Beginners Guide to Beatmaking Akai Mpc x | Mpc Live | Mpc Live Mk 2 | Mpc One

what's up youtube this is tube digger this video is a complete beginners guide to beat making on the MPC live and NPC X this video goes alongside my other complete beginners guides such as complete beginners guides drum programs and clip programs and key groups so if you've watched those videos then this video is a good extension of that and hopefully some of the techniques and workflows will help you to start putting tracks together in your MPC now a lot of people have asked me to show how I go about doing this now there's no definitive answer or definitive method to this I don't start trying to make a song or a project in my MPC X from scratch in any particular way I haven't got a particular method I don't load up a template I just go with how I'm feeling and the vibe that I want to create on any given day so the techniques used in this video hopefully you can use some of those for yourself in your own productions but as I've just said it's all really down to you but hopefully some of the techniques I'll show will give you a bit of an idea of how you can go about doing the same kind of thing now this is aimed at people that have only really just started out on the MPC Live or NPC X or in fact any other NPC because in quite a lot of my beginners guide videos those techniques do kind of translate to all the legacy NPCs because essentially the way that things are built up in terms of programs track sequences and things like that are kind of the same throughout because of the NPC's standard and universal kind of format so usually because I like working with break beats I'll go to my break beat folder in my content browser because the MPC X and the MPC live differ slightly because of the amount of controls that you have on the MPC X things like browsing for samples you can do directly from this dedicated button on the MPC X on the MPC live from memory I think you have to press menu and go to browser so I'm going to do it that way so I can cater for both users so menu and then press browser and now we can see our content directories so the first option here is places that's where any USB sticks or hard drives or SD cards you've got connected or an SSD drive that you might have installed that's where they show up content is the internal content that you get when you first buy this machine expansions or any expansion packs that you've loaded so first of all I'm gonna get a nice couple of breakbeats from my own sample folder so I'm going to go to my MPC x SD samples breaks classics and I'm just going to choose a random folder classic breaks e to K open that [Music] so I'm going to load this break in funky constellation Street Talk part 1 so I'm going to load that in and I'm gonna get another break that's quite nice garnett Mimms stop check yourself so I've just loaded those into memory but I have not selected a pad which they can be loaded onto if I did want to do that I just press on a pad it lights up then I can load that in I've already loaded it and now it says the sample exists I could just press replace and it will just replace that sample but now it's assigned to this pad okay so I'm going to go back to that other right Beach you can check what it's called by going to sample a sign and then you can see any breaks that you've got loaded into memory so on my first pad I've got that garnett Mims break and we can choose our second pad and just click on any other samples in this list and that will assign it to whatever pad you selected so now I've got those two breaks let's now go to program editor on the MPC X it's a dedicated button over here again I can't actually remember in the MPC live I think you might have to go to menu and program edit which is at the top of the screen there so I'm going to press the MPC X button and go into my program editor so this drum program is on track 1 it's the default program that gets automatically created for you when you switch on your MPC live or MPC X I've got loads of other videos showing you how to use the tracks and the programs and the sequences and just check them out they're all in the MPC live and MPC X tutorial playlists on my channel so back to program at it so I'm going to press the second tab along which is samples and now we can see the samples so this is the sample on our first pad and I'm going to split it up in the program editor I could go to the sample editor and create chops but the reason I don't want to do that is because I don't want to create a chopped program I can quite easily just do it from the program itself so what I'm going to do is make sure this pad is selected I'm going to go to copy here now you do have a copy button on the MPC live but it's down underneath the screen I believe by the transport controls on the MPC X is just up here so we're focusing on the pad that we want to copy from then we have to press the screen and that will allow us to copy that pad to another pad so I'm going to just copy it to the pad above it and press do it so now we've got those two samples on both of those pads their pad 1 and pad 5 now if I press these together now they're going to play with the top of each other because the program is automatically set to polyphonic I could choose monophonic so then those samples will cut each other off if it's in polyphonic [Music] now play over the top of each other but I'm going to leave it in polyphonic mode because I do want some sounds to play over the top of other sounds so the way to get around there is go to LFO modulation which is the fifth tab along and choose a mute group