Akai MPK Mini Mk3 Tutorial - Editor Software Overview

in this video i'm going to give you an overview of the akai mpk mini mk3 program editor check it out hey my name is matthew on this channel i do set up videos tutorials and overviews like this one and in this particular video i'm going to do an overview of the mpk mini program editor if you're new here consider subscribing let's get into this so if you look at my screen here you'll see the akai mpk mini 3 program editor now this program editor is different than the mk2 editor there are a few more options in this editor the mpk mini mk3 can store up to eight different programs and what a program is on the mpk mini is a set of midi parameters that can go to the npk mini so with this device you only have so many options right you only have so many pads so many knobs and so many keys but with the program editor you can actually edit your keyboard to affect different parameters up to eight different programs so if you look here there's a program select button and each of these pads correlate with the program so by default there are eight programs already in there but you can go ahead and change these how you want to and that's what the program editor is for so i'm going to try to give you an overview of everything but if you do have a specific question leave it in the comments maybe i or somebody in the community can answer it for you so let's go ahead and get into this so if you look at the top of the mpk mini 3 editor you can click file and you can actually do a few things from here so you could send programs from here you can get programs from your device in this area and you can actually open programs that are saved on your hard drive the mpk3 comes pre-loaded with eight different programs and the programs are right here so you don't have to worry about like erasing a program in here because you can always get that program back so don't worry about it you can send programs wherever you want to on here and if you want to go back to what it was you can actually go here and restore your program so if i make a program on the computer and send it over to this pad what's going to happen is it's going to override that particular program but you can get it back with these here now keep in mind you can actually save a program as well so if you make a customized program with the editor you can actually save that program and have it on here for backup or if you want to send it to somebody you can do that right here as well now whenever i click save you can see what the file extension is for the editor right there so in case you are curious about that that's what the file extension is all right so tools are actually useful so if you click that that's going to give you your midi monitor so i'm going to put this right here now what your midi monitor is going to do is it's going to give you midi information so i have my mpk mini connected to my computer and it's important to have this actually connected to your computer so you can actually send and receive your programs so if you look if i hit pad one now notice in the midi monitor you can see what note that pad is you can see what channel it was transmitted on and you can see the value that i actually hit it now the pads are actually after touch sensitive so check this out so if i hit the pad you can see all those different midi notes all the way down to zero so all these different values came in as i hit the note really hard and then let off my finger a little bit you can see the value went less and less because um the harder you hit it the higher that midi value is going to be and you can see it says after touch so the midi monitor is going to be helpful in this process if you do want to know what the parameters are that you are actually changing so let's go ahead and look at the tools here you can see we have auto populate and what this is going to do is going to automatically apply certain parameters to your pad banks or to your knobs and it basically just makes it really fast instead of doing everything one by one but let's actually go over the interface here before we go any further into that and if you look here you can get your um user guide right here if you do want the user guide so if you look at the graphical interface it kind of lines up to what the actual controls are on the keyboard but kind of doesn't at the same time so if you look up here you have your joystick that's going to you know correlate with your joystick on your physical controller and to the right of your joystick you have pad bank a in red and then pad bank b is in green so on your actual physical controller you have two pad banks to give you up to 16 pads per program so by default you're on pad bank a and if you click that it's going to turn green that's going to give you pad bank b so the values of these pads are going to be different if you're in bank a or b now i do want to know it does say pad 1 here pad 2 here pad 3 here pad 4 here these pad numbers correlate with the physical pads on your mpk mini so you can see pad 1 pad 2 pad 3 and pad 4 on your mpk now the top here you can actually rename your program whatever you want to keep you organized and then over here to the right of that you have your different knobs all right so you could go ahead and click in there and type into there if you actually click the knob it doesn't do anything it's just a graphic but it kind of lets you know which knobs you're affecting now if you look right here you can see this is knob k1 all the way through ka and if you look at your controller knob k1 is up here on the top left and then k8 is down here at the bottom so it goes one two three four five