Akai MPC ONE: How to Make a 12 Bar Blues Jam Loop: A Complete Beginners Guide to Using the MPC One

hi guys welcome to my video on the akai mpc one today i'm going to show you how to make a 12 bar slow blues jam track which includes a drum track bass guitar track and organ track we're going to do it all with the akai mpc one this video is for absolute beginners as i was probably about a month ago and the impetus for this video was the fact i could not find a beginner's video that would take you by the hand and teach you how to make some noise with this box so that is exactly why i'm making this video so with that said here we go in this first part i'm going to show you how to navigate the hard drive and the sd card and you may ask why in the world would you need to do that it's actually not the easiest in the world and it's not intuitive so with that said let's turn let's power up the akai there's a power button here on the left back of this i'm not going to go over the plug the inputs on the back because they're so ridiculously easy i just have i have it plugged in the power cord plugged in on the right or on the right here there's a left and main out and i have that going to a little jbl charge 4 speaker just mono out there's a button there's a little knob here that you can control the volume with and so that's really straightforward as well on the front of it there's only two things there's a sd card slot and there's a headphone a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack so yeah that's about all there is to it now let's get something going so as you see we just started up it comes to this kind of the select project screen and you have a choice you can do an empty project here you could also do an empty project here they're both the same you can see that there's some file there's some project files that i have in here and you can hit this little button and by the way this is a touch pad so you can that's how you there's no mouse or anything that you need to hook up to this and i give it about a b minus c plus it's not perfect i could tell when i've put it in the keyboard track to in the organ tracked or in the bass track it's not perfect uh but it works i mean it's okay so for us let's just go to a new project and we'll hit this empty right here and that's going to take us to what i call home base so you have to remember how to get to home base because i might be in some weird place like this and you go where am i go to this main button right here and that'll take you to home base so in order to show you around the sd card and the hard drive let's make a file so specifically let's make a project our first project file and so the project files where you're going to be doing all the work project file will contain sequences usually just one sequence but for some reason if you want more sequences that's you could do that as well for my simple project i just need a main sequence here sequence contains tracks so this is where we'll make a a drum track a bass guitar track and a keyboard track right down here so the tracks attached to the sequence the tracks don't do anything by themselves you have to assign programs to the tracks and that's exactly what we're going to do but for starters let's save our first project so click untitled and that'll take you to this weird kind of in between menu and there's there's some options here you don't see the sd card or the hard drive which is a little weird but if you click save or save as either one that'll take you to finally the sd the sd card you can see there and there's the internal hard drive now all of the videos i've i've watched online say don't use the internal hard drive there's not that much space on it always get an sd card it's a u3 it's a fast sd card i'll maybe i'll float a picture of it up above this and show you what mine looks like so this is where we're going to be saving and i want to make a new folder but let me just navigate the card so here are the the folders that are in the sd card and by turning this handy little wheel here we can scroll through the projects that i've made so far okay i mean you can click on them as well you don't have to scroll you could also use the plus and the minus keys to get around i don't know why you do that when this nice little wheel is right here but let's make a brand new folder which is going to hold our project file so there's a button right here it says new folder click that and let's write a we'll just use today's date which is 1 21 21 and click do it and that locks it in and so the next thing is well what happened we're we're in the sd card where's all the files what has happened well what's happened is we have created the folder 12121 and we're inside of that empty folder if you want to know where you are you have to look up here and it says sd card forward slash 121 21 and that's the folder we just made if you want to go up a level where we were before there's a folder with the up arrow just click that and now we can scroll back down through here but let's go to 121 21 and let's double click to open that because we need to put something in there now let's save our project file in the in the folder we just made so let's give it a title and this is our project so i'm going to just call it you can call whatever you want but i'm just going to call mine 1 21 21 oops i messed that up and that's what i mean this thing you can't you can't go super fast with this at least i can't because it misses okay click do it and that'll name there's the file name of our project file now i don't see it anywhere in here yet it's because we haven't saved it so click save and it takes you back to that weird kind of in between land again it'd be nice if it just stayed there so you can see it well how do we see and prove that we made it you just have to go back to save as that's the only way you can get back there and then we're back to our cards again there's internal sd you can scroll down to 121. i still don't see the project file that's because i have to open it double click it and great there it is and we already opened it but let's