for those samples so I'm going to choose me Group one for both of these samples and now they will take each other so on my first pad I'm going to take out one of the kicks so I'm just pressing it to audition it on the MPC X because I'm in screen control mode for my cue links I've got all the start points for my samples here so this one will go right across quite quickly so that's times 1000 this is times 100 so it goes a little bit less sensitive now and it goes even less sensitive as you get down to the bottom q link there so that means you can do really fine editing so I'm just going to use my top one here to get to roughly the start of that kick drum I'm going to scroll in or magnify and now I'm going to use one of the other q links the third one so I can get that dead on the start of that kick now something I just skipped over is that if you've got slice which is here set to all that means any other samples that are the same as this which as we know we've got the same sample and pad five the start points will be reflected so if I choose this pattern it's on that kick and if I choose the pad above it and now I move that start point to this snare we'll go back to the first pad and it's moves that as well so I don't want that to happen to stop that you switch the slice mode to pad for both breaks and then you can independently set the start and end points for those pads so let's go and choose the kick again for pad one let's just adjust it up with the cooling again and now let's adjust the start point four five five and now they're different so now I've got my fifth pad selected it doesn't matter what pads you use it's all down to preference and obviously economics if you're left or right-handed you might prefer kicks and snares to be on different pads or round the other way vice versa I'm left-handed it doesn't really matter for this I do usually prefer to obviously have my kicks on the left and then I can tap my snare with the right if you're right-handed or if you just like it different anyway you might prefer to have the kick here so you can trigger the snare with your left hand but because I've got them well one underneath the other it's kind of irrelevant the reason I've done that is because on my second pad I've got this other breakbeat that I want to have a play with I think I'm going to use the kick from this break on pad one and a snare from my second break again I've forgotten to do this it's a habit law I've got into is forgetting to change the slice that one's playing but it's not got an awful lot of space between it and the next hits that come after it but that's okay I'm still going to choose it [Music] now I've not chosen the same meat group for this snare on this second pad so you'll need to do that so I can choke these so I don't actually like the snare from this original sample on my first pad so I'm actually going to get rid of this snare that's on pad five [Music] I'm actually gonna copy that to pad three and then I'm going to change the start point so we can actually get rid of the sample that's on the pad five now and now we've got it on pad three so now I've got a kick and the snare there but I'm glad you're going to change that to a hi-hat now just going to choose this one that towards the end here this is a bit of housekeeping that you can do if you don't want any of the other sounds in these samples you can flatten the pads so I'm going to choose the kick I'm going to press this arrow at the top of the screen and flatten the pad it's a good thing to remember to take the audio tail down to zero seconds if you don't want any extra silence added to the end of that sample you might do in certain situations but if you just want that isolated section where your start and end points are set to just set it to zero seconds you can rename it there so let's just do that for a good bit of housekeeping let's just put kick one and do it now that sample the original sample is still in memory if we go to the sample editor we can still access all those hits so it's a good thing to just keep them there for then for now get your breakbeat going and then if you do want any of the samples or the additional sections from the main sample you can go and get them later if you don't you can just press your system resources button up at the top right corner and purge your unwanted samples but I'm not going to do that just yet just in case I want some of the other sections of that original sample so let's go back to program edit so we've flattened the kick now on a flat on the snare because I don't want anything else after it or before it so flatten that rename that to snare one do it and there's our hi-hat and we'll do the same to that let's just name that H ht1 do it so if we did now perch we'd have a nice clean selection of drum sounds we've just got a hi-hat kicking us there none of that other sample data and we're not using up any additional memory that is just the waste right so there you go simple stuff so let's now put in a sequences okay so that's all nicely in time now to make things a bit more interesting I'm going to copy my first kick drum on to a different pad so I'm going to put it on pad for now so I've selected pad one I'm gonna press copy I'm gonna press the screen and select my fourth pad and press do it and now we've got that kick so what I'm going to do with this kick is I'm gonna roll off some of the top end so it sounds like a ghost kick okay so now we've got a ghost kick and this is where I'm going to use the swing so let's go back to the main page we don't have to go back to the main page to record in in fact let's just