six seven eight and keep in mind your pads go the opposite direction so they start down here at one and up here is eight so it's one two three four five six seven eight underneath here you do have options for your keyboard i'll cover this more in detail in a minute here underneath that you have options for your arpeggiator all right and then over here underneath your pads you have options for your different midi channels so your pads go out on a particular midi channel that you choose and your keyboard and your controls go out on a different mini channel so you're going to have two different midi channels that your mpk midi is going to transmit and you select that right here and you can turn your um after touch on and off here and now over here this is your program area so this is how you send and receive your programs from your mpk mini and if you're messing with a program and you want to kind of test it out you could send it to the ram here and what that will do is it'll load up the settings that you're working on inside of your mpk mini so you don't actually load it into a preset program and you could test it out that way so now that we covered the overview let's go ahead and go into a little bit more detail on what we can do with this so if you look this is the joystick and you can see it says single cc pitch bin dual cc so you have different options now if you look cc goes left and right and then this one right here goes up and down so it's kind of like x y but on the joystick so left and right is one value up and down is another value and those values are noted right here so you do need a little bit of knowledge on what midi information is to actually you know know what you're doing with these values so um a single cc what a cc is is a control change so cc stands for control change and you can have control change values from 0 to 127. so one standard midi cable can transmit 16 different channels on midi each of those midi cables can have 0 to 127 control change messages each of those control chains messages have 0 to 127 values there are several kind of other messages that midi channels can transmit including program changes 0 through 127 and notes so these are the type of messages that we're actually going to deal with inside the mpk mini editor so what i want to do before we move on i want to send this actual uh template to my ram this is just the default one that opened up whenever i opened it up so i want to send that to the ram all right so it's sent successfully this way we can look at our midi monitor let's see if i close this if i open it again if it will clear it and it does so that's very good so let's go ahead and look at this so theoretically it says right here cc is at 80 and that's going to be on the left and right access so let's go ahead and turn it to the left and you can see right there message control 80. so that is indeed correct and then up and down is going to be 81 so let's see if that comes up and you can see right there ctrl 81 so there you go with your joystick now the mpk mini doesn't have like the pitch bin wheel or the mod wheel so you might want to use your joystick as pitch bend and if you select pitch bend let's send that to ram it's been sent so let's go left alright you can see pitch bin shows up now all right now let's pick dual cc send that to ram all right so what that's going to do is if you put the um joystick to the left it's going to send the cc of 80 if you push it to the right it's going to send the cc of zero okay so left right okay 80 and 0. so that's what your joystick does all right i'm just gonna put that back on single cc that covers the joystick let's move on to pad banks so we got pad bank a now if you look at the actual physical controller here we got pad controls we got banks cc program change now depending on what you have selected here it's going to alter how these pads actually function all right so if you look at the pad area we can see pad bank a right here now pad 1 is here and you can see that it's sending the note 16 so depending on what you have selected in the pad controls area it's going to send different types of midi information with the pads so i'm going to turn program change off so if it's everything's off here and this is just highlighted basically what it's going to do is it's just going to send a note value now the note value is right here so pad 5 is going to send a note value of 20 and if you look over here it does send the note value of 20. now if i select cc which again stands for control change now let's hit pad 5 you can see it sends control 20. let's go ahead and pick program change and then hit pad 5 you can see it sends program 20. turn program change off so this could be useful for different things the most obvious thing that this is going to be useful for is to play drums or play notes and that's when pad controls just natural but if you hit cc what that can do is actually send control change messages so if you're using a digital audio workstation let's say you're using npc beats or ableton live you can set these pads to play or stop because if you notice on the mpk mini there's no transport controls so you can actually turn your pads into transport controls using cc now how this could be useful is you can program pad 5 to be stop pad 6 to be play pad 7 to be record this is just an example but let's say you did that right and you were recording inside of ableton live you can hit your record you can start playing and then when you're done playing you can hit stop alright so that's cc and then you have program change now the program change is going to do different things based on what you have like for example like in