say we didn't want to open that one let's go up a file let's say we want to open yesterday's from here click on 120 21. oh look there's a project file there is no way to open this which is absolutely ridiculous akai needs to fix that because that's stupid it's a waste of time so i can't do anything from here so what can i do well i can go back to home base when in doubt go to main and at least we can see we loaded our brand new project file 121 21. so how do i how do i go open 120 yesterday's project how do i open that from here well you would think you'd be able to go to the folder but that just takes us back to the same little weird in between land and the only thing you can do is hit save as and i can see the internal and the sd card i can see we want to save yesterday's file 120 21 i can double click to open i can see it i can click on it but there's no way to open it so it's absolutely ridiculous so going to the folder will do nothing for opening new projects from the project window here you actually well how do you do it then you actually have to go to this browse button which is probably our second most important button if i hit browse now we come to a new button we're going to be using this browse area a lot there's a places well it's by default it's on content and another thing make sure it's actually on this little square for some reason it gets off here things are going to be all messed up you want to always be on that little square within a square button if we go to places and now we can see our card there's the internal drive there's the sd card and our goal here was to open up yesterday's project which was 120 21. now we can double click on that or there's even an open button that's a good sign and now there's a load button so finally i can click load and we're loading yesterday's project and i'll show you what today's project is going to actually sound like once this once this opens up let's go back now we're in that weird place again go back to main and you can see i loaded up 120 21. let me turn down the volume i don't know how loud this is going to be hit play and this is what we're actually going to be building today it's a very simple little jam track okay so great how do you save this let's say i did some work on this and i want to save it luckily that's really easy you have to there's the save button but you have to press see the save is in salmon and there's all these buttons have there they have double labels there's a white label and a salmon label to invoke the salmon color you have to hold down the shift key and then push save all right so that saved the project but let's go open our brand new project how do we do that remember you can't hit that button well what what let's let's back up a sec what is that darn folder for then that folder the only good that is is to create a new project file so if i do want to create a brand new project file that's where you go i hit that that takes us to that weird little in between land and there's the new button and that will take us back to the original startup screen then we have the option to hit empty or we can hit empty project i think i hit that empty last time let's just show you that if i hit that it also makes a brand new project for us right but we already made one for today how do i find that well i don't go to the folder i have to go to browse and then i have to go to places and then i go to the sd card scroll down find today is the 21st double-click that or it could have hit the open button and then it's already highlighted there's only one file there hit load and it's loaded it doesn't tell you it's loaded it's like what happened to look we just have to go back to home base to main and now we can see 121 21 is officially loaded all right so i hope that helps you your ability to navigate this a little bit this took me quite a while to figure out again there's no manual for this uh the kai gives you a manual but it's for the computer software you can hook this to your computer and then you can download a supposedly a more powerful kind of a daw type software but who wants to do that i'm on this is a i bought this to be a kind of a jam box where i could do a small gig with it or i can practice with it so there's nothing other there's a couple youtube videos for beginners but there's not a good one that's going to show you exactly what i'm going to do alright so in the next part of the video we're going to start laying down the drum track and we'll meet the sequence the track and the and the program all these bars all right in this section we're going to finally start to put in a drum track basically i'm going to select a drum kit i'm going to use the one that comes with this machine so you don't have to buy anything so again we've already created a project file the project file has a sequence track and program section in it so for me my simple music i mean for most people i think you're only going to use one sequence it's really kind of the same as the project here so the first thing i want to do is name that let's name the sequence and we're going to call it main how do you name it see the a button right here hit that and just type in main click do it there we go i mean it hasn't really done anything but at least we have our sequence i could squeeze sequence two if you want to do a mixer i don't know why you would even use sequence two because you can assign tracks to this main and there are i think there's over a hundred tracks that you could sign assign to the main so that's plenty for me let's actually name this first track the drum track so same way go to a drum do it okay great let's play the drums nothing happened how come well we haven't loaded a drum program yet so if you look down here in programs and you twirl the knob there's nothing in here except program one which is empty so the first step is to go bring in a drum program where do i go to do that browse button hit the browse button now we're on places that's not going to do us any good but if we go to content now we see some things we see a drum pad here so let's hit the drum pad and here's