AKAI MPC LIVE/X: SEQUENCES TO SONGS WORKFLOW PART 1

what's up YouTube this is cheap digger in this video I'm going to show you a few workflow examples of how to build a song from several sequences in the Akai MPC live and Akai MPC X in standalone mode [Music] so the first thing that I would make sure I've got organized and locked down is my first sequence and all the tracks and programs within that sequence they need to be renamed and correspond to each other so you'll notice on my first track I've got a sub bass the drum program of sub bass second track is named drums the program's drums and so on and so forth speech drains and Christmas that's all the programs that I'm using for this project okay so there's several reasons why this is really important one of them is this if we go to the sequence edit tool and then press events let's say we wanted to copy events from our first track in our first sequence to a different sequence but this track wasn't named correctly or it wasn't named at all and it just said track 1 or track 5 or whatever track it was we wanted a copy we wouldn't then know what was on that there might be a different program on that track so that's one reason why it's good to name we know exactly what sequence we're working in and what track and what program we're also working with I haven't named the sequence yet but I will do but that is also another good thing to start doing is renaming your actual sequences as well you'll notice though that I haven't actually named the sequence or rename the sequence the reason for that is because we're going to be duplicating the first sequence and I don't want to name it something that doesn't make sense with the other sequences so for example this first sequence I hope to end up as the intro so if I name that intro now okay yeah I could go and rename my other sequences but I'm just going to keep that as the default at the moment and then once I've decided what sections of the song these sequences are then I will name them to correspond with that so I hope that will make sense the second thing and this is probably the most important thing is if you're going to be using the song editor you can export your songs to audio or an audio mix down or you can convert them to a larger self-contained sequence in itself if you haven't got your tracks correctly organized let's say for example sub-base is on track 1 in sequence 1 but then later up in sequence 3 for example your sub bass has just been entered onto a different track you'll run into some quite bad problems when exporting your song either to a audio file or a sequence itself it's because the Akai MPC live will be looking to see this consistency between the tracks and the programs and it just won't be able to playback those same notes because those notes will be on different pads and it'll play back all the wrong notes if you've got the same note as triggering off between different programs and tracks so I hope that makes sense if it doesn't just please take my word for it it's really good practice to just get into the habit of creating one sequence ok and then renaming everything so when you go to Jupiter that sequence everything's consistent now this is the way I like to work I like to create a sequence that's elaborate and brought up to a certain level so it's got drums bass and the mid-range sounds any sound effects etc and then once I'm happy with it I basically duplicate that sequence to other sequences and then I return to the first sequence and then start stripping the elements out based on how I want to build that track up so let's first of all go to our second track now this doesn't really matter what order we put these in it just happens that I put my sub bass program in first and then I added a drum program in second so we're going to do that first because I want to get a basic drum beat in over 2 bars as a guide okay that's all simple enough now I'm going to put some note repeat hi hats in there so I'm going to overdub and I've got some 30 second nights in there and next I'm gonna add the sub-base to that okay so that's all good so at this point I'd want to start thinking about how to start making this a bit more diverse and have some variation so two bars isn't really going to give me that variation so now I would make the decision to double the length maybe once twice let's have three times so we've got 16 bars so now we've got 16 bars I like the kick and the snare the sub-base is totally fine so I'm going to go up to my drum track and let's just do some modification to those high hats so I'm gonna put some thirty-second notes into bar 4 for the high hats so the time division is looking at 32nd notes and once you go into 32nd notes if you notice in 60 notes and it gives you the way it gives you the whole bar but once you change the 32nd notes then you get the option to stay in the first half of that bar or the second half of that bar if you press this field up here ok so it's just those two options obviously if you got to 64 you get additional pages to deal with the 64th layers so we can see that we've got 32nd notes at the end of bar 4 there so maybe let's just fill all those up and just do a sweep like that let's see how that sounds how that was quite a nice little effect so I'm happy with that now I'd like to copy that over the next few bars to fill up the sixteen bars so I'm going to go you to my sequence edit tool again then I go to events and I'm just going to copy from bar one to bar five so that all capture those four bars and it will copy it from the start of bar one