the digitone program change actually changes the pattern where it gets its name is it actually changes the program inside of a synthesizer if you're using a synthesizer you could change that program with the pads now i was using program change inside of npc beats to actually change the tracks and it was working so i was able to select track one through eight with the pads again you could program these to be whatever you want now if you look at the notes this one's on 20 and then you can see there's an actual note value underneath that it's that g sharp on the zero octave now i can change that so if i wanted to be like 32 i can make it 32 and that's going to be d sharp on the first octave so it's going to be g sharp 1 and what that's going to do is just going to play that note an octave higher and again you know i can uh for example make it 44 you can see it's g sharp two and then you can go the other way as well into negative octaves all right so the note eight is g sharp minus one and the same for your control change you can go from zero or to 127. now if you try to do 128 it's not going to give you any value put it back on 20. so you could program this for every single pad that you want to and you can make it useful for your own needs now keep in mind your pad bank a and pad bank b can have completely separate midi notes so keep that in mind now another thing i do want to mention about the pads before we move on is if you look down here it says pad midi channel 10. so the mpk mini can transmit on two different midi channels so for standard like midi you have one through 16 you can see right here one through 16. and what this is is you have 16 channels that you can transmit all this dat midi data on like separate channels so you can transmit a lot of different information you can have your pads be on a separate channel then your knobs and your keys and your keys are going to be on their own channel with the knobs so pads channel 10 key bed ink midi controls are going to be on midi channel 1. so you can separate your midi channels so theoretically you can have your pads like control a like a drum beat and then you could play the keys or you can have your pads going to like a bass and then your keys going to like electric piano for example and you can play the electric piano with your right hand and the bass line with your left hand something like that so if you look to the right we got our knobs you can actually rename your knobs right here and the reason why that's important is because on the npk mini you can actually see the name of the knob so like if you want to program a knob to control a cutoff filter on a synthesizer you can name it cut off right so like cut off okay so let's send that to the ram so now whenever i turn k1 if you look right there it says cut off so i know that's controlling the cutoff filter now that might seem trivial but that might actually be useful to see what parameter that you're actually changing right and you can see i'm changing it on channel one and then you have your control change values from zero to 127 right there so uh basically if i turn the knob all the way to the left it's going to give me a value of zero if i turn it all the way to the right it's going to give me a value of 127. now these knobs are continuous so it kind of sounds weird to turn it all the way to the right or all the way to the left there's really no all the way to the right or left but you can actually put this in relative mode as well what it was in before was absolute mode where you can go from zero to 127. now relative mode is going to be a little bit different it's going to be based on your equipment because your equipment needs to actually be able to accept relative mode because these knobs are continuous so what that's going to enable you to do is pick up a value where you left off without jumping so you could customize all the different knobs whatever values that you want right here now what's really cool about this is your software might have 32 different values that you want to control with the knobs well you only have eight knobs right but you can program different values on different programs let's say i'm on program one i can program this knob to be one and go all the way up to eight if i go to program two i could program this knob to be cc nine all the way up to 16 that gives me twice as many parameters and then i can keep doing that all the way up to eight different pad banks so you can get a lot of parameters that you can access but you can only access eight at a time if you're finding value in this video remember to give it a thumbs up below it's going to help the channel it's going to help the video get seen by those who might need to see this information i appreciate you for doing that all right so let's move on to the little keyboard section down here now you can see we have a transpose option so um on zero this key here this left most key is going to be the key of c so when i hit that it's going to be c which is note 48 if i transpose it up one watch what happens to that value it makes it c sharp so c sharp is really this key this black key but since i transposed it up it moved that key down here all right and if i go to 2 you can see that it turns to d and d is really this key but those notes are transposed too all right and if i do 3 it just keeps going so this is really d sharp up here but if i play this key this key is now d sharp and you could put it the opposite way as well up to 12 or down to minus 12. and that's in semitones now if you look right here we got the octave kind of option here so this is going to be default what octave your keyboard is going to be in you can