stay in the program editor and I'm going to put my sequence sent to overdub now so I don't overwrite what I've already put in [Music] doesn't sound too bad but let's go up to time correction up here and the here's the swing field let's change that to 63 that's my preferred swing amount it seems to be a nice middle ground to give you that swing so you can actually hear it without it being too much or too little so you can't hear it now you can choose the events to be selected so I've just selected the swing for this actual pad that ghost kick that I've just created there with a filter I could apply it to all it wouldn't make any difference because the kick snare and the hat that I've already put in are on the grid and it won't swing them it will only swing things that are kind of on the kind of six things if you know I mean or just slightly off grid in terms of straight beats it's probably not the best way to explain it but I could just choose all events so I'm going to do that anyway and you'll hear that they kick the snare and the hat on actually change so I'm just got a back again this is without the swing now I'm going to apply the swing so it's ever so slightly shifted those ghost kicks just a little bit later so they sort of give it that kind of jump rather than it just being a bit more kind of you know on the grid so at this point I wouldn't do any heavy processing but that snare I think it does need to come up a little bit in terms of the high end so I'm gonna go to program in it go to effects make sure I've selected my snare then a double tap there and choose the full band parametric EQ so I'm gonna select that press the pencil so I can edit that so the frequency is set to 5,600 or 5,600 if we increase the gain on that the band is quite wide I find and it's you know not really preferable I just want to add some really high end frequencies to that it really brightens the top end of that snare up now I don't really like the sort of the hiss that's at the end of that snare so I'm going to go back to program editor I'm going to go to my filter envelope page I'm gonna choose the amp envelope to be an attack hold decays sustain mode and then I'm going to bring the sustain all the way down so we can hardly hear it or not at all and then I'm just going to increase the decay I could increase the hold but the decay will give us a nice slope okay so I'm going to focus on decay and I'm just going to use my data wheel to bring that out [Music] it's lost a little bit of volume now because it's a shorter snappier sample so I like to use the compressor for this the compressor master usually because it's got a dedicated game control you don't add any compression it's just got output down here that you can increase the volume of your samples and it saves you going through the sample editor or bouncing out the quiet sample going to the sample editor normalizing I just add it from here and then if I like the sound of it I can just flatten it and it will be flattened along with any effects that I've added to it now let's say I want to add a bit of low end to the kick drum make it a bit more boomy so this is a good technique let's go select the kick as we can see we've not gotten the effects on there in fact I'm just going to go back to the snare and as you can see we still get access even from the insert effects page the option to flatten so I'm going to flatten that now this is also a good housekeeping method to save memory or actually CPU should I say because it uses up some of the processing power the more effects you use so if you're happy with the way that a sample sounds with the effects that you've applied to it I'm happy with that snare I would just press do it now and as you can see it's now got rid of the compressor and the parametric EQ is got rid of them out of the inserts I'm starting from a fresh now but I've now got those effects onto that sample and that's just a nice little bit of housekeeping you can do on the way to keep in mind so you save CPU so now let's deal with this kick now I'm going to go to the filter envelope page the default filter is set to low - but if we change the type to high for that's quite decent one now the cutoff is full so we're hardly going to hear this kick now it's just going to be very high frequent frequency I usually bring it down to around 25 30 24 actually sounds a bit better and then I increase the resonance and that will make it more self resonating it'll actually emphasize the low frequencies even though it's a high-pass filter so now we can hear that's got quite a nice bit of heaviness and weight to it and now I'd go back to the cutoff and adjust the frequency so it actually finds the resonant frequency of this actual kick drum now this does depend on the pitch of it so if I was to move my frequency down there so around 18 or 20 it's at its most loudest so that's where we've actually found the resonant frequency of that actual kick drum now that will change if we change the pitch of that kick drum so now I've pitched it down to minus four semitones let's go back to the filter now that frequency value that's 18 though isn't taking as much effect I'd have to lower it now for it to find the resonant frequency of the kick drum based on its current pitch setting though and now you can really hear a big thud to it [Music] now we're getting a little bit of a click I can hear on the end of that so I'm going to adjust the sample now I'm not going to do that in here I'm going to go to the sample editor so whatever pad you've pressed if you now press sample edit so I want to choose the kick it will focus on that