and I'll make four copies to cover our sixteen bars so I'm just going to press replace go back to our main page and that should play back quite nicely with those high hats happening every four bars so now let's add in some more elements let's add in the drawings so these drones are the same drawings that came from my other soundscape and Joan's video where I took a short Bell sound and stretched them out over a long period of time to get that really nice droning effect so for the drawings I'm going to put in these four pads [Music] but I'm gonna spread that out over these 16 bars [Music] [Music] that's all good let's get the Christmas sounds in there so I've got these nice samples from this Christmas song by Nat King Cole so I'm going to put those in to compliment in the sequence now [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] okay so they worked really nice they're in the same key especially that last one I really like the way it kind of morphs into the last chord of those drawings in the drone program I think it's just the speech we need to add I'd like to add this sample come closer into the light so I think I'm going to add that towards the end of the 16 bars so every time the sequence changes we get that nice speech sample to lead it in to the change-up so that I'm going to do later on in the track so I think I need to time stretch that speech sample so it fits a bit better with the tempo of our track so I'm going to go to menu sample edit here's our sample the light go press process and this is just a case of trial and error now so I'm going to reduce the tempo I don't know if you guys can see that on there it's a bit washed out on the camera but at the moment it's saying the tempo is 2 9 8 which is obviously you know not correct necessarily but I'm gonna bring that down to 2 6 8 so I'm going to reduce it by 20 beats per minute press do it I'm closer into the night I'm gonna try on the first step of bar 16 [Music] okay so that needs mixing a bit better but I'm going to leave that for now so this is pretty much all the elements that we need to then make the decision where we're going to go next so I want to now duplicate this sequence two additional sequences and then I'm going to return to this sequence treat this first sequence as my intro and start stripping away the elements that I don't want in the intro so I press my sequence edit tool and copy sequence I'm going to copy it to sequence two then I'm going to copy sequence T to sequence three copy sequence three sequence for sequence four sequence five and that should do us five sequences okay so I'm going to return to my first sequence and now I'm going to rename this to intro so we know that we're working with our intro I'm going to go back to my first track with a sub base and I'm just going to press my arrays button and I'm going to raise the base because I don't want the base in the intro and I also don't want the drums in the intro and their arrays those I want to keep the speech but I don't want the Christmas sounds in there I want to bring them in a little bit later on just to add those to build the track up so I'm going to erase those from my intro sequence so it's pretty sparse now because we've just got the drawings in there and the speech sample so on my fourth pad of my drum program I've got this hi-hat with a delay on it okay so I'm going to put some of those notes in I'm probably going to use the note repeat just to give us a nice little percussive timing reference if you wanted to mix this track in a live mixing environment it would help DJ's immensely rather than just having a drawing with no tempo reference so I'm going to put those in [Music] [Music] so when a little bit off with the 32nd notes there so I'm not too concerned about the 32nd notes because we've got the delay effect on those high hats so I'm going to time correct them to 16th notes so I copied what is now our intro to all the other sequences so we know that our second sequence has got all our elements in it so I'm going to go out to my second sequence and now I want the drums to be introduced in our second sequence but I don't want the sub-base so I'll arrays the sub-base keep the drums speech is fine I want to now erase the Christmas sounds again because I still don't want most to come in as yet so I'm there erase those as well okay so now our second sequence is essentially the same as the intro - the hi-hats with a delay because we don't really need those now we could put those in but now because we've got the drums coming in we don't really need those high hats at the moment I might put them in if it actually complements the track and now we can just literally move on to sequence three and with sequence three again I don't want the base to come in yet it's too early so I'm going to delete that and now I would like the jazz or Christmas sounds to come in all the string sounds in that program so I'm just going to leave that because we know they're in there already because we duplicated our first sequence which is now the intro so I'm going to play that back [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] cool so that all sounds great now I'm going to treat my fourth sequence as the breakdown because I know I've got another sequence after that the fifth sequence and I think that's where I'm gonna kick off the sub-base so the fourth sequence we need to keep the Christmas string samples keep the drains keep the speech I might keep the drums in there and there may be filter those drums down as we get towards the end of the bar before