make it a higher octave by default or a lower octave by default so so if you want to get to an octave really quick you can like have like program one be at minus four octaves and then program two be at plus four so you can just go ahead and hit program select and then boom you can be in a different octave underneath that we have arpeggiators so these are kind of like some default settings that you could put in your arpeggiator so you can have one program have your arpeggiator by default just turned on down here we got tap tempo so there's a tap tempo button on here so right now it's on two so when i tap the tempo after two taps it's going to calculate what the tempo should be but if i put it on three if i tap it after the third tap it's going to figure out the tempo and then four after the fourth tap is going to figure out the tempo here is your default tempo of your arpeggiator 120 you can change that to what you desire if you want your tempo to be 70 you could do that right there type it in here's where we set our default time division so you can do quarter notes quarter triplets all the way to 30 second note triplets now keep in mind you can change all this on your keyboard but these are just the default settings that you can make it be now you can change your default octave here you can have it where the default clock is the internal clock because there is a clock in here or you can have it read external so if you're in like ableton live you can read ableton live's clock by default you can have the arpeggiator type right here you have latch where if you press the notes down and then lift up it's going to latch whatever notes that you played and then you got your swing now i didn't want to talk about after touch because this does have aftertouch and you'll look there's a couple different options you can have you could turn your after touch off you could turn your after touch to channel and then you could turn it to polyphonic now if you put it to channel it's going to sense the pressure of all the pads held down and generate the highest channel after touch value among them if you put it on poly or polyphonic it's going to allow each pad to being held down to have its own separate independent polyphonic aftertouch value and if you turn it off it's going to turn it off now if you look over here we got our tools let's go back to auto populate so we can do auto populate you can see our pads our pad banks right here so we can apply different effects to our pad bank so we can set our scale here we can do chromatic up which means you know this is going to have all the notes chromatically chromatic down you can do uh different scales you have all these scales that choose from major minor harmonic minor but if we do chromatic up we can start from zero let's apply it to bank see what happens and you can see starting on pad one our note value is zero and it goes up to seven and we can do the same thing with the knobs where we basically instead of like program these one by one say if we wanted to start at eight we could apply that and you can see it starts at eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen and fifteen and then we can set our low value and our high value so if we wanted our low value to be zero and a high value to be i don't know 50 for whatever reason we could do that and you can see our low value and our high value transmit as well right there last thing i want to talk about are how we actually send our programs so right here is how we actually send our program to our keyboard keep in mind you do need to have your keyboard plugged in for this to work so if i'm happy with the settings that i created in here i can send this by pressing the send button now if i want to receive a program i can actually receive it here you can actually rearrange your programs this way like i don't know if you wanted program one to be on program seven you would just receive it from one load it in here and then send it to seven so you can rearrange that way all right so let's just try to send a program so program name let's just call it pgm1 i'm going to send this to program five all right successfully sent it i don't know why i picked five the numbers are off but let's go with program two i'm gonna send this to six successfully sent now let's look at our device here so if i go to program select five you can see it says program one and if i go to six you can see it says program two and you know i have all my other ones that were in there as well like that's just the one i just programmed randomly you see i have my mpc programs but if i want to get back to the one we just sent program one program two i know this was a long video i hope it has helped you out remember to give it a thumbs up below and you know thanks for watching and remember to subscribe to my channel if you want more videos about the mpk mini and leave any video ideas in the comments below or any questions as well my name is matthew continue creating music we'll talk soon thanks for watching peace out

Channel: Matthew Stratton

Views: 19,429

Rating: 4.9705448 out of 5

Keywords: MatthewCreating, mpk mini mk3 tutorial, akai mpk mini mk3 tutorial, akai professional mpk mini mk3 tutorial, mpk mini mk3, mpk mini mk3 setup, akai mpk mini mk3, mpk mini, akai mpk mini, akai mpk mini ableton setup, akai mpk mini setup, akai mpk mini tutorial, how to use akai mpk mini, how to use the akai mpk mini, mpk mk3, akai mpk, akai professional, mpk mini mk3 editor, mpk mini editor, mpk mini mk3 editor tutorial, how to use the akai mpk mini mk3, Matthew Stratton

Id: SAVs6xK8Ick

Length: 22min 54sec (1374 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2021