bpm isn't correct or whatnot let's go and try to time stretch it without doing something first well since i used bpm mode and i made sure that i had everything properly uh chopped up and that's the reason why i showed you bpm mode over all the other ones like manual chop and all that i can time stretch stuff so let's see how good we can go how far so now that that uh we noticed something weird going on with the chops or whatnot uh what i'm going to do is just go back to the original bpm first and and we're going to do something right here we're going to use this track since the track has what you call shift and grid let's go in here you see the piano roll you see the chops and whatnot go back in the main we need to hit this pencil sign and what we're going to do is bounce the sample now bounce the sample will do something pretty unique to this and will allow you to do something cool now what i need to do is access another drum program i just have program 2 and it's empty i'm going to go into assigned samples here and i see bounce track number two i'm gonna go over here select the pad then i'm gonna hit the data wheel all right so we can hear that the sample is in there now and when i go into my main i can go into warp samples so now i'm going to warp that sample hit the warp sample make sure that i'm on that pad here so i make sure i have it i did have some empty spaces in there but either way uh we have that sample right there and this is what i'm gonna do i'm gonna go into here i'm gonna make a track for it real quick let's go record [Music] record it in there [Music] all right it's in there now uh now that i have warped sample here uh let's go ahead and hear it now [Music] now let's lower the bpm [Music] now you can see that it's warped now in hindsight of that if i just raise the bpm just to show you guys you know it'll pretty much respond no matter what just that's just in case bpm mode fails you and you do a little bit too much and it goes back into manual and it's not evenly chopped up or whatever the other thing i want to show you is this right here now you might work with a sample and it might have too much bass in it and that's when you want to use the filters inside of the mpc live as you can see i hit this eyeball sign over here i'm going to go into my insert here i'm going to go over here into filters and let's go over there to filters right now we're going to go and grab a high pass filter because maybe it might have a little bit too much bass in it now if i play it you might not hear much of the sample and that's because we need to hit this pencil sign and once we hit the stencil sign we're going to mess with the frequency sweep [Music] now let's go ahead and you can hear the natural base in that sample but you want to kind of chop that out and make room for other things in the lower frequency content so make sure that you get to using a high pass filter this is how our legendary producers of the past and the present and the future will will and should do a sample based beat okay now let's take things up a notch here and we're going to sample some vinyl now of course you will have to plug up a turntable to your mpc live x01 so you'll be able to use that okay and the next thing i want to do is this right here so i'm already in new i just went and i'm not going to save that track because you know i was just lively gagging the bs'ing so that i can show you how to use the mpc for sampling all right so we have the zelda vinyl here i'm going to go ahead and put that on here because it's the easiest thing to use without getting a copyright strike and i'm gonna find a sample all right let's get into it so i have the turntable plugged up now and it is plugged up right over here into my audio ends right here which is my line-ins for the turntable so you can hear it now we need to go into the sampler so hit shift sampler on the npc live or you can go into your menu here i'm going to go back into main hold the menu and then hit pad number nine and that will pull you up into this so if i was to play the sample you can see the sample is being played right here as i'm messing with it now let's talk about the different areas here now you see that you have input one and two uh what you probably won't understand and you might not be able to hear it but uh you can choose the monitor in which we'll have a double effect on here now and yeah you can hear it now uh a double uh probably twice as loud but yeah so input one and two is selected here i have input three and four but and you can also resample uh with inside of your mpc so but yeah so we have that you could also insert effects so that's one of the things that i want to show you you can choose stereo you can choose mono that's the other thing here uh you can arm it and it will sample right here press stop and then you'll see new sample being created and you'll see where you can save it play it and there's nothing there right now so that's when i play something discard or keep it or edit it so what i'm going to do here is discard for right now because i want to show you another feature that i that is very important now you can go and set up your threshold so that way if you uh play and there's it won't start immediately like it won't start at all so whatever i have to do is and then now you can see it is recording the sample and and so forth so i'm going to go ahead and discard that most important thing right now i want you to do is find the sample where you want to sample that or what not now that i have the sample to where it's at i'm going to go ahead and set my threshold up so when i start it it will get to that point and now you could also set the maximum lift i have it at 40 seconds right now but you can adjust it a little bit further than that if you want to a sample longer than 20 seconds 40 seconds or whatever i believe the maximum amount is 20 minutes i believe you also have slicing where you can slice the samples uh pad tap where you can tap the samples into each individual pack that you want and so forth but i'm gonna go with the basics of stuff so let's begin with that oh damn who's getting nice love zelda but anyway so the main thing that you want to do is just make sure that you have a competent name for your sample so uh i'm gonna name this zelda boom boom zelda and you know that's the beginning part here uh one of my favorite parts wrote in c major so whatever i'll just name it uh groove one since it's on groove one side a side a it's my only zelda record so i just put that um i'll be good to go side a do it now it's saved it will save in either program one here so that's what that means you could choose whatever program you want but i'm going to go ahead and just choose keep and boom and now it's inside of that program and i can go and tap in simple edit and here's the sample right here now that we're already in sample edit here there's a couple of other things that i want to show you as far as tips [Music] we're going to tap in the tempo yeah i recorded it pretty hot so yeah excuse that but there's other things to it i want to show you too so the main thing is trimming the sample [Music] so we're going to start by trimming the sample here it's lord so i have to i have it where i want it at 1 2 3 4 2 2 3 4 3 2 three four four bars two three four i can