in the sample editor now that click isn't as a parent because when you're in the sampler that's how it plays it back it's route pitch or its root note so I'm going to select the last half of it press process and then choose fade out as my function and that will just fade down the end of that sample there and now let's go back to program editor and now we shouldn't hear that sort of click or noise at the end now it's gone now one thing I didn't do is change the pitch of our ghost kick so I want to pitch that down to minus four semitones so it matches the main kick now another thing we can do is deal with the hi-hat now because there's no low frequency content in there that we need we can change the filter type of that to a high pass so I'm just going to choose high four and that way we get more of a cleaner signal throughout because there's no frequencies that might interfere with any of the lower drum hip frequencies that we've got like the snare or the kick another thing you can do because we can see that this hi-hat is quite low in volume we can go to the sample editor is focused on that now press process and we can normalize it which will bring it up to its highest volume level before it starts clipping in the digital domain so now that's really loud and it's not going to sound in context with our other drum hit so I'm going to go back to the program editor I'm going to press the samples page once and now we get access to the individual volume for that actual layer where our hi-hat is loaded on to so I'm just going to bring that down it's quite low press the sequence back that's not too bad now you could choose to keep the tail of that hi-hat in there because it's giving us quite a nice old school vinyl kind of feel to it but we could also short on that sample we could either shorten it with the start and end points but that's going to sound a bit scrappy so let's have a listen to that I'd rather use the amplitude envelope to do that it sounds too choppy to me it doesn't sound unnatural so let's go to the filter envelope page I'm going to choose attack hold decay sustain for the amp envelope mode and again I'm going to just bring down the sustain field here now it's really snappy and chops off I'm gonna increase the decay again another thing I like to do to create a bit of variation or a bit more of an interesting beat is to go let's go back to the program editor go back to sample so we can see our hi-hat now I'm going to copy that to pad 7 the pad above it just so I know that you know in my column that I've got a similar sound it's just something that helps you to kind of visually know where you're at so we're focused on pad to pad 3 sorry I'm going to press the box on the screen and copy it to pad 7 do it so I'm going to take the volume down for this hi-hat on pad 7 it's the same sample but I'm just going to the actual volume of this different pad so now we've got something that we can play around in terms of the high house so let's just play the sequence back and use note repeat to add some variation with that other hi-hat because we've got a swing set on it's automatically swinging our note repeats so if we now take that swing down to 50 and press and hold our note repeat you can see that that swing is not applied but if we increase the swing we can actually live audition that swing okay but we want it to be set to a swing value of 63 to correspond with the rest of the beat which is swung as you know without kick here it will just sound wrong if we've got those straight sixteenths going over the top of the swung ghost kicks so I'm now going to put those in now let's just go back to the program editor this is where you wouldn't want this to be set to a mute group okay so the high hats aren't set to a mute group or at least the same mute group as the kick the snare and the ghost kick because they're playing at six things over the top of these other elements the kick and the snare which are playing on the eighth beats if you see what I mean okay so we don't most to interfere or cut the other sounds off so let's put those in now I'm going to add some thirty-second notes to those high hats just at the end of these two bars [Music] so I don't really like the volume level of those but we can just go into the step sequencer if we press and hold shift we can choose whatever pad we want to edit okay so now I'm looking at those sixteenth Swan high hats that I put on pad seven the time division we're looking at is thirty second notes and we know that we added those thirty seconds so because we've got a gap in between we know these are six things in the first bar and for the most of the second bar but in the second bar we're still seeing the sixteenth notes that's because we haven't used the arrows here to jump up to see what the step 17 to 32 are doing so they don't look brilliant I'm gonna actually add four there at the end okay and I'm going to sweep up the volume there and I'm just going to make them all slightly lower than the main ones okay so let's go right from the bottom up and create a nice curve so let's listen to that and again we could have also just puts all these high hats in just using pad three so let's press sorry let's press and hold shift so we can see that our pad three high hats are on eighth notes okay we could have just put notes in between there on the six things and then taken the volumes down of those and done exactly the same thing as I done with the no repeats so that's another way that you can enter those notes to give it that kind of shuffle feel along with the swing value that I've added anyway that's how beep now I