Getting Started with MPC Live 2 | the Step Sequencer

the step 3 concern is actually not that bad and in today's video I'm gonna be going over everything to know about the step sequencer we're just going to take a deep dive into this and for those that found it frustrating before I promise at the end of the video you're going to have a better Outlook at it and you may even add it to your workflow later on so let's just start at the top real quick as you can see I'm on the drum track so usually when I use any kind of sequencer it's really for drums but I will be going over how you can use Melodies a bit later in this video and you're able to just use the scroll knob to just go through your other tracks and as you can see some is already in there but that's because I already layered it in the grid view so it will show up in here as well let's just go back to the drum track then you have sequence but above that you may not be able to read it but it says track length when it's on sequence it's only going to follow the amount of bars in your actual sequence and then you have the tempo and then you have the global Tempo just in case you want to switch back to the tempo that you have as your default and right here is more so just showing you where you're at in your bars so right here it says pad a01 which is meaning your first pad and the bank a and at the bottom it shows you bar one and that just symbolize you know this display right here it's only showing you one bar length and as you can see right here the playhead is already at two bars so the way I would get to that is pressing the bar plus sign to get to the second page so you'll see that more in context and then you have your parameters you can mess around with the velocities different effects like ratchet and even add in some for the particular track drum program or even a pad itself and you could just choose different parameters and then right next to it is time division time division I'm gonna get back to that if you see that this grayed out area and it says 1 to 16 if I was to go to higher time divisions such as smaller increments they have to have another page to play out the whole length so this is not just one bar then you have the nudge feature to move over the notes the nut feature is just there just to be there because if you're working on a step sequencer you obviously are more clicking onto the grid and then you have different presets now I'm just going to jump down here you got your TC which is your time correction you can choose the different time division as you can see we on 32 we could just switch back and it will show 16 again over here and bars like I mentioned before it correlates to this amount of bars which is the display and pass select we'll get to that and then the plus and minus pad this is a way for you to go through to the different pad because as you see this workflow is more so one at a time thing so if I'm working on my kicks it's only going to display my kicks so if I play that but if I skip over now it's going to play my snares so and then you can also hold down shift to access the different paths a lot faster so I only have three paths in use out of all the 16 pads and when it comes to you loading up your own drum kit yeah it doesn't show the name of what sample that you're using whether it's a kick or a hat you're going to have to have some kind of preparation to get better at step sequencer so what I mean by that usually I always have my kicks on the first pad my claps or snare on a second and on the third a hi-hat and on the fourth open hat and then above that is pretty much the same thing but just different samples so it's good to develop a good structure because then when you're flipping through you don't have to think too much so I can easily click through to pad two and realize okay that's a snare and click to pad three and realize that's the hi-hat so now let's just get into putting in some notes if you've been producing for a while you know that the snares usually land on a two and a four so the two is going to be right here because we're in the eight notes division so is one and two and three and four now we have to go to page two to go to the second bar and then we can just easily type that in now we could keep going to the third bar and the fourth bar and putting it in that way or going back to the track link where it says sequence we could still keep our fourth bar sequence for the whole project but put this track into a two bar sequence so the way you would do that is put eight beats because eight beats equals two bars four beats equals one bar so now that I have it on the first bar in the second bar it looks what happens as you see you don't see that I hit the pad on the other Pages because I'm looping just a certain section if we go to the 16th note division now it's going to be counting a bit differently because the two is switched to these pads right here which makes sense because when you count 16 notes it's going to be one E and A two e and uh three e and a four e and uh so now if you practice transcribing other songs that you hear and transcribing the drum rhythm not just the melody you will understand like the Drake bounce is what I like to call it I understand it goes to uh three e and when you hear it you're going to recognize this bounce so let me just go to Bar two and do the same yeah just like that I'm able to put in rhythms a lot faster so that may take you some time if you're a beginner sometimes you have to slow down your workflow to speed it up nothing is ever hard it's just new so now that I have that bounce let's say I wanted to get more creative and go to 32 notes so now 32 notes is a bit faster now you can see the two is all the way up here so it's like one E and A one Indiana before it even gets to the two because you would still count 32 notes the same as 16 notes but a bit faster so then I could just experiment with it probably put something right here thank you as you can see I'm not even seeing the whole page of this second bar so