a heads up on this make sure it's again on this square when you're viewing these menus in this section make sure it's not over here because that will actually show me the the wav files that go into making things so we want to see the finished kits in the finished base kit and organ kit and drum kits so you have to hit that square it'll be there by default but in case you mess that up so here are some kits these come with the akai mpc one and if you go down to fat kit that's a pretty darn good good kit so let's load that up by hitting the load button okay great um i don't see anything again because it'd be nice if when you did an action it'd be nice if it took you back to the home page or main but it doesn't so hit main and there we're back okay let's play the drums nothing what's going on well we have to look under here for the for the program we just loaded it's not program one but there's the fat kit okay so let me show you another problem or just let me explain these tracks how they work so we can look for things drum tracks are under this same little square with these four squares within a square but there's also a plug-in option so you can look for plug-in programs i'll show you a base plug-in that comes with this which is quite lame but i'll show you anyway there's also a little keyboard here which is very there's some very powerful programs we could load those are the mpc expansion packs we'll load there so but for and i mean we can search through this stuff i don't see anything but if i go to the drum and we can load more kits too if we wanted but there's the kit so great one of the problems i'd i have with this there's no way to lock this program to the drum track so if you accidentally hit the plus key or the minus key you might kind of discommunicate your to your program from your track which is a bummer so you just have to be careful with the controls but nevertheless we have a acoustic kit the fat kit assigned to our drum track so now let me say a word about about this drum pad it's touch sensitive so here's the kick if i hit it a little bit it's light the harder i hit it the more it goes now it's not just me other people on youtube have said this is a very stiff pad you have to hit this thing pretty darn hard there's a way to adjust the sensitivity which there's other youtube videos on that i adjusted this to the most sensitive and then i use this button right here it's called full level if you click that you can hit it really light and it goes full power every time okay um so that's great if you don't for whatever reason you don't want every every strike of the pad generating a full power note there's a half power it's in salmon so i can actually hit shift push and hold shift and hit this button again and now i'm at half level and it's not as loud i like full so i'm going to go back to there um all right so with that said i think we're ready to to record our first drum sound and i'm going to put this together this is a slow blue so i'm going to put it together with i'm just going to put a kick a snare and a high hat an open hi-hat all right so let's put in our drum track but but before we do that i better explain a little bit about the main sequence so let's go through this because we need to get ready to record there's a beats per minute uh texas flood is 50 beats per minute so it's down quite a bit just turn the wheel go down to 50. right there's also a bar button if i click on that i can change the amount of bars i want to record i'm just going to record in one bar because it's such a simple drum beat i'm going to record it simply get it perfect and i'm going to copy it 12 times that's the way to do it and i can spice it up as i go along there's also a very powerful looper right here let me actually turn this up to four bars for right now you can see that the loopers was going to start at the first bar when it comes to the end of the fourth bar it's going to loop smoothly back together i can turn it off by hitting it like that this is going to come in handy when i want to put some accentuations at the end of the fourth bar i'm a guitar player i like to know when i'm at and i'm jamming i like to know where the end of the fourth bar is because the key is about to change there all right but that's the looper transpose we'll talk about when we talk about the bass you can change keys the drums don't care what key you're in the other important thing is this little metronome it's a little triangle here with a line through it so here's the metronome there is a three click count in that you can't change or i haven't figured out a way to change it so right now it's set to give you a three-click count-in only on record you can change that to record and play i come back to that when i practice a little uh to warm up but then enable so this is going to click count and every beat is going to there's going to be a click on every beat i think you can control how the clicks are actually placed but i would leave it at 144 as the classic you know like your foot tapping on the stage i could also enable it for play if i wanted but don't really need to do that i just need it going when we're recording down here's the sounds you can have different types let's actually hit play we can listen to these if i enable it during play we can hear we can hear these go so there's a side stick oops there's a different type of side stick it's a clap so you can whatever you you know if whatever floats your boat i like the side stick the outputs don't worry about that that's going out of the mains i guess you could route those to your headphones if you wanted i just leave them the mains and then this is the volume it's kind of weird you have to go drag diagonally to change the volume so that's a little bizarre all right let's hit close so now we got the metronome going let's get ready now to record something but we better talk about these buttons here first so stop play i mean self-explanatory so record versus overdub when you if you want to record a brand new track and you want everything erased starting from scratch use the record button if i