love sub bass and I love subtle sub bass you know just one or two hits here and there to give a beat a nice bit of weight so let's go and grab a sub bass kick or something like that so let's go to browse I'm gonna go to my internal drive in fact I'm going to go to expansions because I know that there's a hell of a lot of decent sub base samples within these expansions we've got our sub base in there instead of live recording this let's just show you the step sequencer so I'm going to change my time division to sixteenths then I know that I'm going to put my sub on my first beat and on my eleventh beat and that should correspond with the main kicks so I think I'm going to put another sub kick or another sub hit on the second bar so let's go back to the step sequencer but I'm not going to put it on the downbeat I think I'm just going to put it somewhere in the middle of the second bar so I'm going to put it on that kick that comes in on step seven I think so let's put that there but I'm going to pitch that down now so I could just remove this from the step sequencer and play in live and use 16 levels so let's just do that first and then I'll show you another method of doing that just go back to the main page so I'm going to go to 16 levels make sure I've selected that sub so the default pitch we can hear by pressing pad for if you see here it says original pad it says four and that tells us that in 16 level mode pad fault will play back the original pitch of this sample which we've already got programmed into our sequence if we press plat five where the actual sample is that it will be pitched up one semitone the very first pad is not low enough for what I want I want a really low one so we can change the original pad number to a higher value and that means we're shifting up the original pad semitones or the tuning to a higher pad so let's shift it all the way up to pad 16 and that means we can work our way back down and choose a very low pitch sub so I quite like that one there so let's program that in [Music] so I'm happy with that that's the drum and the bass sorted now let's add some musical elements so let's go to main now if I'm stuck for a sample and I think that I probably haven't got something on my hard drive I usually go to youtube and it's exactly the reason why I called myself tube digger in the first place so I'm just gonna move my camera up so you can see YouTube on my screen and let's just change focus a bit okay so I like to sample from psych jazz and psychedelia there's an awful lot of interesting sounds from that error or that era should I say you from like 1960s through to the 1970s I usually just type in psych jazz psy it's ch a jazz or psychedelic rock or something like that and YouTube's an absolute treasure trove for that kind of material [Music] I'm going to choose pad 9 because we don't have any drums going from pad 9 up to pad 16 and that's where I'm going to add my musical sample so they're kind of separate from my bass and my drum hits down the bottom here so it just happened that pad 9 had been pitched down 2 semitones or minus 2 semitones and it just works it was just a complete fluke complete coincidence and I quite like the time of it timing of it so I'm just going to put it in as it is now [Music] now that's all fair and good again I've forgotten who changed my slight slice mode to pad so let's change that I'm going to copy that pad to pad 10 so click on the screen choose pattern do it [Music] so I'm going to raise that first instance of it and I'm going to choose pad 10 and see how that sounds over the top so this is how I would then start to think about a second sequence or maybe use this as the first sequence so I'm just going to choose that I don't want this big hit here because it's going to clash so I'm just going to make sure that's like that I'm going to flatten map so we've just got that section there and I'm going to do the same with this pad [Music] okay so before I flatten that I'm going to copy that again to pad 11 so copy select pad 11 do it now I'm going to flatten pad 9 and I'm also going to choose another section from pad 11 and flatten that [Music] flatten up and now I'm going to choose meat group two because we've all you already use meat group one for the drums and these will cut each other off okay so that should be enough so I'm going to treat this as my first sequence and I'm going to use the section that I put on pad 11 for this so I'm going to make sure that I'm not using any of those I'm going to raise these in this sequence and let's add this to our drum and our base so now I'm going to go to the main page go to sequence edit which is this pencil here and I'm going to copy that sequence to sequence to do it and I'm also going to copy it to sequence three so now we've got three identical sequences I'm going to go back to sequence - I'm going to erase that pad 11 that we put in and on sequence 2 I'm going to use the sample or the section of that sample that's on pad 9 so that we can just go to the next sequence and choose between our first two sequences so let's see what our first sequence sounds like and then we'll jump straight into the second sequence [Music] so we've created some variation there so we've built a drum pattern we've sampled in some musical elements we've done quite a bit of editing in the program editor and now we're at a stage where we can start changing up the sequence and hopefully inspire ourselves to make the track even more elaborate even though it's you know very basic in the grand scheme of things let's now choose our second seek third sequence sorry and choose