stop it right there i can stop that sample right there and i'll be good to go three four boom so i already have it the way i want it it's good to go to be honest so what i want to do here is go into process and i'm gonna choose this card so there's different functions with this so you have this card you have delete uh and you have silence which will silence everything that is in between the start and end point uh and it will tell you all that stuff right here says process do it will silence the section between the starting endpoint uh you have extract where you can extract everything from the starting endpoint there and you also have normalize where you can normalize things to where it won't be so if you if i did record it in uh lower in volume which i should have apologized um i would have that option uh reverse i can reverse stuff and fade in fade out so for pin shift time stretch and so forth um we're gonna go ahead and go all the way back to this card so with the start i could delete everything from the start point that's before the start point so let's go ahead and do that boom [Music] and now i can just move on uh you'll see the point of tap tempo in a second here uh what i'm going to go ahead and do is just do bpm chopping here uh 1 16. [Music] let's lower that in here all right see where i'm going with this always doing bpm chops i can just adjust things zero point and stuff like that snap i'm not gonna do that so i'm just gonna go ahead and just press shift process oops not process shift and convert and then i'm gonna convert uh non-destructively boom and i and i can adjust those chops a little later so you know that's the thing about that i really like let's do something a little different here we're gonna go back into the main boom and we're gonna see if the zelda has been created the ssl has been created here i can go back into program one and now we're going to pick out another vinyl let's pick out something and i've done a lesson on this before but i'm going to keep things grouped together here that's what we're going to do for uh organization so let's grab some drum loops or some drum brakes so i have some drum brakes that i'm gonna chop up here and we're gonna utilize threshold but i'm gonna show you something short and then i'll link you to the longer version of that which is 17 minutes long so let's listen to some drum breaks now what i'm going to do here is just go up to the sampler and let me go ahead and show you the vinyl too just in case you know i know there's vinyl heads out there like me drum library volume 13. i recommend buying this whole entire library but i picked out this one for a specific reason because they had drum drum breaks that i liked so let's go ahead and get back into that sampler though baby and we're gonna make it happen and i just let it roll but it's not much going on here so now what's gonna be different about this one is i'm to go into a2 i'm going to set that to a2 and then i'm going to name the sample here drums let's go ahead and keep boom keep it and we're going to main sampler here and we have our drums now now this is this i'm not really tripping about chop uh about trimming it up or anything like that because it's just a drum brake loop uh but what i'm gonna do here is just go into threshold and we're gonna and i already have my drum kit and now i have a drum kit here uh by using threshold and that's the purpose of using threshold chopping all right and yeah so let's go ahead and convert that over boom convert that over do it boom and now we have something going here and now i can go into the main here and what i want to show you now is program editor so remember i i brought up that you can adjust chops and do different kinds of things with the program editor so we're going to select the drums first and we're going to go into menu here and hit program edit you might have a specific button related to that but i'm on the live too and that's the way you would do it on the live too so [Music] so we need to go over here to the kick and we're going to do a few things here and this is where we're at so we're in the program editor we need to go to filter and envelope tab and now we're going to lower the cutoff of this part right here so make sure that you're on that part so i'm going to use the q links to go to q link number four and let's mess with the cutoff and i can mess with the resonance and i can also go into that sample and lower the semitone of it and it won't hurt anything so now i can just go back over here to filter and that's where you'll see certain things like envelope here you'll see amp envelope let's go into ahds so i can adjust it so that we're going to mess with the attack we're going to use the hole though let's lower the sustain we got to decay i can mess with so and i can just repeat the process here maybe i want to uh get that snare a little bit and i can go over here adjust some things here let's adjust that slow the sustain again [Music] now if i was to mess with this you'll see that things are being cut off here i need to go into the master and let's adjust the polyphony so that i can be able to drum it out like how i would normally so i'll go in the polar phony here i'm going to go and just uh select one i guess 16 would do i could select 16. and then just make adjustments further to snare in the hi-hat and you can add effects let's add like a little bit of a verb that gives us some and you can see that the reverb i add is only on the hi-hat so that is pretty cool right so i'm gonna release that a little bit [Music] yeah all right next thing let's go ahead and just uh mess with this real quick uh the bpm is at 80 bpm remember i tap temp hold it in and then we're gonna see what we could do with it all right let's go [Music] so all right i guess so [Music] remember put stuff together here all right [Music] look for i'm gonna look for a filter [Music] and whatever you get the point now that you've seen what you can do uh with sampling i want you guys to experiment with it and make it work for you so yeah here you go sampling in a nutshell so tell me how you feel about this video i hope it's useful to you guys i really want to focus on sampling and making sure that everybody understands that even i have developed some new techniques myself and i want to spread that out to the community because i know a lot of you guys uh y'all might have questions of how to sample and you know how would you approach a certain sample and if what if you sample with vinyl what if you do the loops and stuff like that or if you use sample packs well you know this video will cross the t's and dot the eyes and hopefully it will open you up and you won't be surprised bars anyways yeah just let me know how you feel [Music] fish

Channel: Ave Mcree

Views: 78,347

Keywords: avemcree, Ave Mcree, Akai, Akai Mpc, Akai mpc live, Akai mpc live ii, Akai mpc live 2, mpc live, mpc, mpc sampling, Akai mpc sampling tips, sampling tips, beginner sampling, beginner mpc tips, beginner mpc live tips, beginner mpc live ii sampling tips, beginner mpc sampling tips, advanced sampling tips, advanced mpc tips, advanced mpc samplings tips, tips, Akai mpc live ii sampling tips beginner advanced

Id: 1BaWd_dRrlM

Length: 32min 4sec (1924 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 13 2021