hit record you'll see record and play flashes it's getting ready when i hit play i'll get a three click count in and i'm off recording so if i've recorded something and it's a keeper but i want to record the next part then always hit over dub if i hit over dub plane start it'll record again but it'll record over the top of the last thing that you saved we'll talk about the undo function as we go and the erase as we go we'll talk about timing correct i'm going to screw something up so so i can show you timing correct okay we're back we're ready to record our first kick drum but remember i said i'm going to just i'm not going to record four bars i'm just going to record one bar and then we can copy that to make it really simple i'm also going to check my metronome to see what's going on here i should be getting a recording or a count in during record uh and it's enabled during oh it's because it's enabled only during play that's why it was messing up in the last section so we want it enabled during chord and we want the count in during record now we're all set hit close all right so i'm going to start by putting in the open hi-hat let me just start play so i can practice just a little bit so i should hear although remember the metronome let's go back to the metronome i turned it off during play so let's go record and play now let's hit close now it should work while i practice and get ready right so there's the beat one two three and look at this so this will tell you what bar you're in and it'll tell you there's four beats per bar if i had let's put six bars in there see how that counts the bar and there's four beats three or third bar second beat third beat fourth beat fourth bar so hopefully you understand that kind of stuff because i'm not going to go into that any more than that so let's put let's put this back to one bar we're looping the looper's on um great i want to practice so let's hit play i want to get my my time so i don't mess it up too bad so one blues has a triplet feel to it so this is a triple lit triple triple triple that triple that one two three one two three okay i got it so now i'm ready to i might actually turn that up a little bit i'm ready to go so let's hit record this is the first take i could have hit overdub two it doesn't matter hit play and i should get a three click count in one two three triple it triple triple lit triple lit what in the world has happened this drove me crazy so i finally figured out tc is time correct let's go look at that screen by default it's set to 1 16th notes which is fine and i'm not going to explain you should know what quarter notes 8 notes 116 132nd you should know what that stuff is but this is a kind of a four to the floor like the metronome it's a steady beat it's not a galloping triplet beat to get the galloping triplet beat i initially hit off in that time that turned off timing correct what is timing correct what that means is when you're manually hitting in notes if you're off a little the computer will grab your note and throw it back on track and because this is not in triplets it's throwing it into a four on the floor type pattern and messing it up so you can get rid of it by hitting that but by mistake i actually hit the t button and i noticed that all the all the timings got a t after that so i went back to 1 16 and sure enough now it's going to be you can do blues and triplet feel to this there's a swing button here that it doesn't do it it doesn't give you a real triplet feel so leave that at 50. let's click do it now we're in the triplet mode and let's let's try to repeat and if i hit play how do we get rid of that that mess well there's two ways we could hit the undo but that might undo my triplets that i just set we can just hit record and it'll race right over that so that's what i'm gonna do so here we go one two three triple it triple it triple it triple lit i missed the last note on purpose let's see how it fixed it great i'm going to keep that take i'm going to show you something really cool let's go fix that so just hit play and let's go to this little hashtag right here see it this is the grid and it's really really powerful it shows me exactly where my open hi-hat hits are where the notes are as you can see there's the playhead the white line you can see i'm missing one right there so let's just add one and you can add it right in the play mode so let's talk about this grid there's four controls it's by default on this little magnifying glass so you can't mess anything up here but i can sure blow it up and i can drag it around and i can see the problem is to go right there how do i put a new note there all i do is go to the pencil and all i do is put my finger there and it makes it bigger i'm not sure why it does that but there the problem is fixed so let me show you what else i can do let's let me show you how to drag this so this little square button here i can grab it and drag it around right so if i want to drag it back in the right place i can put it back there right if i want to create maybe a something kick down here i can put notes in there let's get rid of those by hitting the eraser and just erasing them so there we go all right now let's put in the kick and snare so texas flood it's pretty simple actually it goes kick kick snare kick kick snare and that's about all there is to it so let's overdub don't hit record or you'll race everything over dub give me that three count in one two three kick kick snare kick kick snare all right that's all there is to that let me show you the erase function while we're here let's say i don't like that i like the snare but i don't like the kick i can just hold the erase down and hold down the kick whenever i want to erase something let's say i just want to erase that that second this one right here one bar is good so i'm missing one then i can put it in i just re-hit it [Music] so that's a nice handy tool plus i don't have to be in play either to do that if i or the i don't have to be in the record mode if i just hit play i can also hit erase and delete some of those i can delete all of them if i