that sample on pad 10 which we haven't used so now we would have two arrays pad 11 because that was the original one we copied over so we don't that sample playing on there and now we're going to input the sample section that's on pad 10 so as you can hear it cuts off so that means that we can either restart that sample but that might make it a bit repetitive even though it's kind of repetitive anyway but we can use one of these other two pads or we can create a fourth pad with another section and have a little change up but let's try and work with what we've already got so let's put that in again that's just a raise that and let's chop between the other two pads along with that or at least one of them [Music] okay so that works let's actually arrays those again and then we can just try pad 10 with pad 9 instead of pad 10 and pad 11th so they're both work so we could actually keep sequence 3 now go to sequence at it copy sequence the sequence 4 do it if I use those notes again so we know that we're clear and then do that other change up with pad 10 and the pad 11 so now we've got four sequences so let's go back to the next sequence in fact I'm going to go to the song edit so on the MPC X you press and hold shift and press next sequence and that will take you to the song editor now we're in the song editor and we can see those four sequences that we've got to work with let's insert the slots so we've got four slots now now in here we can choose the amount of times that they repeat so even though they're two bars long we can choose them to repeat for let's do four so these two bar sequences are now going to repeat four four times so essentially they're going to be eight bars long we could increase the length of the sequences that eight bars and then do some more variation in between them but for the sake of this video I'm just going to make all these sequences four bars or loop over four times so they're essentially eight bars long and then we have to change the actual number of the sequence so our first slot needs to be one second slot needs to be two-thirds so slot needs to be three full slot is already sequence four and we could just play start and that will play back all our four sequences in order [Music] let's just summarize what we've done with brought in two completely different bright beats taking elements from them the kick from one another kick from the same one a snare and a hi-hat from the other and created a hybrid beat that sounds correct in itself as if it's our own original break beat that we've created I say we I've done all the work you've just been set we're eating donuts and I've been doing all the work but that's alright I still love you so we've put that together we've added some sub bass we've had some fluky moments so it's kind of easy for me to put sign together kind of live on camera I have had quite a few mistakes and a few little things go wrong in this video I'm using my iPhone to record this so whenever I get a notification on Gmail or a text message it actually comes on the screen and what I'm recording into QuickTime gets recorded so anything like that I have to stop and start all set up a very good mate of mine call me alright to stop the video then because it automatically cuts the video off in QuickTime when the phone you know you can't have the phone recording and speak on it at the same time and record video so loads of things have gone wrong but I've managed to put together quite a nice sequence and that musical sample that I'd set from YouTube just happened to work very well and it's got the right kind of wired that I like you know you've got the quite nice raw sound of the beat and the sub bass and then you have this nice light contrasting flute on top you know the nice sort of acoustic guitar it's not the be-all and end-all of how you put a track together but if you do make particularly boom-bap hip-hop or nice instrumental hip-hop beats you know it doesn't matter if you do that or you make house or techno or drama bass it's essentially the same thing you just get a vibe you put your brakes together make them sound original if you don't really want to use stock sounds or expansionpak sounds if you have got any comments or questions please put them down and I will no doubt get to those questions and answer them as soon as I can again if you do want one-on-one tuition with myself you can hit me up on Facebook it's www.facebook.com forward slash tube simple enough just send me a message on there and we can arrange a Skype or Google hangout session whatever you prefer to use they are $63 for you guys in the States from the U and Canada they're 45 UK pounds or they're around 52 euros I believe that conversion is for an hour everyone that I have taught on these lessons has said this has been brilliant you've answered all my questions excellent and they've recommended me either on Facebook MBC groups or elsewhere also if you don't want to do that and you just want to contribute to my channel there's links in the description to my paypal where you can send me any amount of your choice just to help support me and my channel this would make a massive difference to me if you could contribute to the channel somehow so I can keep giving you this free content on YouTube so I'm not going to go on about that anymore if you want to support me I would really appreciate it and I will see you on the next one this is to bigger I'm out you

Channel: Tubedigga

Views: 104,474

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: MUlWyWj_FLs

Length: 49min 7sec (2947 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 20 2018