I gotta click over and then I'll see it so you can just experiment with it I could go to the 16 notes and put it on the E and the uh now where it says velocity I'm gonna show you something with the Q links with the Q links you're able to control the velocity so if you hold down Q links you can see that it says step one step two step three step four and it's just correlating to the actual steps at the bottom so the Q Link controls the different faders for the different options of the parameters and the way to add this to your workflow and be fast is understanding the top bar is 4 8 12 16. and the reason why I have it as a multiple of four is because if I'm trying to turn down to step five I understand that the first Q Link only goes up to four so if I think about it as 4 8 12 16 I know I need to go on a second pad and boom five and then okay let's say I want to turn down pad 13. so I know I gotta go to 12 which is the third Q Link and then just go to the second knob now you may think that's a lot of work and all that stuff but the more limitations you have the more your brain starts to work and when your brains start to work you're able to be more creative it's just as simple as that so then I could click the plus sign to go to my hi-hats since I'm in half time which is 90 BPM versus 180 BPM which will be double time I could go to the eight note divisions I'm gonna be playing one and two and three and four and and it will sound something like this and then you see this fader right here this is the global fader to turn down everything all at once now you may be thinking what is this function right here that you might not be able to see it but it says flip stat and all that means is if I have a note right here when I press flip it's going to put notes everywhere else except for the spot that I previously had it so let me hit flip and boom that note that I previously had right there is not going to be played but every other note will be played with that in mind and just thinking smart instead of going through like this all I have to do is just do nothing because if I do nothing it's going to pretty much be the invert of that so now I have it all laid out go to the bar two so I can lay out hi-hats as fast as that flip through the time Division and on the second page then I can add a vote right here and instead of just starting from the place starting playing the first bar again we could go up here and go to Bar two and just press play not play start so you could do something like that going back to parameters I could just go to ratchet ratchet is another way to do kind of rows so remembering the Q Link function let's say I want to bring up the ninth I go to the third Q Link which is going to be the first one and that's going to be on the second page so let's go to the second page and press play so now let's just go back to pad one to add in the rest of our kicks so me already knowing that I'm gonna have my other kick hit on the 11th step when it comes to trap you're going to realize most of these bounces are the same the only thing that makes it sound different is the sample itself and maybe you know the velocity change and a roll right next to it and then I could go to the second bar and since I'm in the 16-0 division I already know to put it like right there on uh the ADD and the e Simple Man and then the 32 note you know go to the second page I realized when it's right next to it on the 32 note it may not sound that good so maybe skip a note throughout this beat you see me hitting a pad function and I don't really hit past select I select is just where you could audition your sounds if I had more pads then it would make sense now you can also hold down shift and you could click it but then it doesn't really audition the sound so that's not really that useful comparing to this using the password like while you're in drum program and going back to the holding down shift you can see that I could clear the whole section and clear the bar and I could switch to a different track so now I just want to show you how you can actually make a Melody using the step sequencer this time when we're looking at a pad it actually shows the note and the octave so that says D2 if I want to go a bit higher all I have to do is hit the pad note like rhythms that are very simple then you can put that in a lot faster I know making the trap beat like some South Side Melodies is very simple is just using one and two and eight no kind of Melodies so I could just go to the eighth note division put in C right there and this is where musicianship comes in handy because if you have musicianship and understand your notes in the Scout then you could easily find your notes and I understand that D sharp is in c minor so I could put that on the two and then I'm gonna go to D because you know a semi tone makes it a bit darker a little bit of music theory and then go to the Fort pad and go to probably G and then it's a sound something like this and you already know going back up to the track length I'm not gonna want to type all that back in so I could just go all the way down the two beats and as you can see it's blacking out everything else now it's gonna display this to beat rhythm and we can even add back our drums and past select will be more useful in this section because then I could is actually auditioned a note [Music] so I could go back to D and then let's even hear how the ratchet would sound on this and that's on the third step so we're going to go to the third Q Link on the first Q Link page [Music] that wraps up this video man thank you guys for watching and tuning in if you like this video like And subscribe share with your other producer friends that haven't messed around with the step sequencer and show them that hey it's not as bad and you actually like some dope stuff out of it [Music]

Channel: Jae Freshmen

Views: 5,180

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Id: roksDB7ROkc

Length: 13min 26sec (806 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 31 2023