want so all we have left is the snare i can't put them in though because it's not recording but i could put them in without recording by going to the hashtag let me go to the dragging tool let's show you the race tool i don't think i did but there's kick a 0 1 that's that's the pad there so it should go kick kick so i think let's put the pencil tool in i think it goes kick [Music] kick would be here [Music] it goes there and there [Music] nope let's drag it a little closer now i might not be able to put it in like this no so it doesn't have that triple feel to it i can head undo undo the last move undo the last move so i'm gonna have to overdub and hit that in just curious where it will put it start at one might be four this time three four yep so you hear the four count in sometimes it freaks out and it counts four instead of three [Music] oh that was my fault was that my fault let's undo that let's see if i can put it in by the hashtag by the pencil where was it right there oh yeah it was just my fault [Music] how do i fix that get the the nudge tool that little square and now i can drag it and drag it wherever is that right nope one more this way that should be right all right awesome [Music] so we have that in now let's go back to home base let's duplicate this now so how do i duplicate it go to the little pencil here this is a powerful menu so we can erase the track we can clear the track and just make it completely non-existent i can delete individual bars or i can double the length of the bar so if i hit this arrow i go back so we have one bar hit the pencil again so one times two is two i just created made it two bars and i recorded all the stuff it just doubled the track so i can let's go back and double the two bars so two bars the times two button two times two is four bars see how that works and i'm going to stop right there because as i said at the beginning i want to make a sign while i'm jamming out i want to know when i'm at the end of the fourth bar because i know then that the key is in blues is usually going to change so i'm just going to put a and uh in there all right so let's let's just lay that down real quick overdub don't hit the recorder you'll erase everything and let's do the count it should be three maybe four it'll be three this time two three all right there we are so i'm on bar one i want to be on bar four i don't want to listen to this this little second bar down i can in record or play i can whip the playhead back and forth so this is a handy little thing here because i know i want to record i want to put my little my little accentuation i want it in the fourth bar the fourth beat i know exactly where it's going so there's no sense of just waiting for it to come around i can loop the fourth bar by hitting start of the loop area and let's turn that to four and now i can zip up to four i could have waited until it got there but now watch it's gonna loop around the fourth bar [Music] see that and it's gonna it's this fourth beat i wanna put in so let's put it in three [Music] and let's let's add a little snare let's add this one in here okay great stop it um and let's put this remember to put this back to zero it doesn't when you record it doesn't always go back to zero so you have to you have to watch this loop function whoops okay so now i'm looping the four bars when it comes to four you'll hear that little accentuation i put there [Music] awesome all right now that we got that in let's make a 12 bar blues out of this okay how do i do well we just go back to the times two button all right i have four bars times two is eight bars don't believe me i can i can hit the main button too maine will always take you to home base so yeah i got eight bars let's double that again eight times two oh that's too many bars isn't it that's 16 bars now what do we do let's delete those extra bars go to pencil delete bars make sure you're in the main sequence which is the only sequence we have what's the first bar you want to delete i want to delete bar 12 is that right no that's part this is a 12 bar blues i want to delete bar 13 what's the last bar you want to delete i want to delete everything past 13 so 13 14 15 and 16 will be deleted when i click do it all right let's go check and see if we have our 12 bar blues let's hit play we absolutely do there's our 12 bar blues let's see if it we're on a third bar let's zip all the way to the end twelfth bar let's see if it turns around okay great now let me show you another trick these are called cue knobs i think i showed you the second one how we can speed around the first one will make the drums whatever whatever track is selected this will go to is the volume for it so i can turn it way down i can turn it way up right there [Music] all right what else do i need to show you well how about if we want to send this to a digital mixer but we want to we want to kind of kind of modify the members of the kit like that hi-hat that open hi-hat is is way too loud so how do i do that so for drums there's a very handy little button called track mix in salmon so if i click shift track mix and hit play you can see the members of the kit there's there's the kick if i touch on the kick i can control the volume of that kick i can turn it off [Music] right uh the metronome is still going let's let's go how do you shut that off let's go shut that off we'll go back to home base metronome and let's we don't need it on when we're playing anymore so now it's only going to come on when we record click close so that's going how do i get back to the place where i can control the members of the drum kit remember shift track pad or pad mix sorry pad mix [Music] okay where's that annoying open hi-hat right there let's click on that let's turn that thing way down let's turn it off for a second great let's just put that where it's supposed to be [Music] i mean it's to taste right however you want that seems a little more reasonable to me now let me show you a gremlin or let me show you a real problem this took me an hour to figure out i accidentally hit the solo button once and i was on the kick