the bass kicks in on our fifth sequence so we don't want the sub bass in there so I need to delete the sub bass do it so we've got our full sequence this is our breakdown now I'm going to go to my second track with the drums so let's go to our channel mixer and let's take a look at the drum program we've got this low pass filter already loaded into there and it's just set as its default value at the moment so I need to press on the whole Q link make sure I'm in project mode because that's the mode best for this project so I'm gonna press Q link edit and now I'm going to choose my first Q link knob this one here to control the insert for the program so in program here we need to change the program to drums so double tap on that and select the drum program and then now it's our second insert actually when they change that to frequency so let's play the sequence back and I'll just adjust this bottom Q link knob here this one and that should adjust they'll cut off of the drums [Music] so this is our breakdown and I've just got to now how to automate the low-pass filter cutoff so this is a nice lead-in to the fifth sequence where we're going to introduce the sub-base so I'm going to put into write automation mode I think what I'm going to do is just gradually bring the low-pass filter down for the first eight bars and then maybe start to reintroduce it for the last eight bars of this sixteen bar sequence [Music] [Music] so I'm going to come out of write automation made and that should lead us nicely into our fifth sequence so let's go up to our fifth sequence and that's where we want our sub base to come in I want the drones to stop dead now the drones program is monophonic so all I need to do to stop those dead because otherwise they all trowel over from the last bar of sequence four into sequence five it's really easily done you literally just add a ghost note in that has no sample on it so I need to go back to sequence four go to a grid editor make sure I've selected pad 13 which doesn't have a sample on it if we just cut it off on the start bar 13 because we get that string sound so maybe it would be nice for that is just cut dead there so there's our ghost note and actually cut off that last drawing pad there that I just play back so I'm gonna play this sequence all the way through and we'll just listen to that cut off [Music] so not too bad I think I probably need to just raise the kicks they didn't sound too great and the snare as well I think so I'm gonna choose note again I'm gonna go up to bar 16 where we know that we've still got some elements in there so I'm going to get rid of the kick and the snare and I'm going to keep in those high hats to lead us into our fifth sequence so I'm gonna press do it and let's not play the whole thing back again let's just play it from bar 9 just to check whether sounds ok [Music] and now on sequence five we know that this was a duplicate of the very original sequence so now all we have to do is get rid of the drawings out of there so I'm going to raise the drones from that I'm also going to erase the Christmas samples now we can check all of this in context by going to the song mode and we just press insert I'm going to press it five times so we've got enough slots for all of our sequences I'm going to choose the first sequence turn the date we'll we've got intro then we've got sequence to sequence three sequence four sequence five because they're all in order I'm I've actually constructed those sequences to run in order I don't really need to rename those in other tracks that I've made sometimes I've got these named exactly like chorus bridge second verse but for this because the sequences have being built up in order this is completely fine and I know exactly where I'm at so now we're going to play back the entire thing and then thereafter we're going to export that to a larger sequence just sit back and enjoy this guys I'm going to play the thing in its entirety and just see how it's all working together at this stage [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so now it's just a case of deciding what to do next we could go to our song edit and export this whole thing as a individual sequence on its own by converting to sequence and then we could just deal with that one sequence on its own and not worry about the song because obviously when the songs playing back you can't really do any other editing you're kind of locked into song mode so it is more flexible to convert to a longer sequence so I'm going to do that do it now if we switch to sequence six it says from song so I'm going to rename that to dark light one as the name so just delete the from bit at the start there press do it so now we know this is our song that we've exported from the song editor in its entirety and as you can see is 80 bars now any comments or questions please put them down below please like subscribe and share if you haven't already done so please do check out my patreon Chuck as a dollar give me a bit of support so I can continue doing these videos for you guys on YouTube and I will see you in the next one this is tube digger and I'm out [Music]

Channel: Tubedigga

Views: 60,848

Keywords: mpc live tutorial, mpc one, mpc one lesson, mpc one tricks, mpc one tutorial, mpc tricks, mpc tutorial, mpc x, akai force, akai force tutorial, akai mpc, akai mpc live, akai mpc one, akai mpcx, mpc, mpc 1, mpc lesson, mpc live, mpc live lesson, mpc live tricks, mpcx tutorial

Id: lCVdYwF561s

Length: 25min 30sec (1530 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2017