and it was gone and i i ended up at main and my kick was going my snare is gone too it's like what happened and i looked at the other place you can control the sound of all the tracks like this triple bar here i can also control the sound of the tracks by hitting level i can turn them off but i'm like where is my kick and my snare another place i can control the main mix is to go to track mix above pad mix track mix so i can also here's the acoustic kit i can control the kit but there's no the mute is not on there's no indication that i muted anything so you have to go back to the scene of the crime the scene of the crime or the screw-up was pad mix i hit pad mix holy smokes everything all this stuff is muted i don't even know how that happened so i can start unmuting stuff i know i need to unmute my my kick wow what i don't even know what i did there how did i get those all and me oh you know what you see what happened when i was on acoustic i hit the solo button so there's the rest of the stuff i tried to hit mute see how i muted that so watch out for these buttons [Music] let's go back to home base let me show you another trick i kind of showed you but let's do it official let's hit play [Music] uh what happened to our hi-hat we got to go back to the scene of the crime i guess i didn't hit it so yeah it's still muted so go back to that and hit unmute it and let's pull that still sounds loud to me [Music] all right let's go back to the main and again i showed you this a second but let me just make it official what if no you know what else when i put the base in i'll show you how you can adjust all the tracks together that's just hitting track mix or this third bar here because there's going to be a base and a keyboard or there's going to be a bass and a keyboard track just like there's a drum track and you can control the sound of all these tracks right here you can transpose the track right here you can pan the track to the left and right i only i'm only mono to the left but you can do pan here so this track mix is or this little triple horizontal bars is a handy function as well all right let's go back to home base i think we're good right we got our drum track down all right let's turn this off and that pretty much does it and i mean you could you can keep over dubbing and adding to make give it more nuance but i think you got the idea so let's go on and lay down a bass track now so to lay down a bass track we need to first make a bass track because we have a drum track so let's go to empty track and let's name it bass so click how do you name it a button okay we'll name it base click do it okay great and now we need to assign a program to the base so can we assign this one no the drums are still here is there a bass program no we can look under plugins no we can look under this little keyboard those are mpc expansions no so we have to go load one where do we go browse right we did drums right here i mean we go to places there's nothing there for places but we could go to content here and we can go to well let's let me show you what comes with the mp3 it's terrible but i'll show you anyway there is a baseline right here so if i click on the baseline and click load it loads this baseline so let's go look for it so back to programs and it's not under here it's not even named it's actually uh you have to experiment to find it it's actually under this plugin and it's just called plugin number one and if i play it nothing what happened nothing so here's a tip this is for drums you can't play this thing right now for bass to play the bass line or a keys you have to go into notes so that's an important important button and it's salmon so i have to hold down shift and notes and now i can see this bass track so here's the one i mean it's just terrible i think i'm not i'm going to go over this more here in a second but let's just get rid of this so let's go back to browse and let's find a real base program i had to buy this i'll put the name of the website but it's so easy you just pay a nominal fee for it and you download it and you put it on your sd card it tells you exactly what folder to put it in and then you're ready to go it lives under expansion so let's look under the expansions tab and actually you can download these expansions the mpc one expansions from akai by registering the product if you register it'll give you permission to go to a website it's kind of a pain but i was able to download these and it's got some some really loud programs here [Music] but yeah but here here's the electric bass so there's one the first one i bought so if i go to that [Music] we can see we got some bases here and let's just use the cutlass clean how about so let's load that one up and see how that sounds and you can see it's already loading or loading a lot more there's a lot more to it go back to main and now let's look under plugins for it nothing there that's because it's not a plugin it's actually under this keyboard icon well there's two there's none to oh there's the clean base right there the cutlass base clean let's play it how come nothing's happening because you need to go to notes press shift notes and now here we go much better now i can control the volume here if i want on this top button all right so awesome that'll work let's go through this a little bit so when chromatic is pushed it shows you the chromatic members of the scale which is very nice if you hit notes it just shows you the root notes takachi so it gives you a bigger platform to play with but you're missing some of the notes that you need if you go to chords it sounds terrible with the bass but that sounds pretty good with the keys when we come to those so just keep it in chromatic you can set the key so we could do it in a or whatever it's in g right now but let me show you the key of this thing this the root the bottom root note like the one chord of a one four five blues will always be here and you should always set that to the lowest possible octave here's the octave so i'm gonna turn it down to zero and see nothing happens because i'm i'm too low i have to go up to one and now at least the one will sound good there's the four there's the five chord so that sounds pretty good okay if i go up to like five the one chord well it's even too high for five it doesn't even work so you have to be in range you have to search for that range just like i said and that'll work there okay and i'm going to actually record it in g but let's let's say that let's go up to d and see what happens so what about in d there's the 1 there's the 4 5 is see it's getting kind of high too high for a base so i didn't follow my rule on the one i want to make it as low as possible so we can go in the next octave under still works how about if i go to zero that's too low so that would be the correct uh the correct octave to choose because there's the five sounds better it's not so high there's the four all right but i actually want to record this record this in d or in g which is a great key okay so we're all set up let's record our baseline now you can't go back to home base to record the baseline because the pads don't work so you have to record through notes so back to shift and notes so now we're at the mercy of our counter to know where the heck we are here and i could piece this together through the grid function but it's too hard it's better to just just do a full take all 12 bar blue all 12 bars that's the way i do it if you had patience you could slowly put it in through that same grid function but i'd rather just put it in so make sure you hit overdub it'll snap when you hit record see we're up here in the fourth of eighth bar it'll snap it back to zero let me show you one more thing though make darn sure that we're started here because if you're not looping at one if let's say i'm looping at 9 10 11 12 that's where you'll record and you don't see that when you're on the notes menu so we're okay but i've had that happen screw up before too all right so we're ready to go let's hit give us a three maybe four but should be a three one two three whoa what happened [Music] uh let's see what did happen i actually have no idea what happened but let's erase that silliness for sure um that's probably because i jumped over here this thing as i said it definitely has some gremlins in it and we're looped okay okay it should be working so let's go back to let's see i'm on base okay let's go try it again notes oh you see what happened we're at g0 i forgot to set my octave it's too low okay so i had that there's the correct the correct octave for that so good lesson there another pitfall so let's go over dub i hope we recorded it i think it or erased it and let's hit play start one two three [Music] okay i screwed it up on purpose on the turnaround i screwed up the four so that would probably be like the tenth bar let's i'm still in record that's speed ahead and see because i know where i messed up [Music] right there ninth ninth bar i messed up the looks like the third bead [Music] ninth bar right there that's the wrong note so let's erase that ninth bar third b so let's erase that hold down the array so we'll just erase i can hold it down anytime because it's [Music] i shouldn't have hit that no it's just the wrong note so that's gone [Music] okay and now let's just put in what's supposed to be there [Music] and there i fixed it let's go back and listen to make sure ninth bar third third beat fine now [Music] okay great so now we got our bass guitar let's go back to home base and now let's say we want to mess with the volumes of these things well there's two places i showed you before to mess with the overall volume we can go to the the hashtag here or even sorry before i do that let's go to the hashtag i said that a freudian slip because i wanted to show the hashtag hit play and here's another bug in the akai mp mpc1 i don't see anything so i've learned if you hit the up arrow and then go back to the hashtag there's our baseline and we can go the same tools work there's the moving tool and the shrinking and expanding tool there's what the whole bass track looks like and you can erase you can use the eraser you can use the pencil you could do whatever you want [Music] so i could have made the correction here as well but for me it's just easier to punch it in you know okay let's go back to home base [Music] let's manipulate the sounds i think that bass is a little loud so i can go to this little three these three bars these three horizontal bars there's drums i can go to base i can go to the sound of the bass and now i can turn them down turn them off if i could do whatever i want to them okay i actually like the base load i can also mix them i don't really like this place though let's go back to home base i prefer to go to track mix and you can also see the base right here so i can control it like that i can solo it and turn off everything else remember if you leave that you might get lost if i go back to home base it's like where's my drum kit it doesn't indicate that everything's muted which is annoying even if i go to track mix you would think that shows everything it doesn't show that anything's muted so that's annoying that'd be nice if they fixed that you have to go back to the scene of the crime and the scene of the crime was trackpad mix and there i can see it soloed where's the other place i said we can control we can control all the track sounds and mix those um right here and here it doesn't even show oh it does show it's muted there the drums are muted so i could turn it off there will it let me no it won't let me at least it shows me sometimes it does sometimes it doesn't seem to show me so you still have to go back to the scene of the crime which was the track mix to fix uh to fix the so oh it's because the solo was on why it didn't so now everything should come back okay although i don't hear the drums oh because i was on let's go look the acoustic kit is muted too so let's go see what happened to that you see how this can be drive you absolutely crazy did i hit something here it looks like it's muted there there we go so i had to fix it in two places i wonder what happens if i hit solo and then i go back to track mix at least it shows it's soloed so it looks like i can fix it there as well so anyway good luck with that just be be careful remember that this can be a landmine of problems um okay great so i think that's pretty much it for the base section how about let's put in the keyboard now all right let's put in the keyboard so we need a new track for it i'm going to go a little faster because you guys are experts oh you know what i didn't save it how do i save it i showed you that way back at the beginning let's not lose our work hit shift hold it down save button and it's saving when we put the keyboard in it's going to be organ another mpc expansion pack that i bought it's going to be almost exactly the same as putting in the base so okay it's saved so the first thing we need to do is make a new track find a free track um let's see track one was the drum track two is the bass track three is free so name it by hitting the a button so this will be we'll call it the organ great hit do it oops see how i double hit it i hit solo that would have been a disaster okay great there's nothing there that's because we need to load the organ program go to browse and if wherever you are you have to go to expansions and i bought this one right down here it says vintage organs and you can play with the ones that come with the kit i gave up i couldn't find one i liked they're all really funky and dance music and hip hop i just want a good old-fashioned vintage organ so i had to buy it and we can listen to some of these oh here's a good landmine right here it's like where are my darn base programs all i see are the wave files that created the base program it's because i'm not on this little square right there the base pro the drum kits the base kit i can call it because it's made up of wav files and the organ kit it's these are labeled.xpm so to see xpm you have to be on the little the four squares put in a square form so let's listen we can listen to some of these okay i actually like one that's called rock organ right here and it does have a very long and long introduction to it i don't know what that's about but let's hit load and load it up while it's playing okay great thank you very much let's go to main and let's look for it so is it under plug-in no it's certainly not under drums i mean there's our drum kit still but it is under the keyboard and there's the rock organ right there it doesn't play how come because we're not under notes just like the bass we have to hold shift down and then click notes while we're holding that down and there we go [Music] there's the key in the same deal now the chords if you hit on a chromatic chord you can play the one four and the five there's the one i can turn that up a little i think five four one so i could just put those chords in if i want i'm going to make it a little more fancy but the same rules apply with regard to the octave so you want the lowest octave here possible that's the one chord and let's turn it down turning the wheel down to zero it's too low so if we're in the key of g we'll keep it there alright so let's record so it's the same principle you can go back here and just make sure the looper isn't isn't set make sure the loop is either is looping from bar 1 to 12. the everything is the same i mean we're good to go so let's go back to notes hold down shift and let's put overdub we don't want to erase everything and then let's hit play start it'll give us a three click count in might be four this time three four no it was three let me start it over if you push when you have overdub when you push play and start if the first count in the first click is almost instantaneous it's going to be a four count in most of the time it's a three count in b but it definitely has a bug in it one two three [Music] all right screw that up how do we get rid of that start over hit undo that'll take it all away just let me hit play to make sure it's gone now i have to go back to zero make sure that's gone [Music] now the reason i gave these this keypad a b minus c plus is because of this organ it's finicky if you don't hit right in the center of the keys it'll miss notes and i don't know if that's the program's fault or the mpc one's fault but there's you have to be careful with that let's try it again one two three [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Laughter] all right let's see if we got it and sometimes it misses that first note but it's really there i have to turn it back to one so i missed a note somewhere let's see where i missed that see what bird is and we'll fix it we're at the sixth bar nothing yet seventh bar [Laughter] [Music] i know i missed it somewhere i think it must be the tenth bar maybe it was the tenth bar that's it tenth bar second b let's confirm it i just have to hit that e2 right there so let's stop it i mean i could go back to the grid to do that but let's just over dub it in there if i miss it then i can erase it without messing everything up so uh 10th bar second beat right let's speed ahead now i'm just watching this [Music] here comes the 10th bar all right got it so here we go [Music] pretty simple let's make sure i got it [Music] there's the five the four is where it was messed up [Music] great i'm going to turn the master volume down here all right so that's about it i can go back to home base we can save it to let's save it better do that it's so easy though hold down shift hit save so that's our project for the day um great that's about it so i hope you've enjoyed the video leave comments down below if i'm missing something or you know a better way to do something or you could help me that would be awesome if you could write comments and help me below if you have comment or questions i'll i can try to answer those and great we'll see in the next video

Channel: Just The Blues

Views: 5,626

Keywords: Akai MPC ONE, Beginner, Make a beat, Make a loop, Tutorial, Instructional, 12 bar blues, Drums, Keyboard, Organ, Base, How to, Douglas Gillard

Id: YX8hXWRbx8s

Length: 67min 46sec (4066 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021