How to Create MPC Chord Progressions

what's up youtube this is tube digger in this video i'm going to show you how to create your own chord progressions in mpc in standalone this is for npc live mpc live mark ii npc x and of course the mpc one this should also work for owners of the akai force as well [Music] before i get into this video i just want to thank all my current subscribers anyone that's liked and shared my videos anyone that follows and supports me on social media and of course all my current patrons on patreon i really appreciate your support if you're interested in joining me over on patreon it's www.patreon.comtubedigger every week i give away a brand new sample pack or a key group program a drum program or an npc project file or something similar so it's really good value for money if you just want to head over there www.patreon.comtubedigger if you'd like private lessons with myself please contact me at tubedigger gmail.com for more details i've also recently given my website a huge overhaul the user experience on there is far far improved from what it used to be so if you want to go and check out my website where i've got sample packs key group programs drum programs npc expansions etc please head over to www.tubedigger.com so how do we create chord progressions in mpc in standalone well the way that i do it is to utilize the retrospective record function which is a really good function that came in the mpc 2.8 so if i was to play some notes now on the pads or on my arturia key step which is just to the right of my mpc and then press and hold shift and press the main record button those notes would be printed into the sequence here and you could see them in the grid so i'm just going to do that now i'm just going to press a few notes [Music] and i press and hold shift and record you can see that they get printed into the sequence and this is a really handy feature if you know what notes you want to play or what chords and have them printed directly into your sequence and obviously we've got to move these around manually if we're not playing them timed up to a beat because these are just not on the grid in any kind of structured fashion what if we don't want those notes to be printed what if we've played a load of notes and we only want a few of those to be printed well the only way to really do that at the moment is to actually print them by doing the shift and record button combination and then go inside and delete the chords or notes that you don't want which is a little bit inconvenient but i found a workaround there doesn't seem to be anything in the manual that pertains to clear the retrospective record memory because obviously you're just playing loads of notes and then the only other function you've got is the press hold and shift and record button to print those notes let's just undo these notes play some notes randomly the only other alternative way i've found to clear that memory is to actually press record your main record button press play start now let's press and hold shift and press record and the notes don't get printed so that's all you need to do is press record and press play or play start and that should clear the retrospective record memory well i'm going to play some chords on my arturia key step then i'm going to print them into the sequence and then i'll show you how to create a chord progression so i'm not musically trained i'm just letting you know this because if i make any music theory mistakes i'm just trying to cover myself so i don't get bombarded with a load of criticism from trained musicians so when that comes to me doing chord progressions i'm making the basic assumption that a chord progression is some similar chords but you're just shifting the odd note around so i'm going to do that now i'm just going to play these chords into the mpc and use retrospective record to print them into the grid [Music] so let's press and hold shift and press record go to the grid and that's printed our chords now you can see that these are grayed out so let's just increase the bars so we can get access to those so i've got seven chords there now if i want to add to these so if i want to add a further nine chords so we've got a full band of 16 chords in our progression when we go into pad performance mode we can quickly grab some of these chords and just transpose them or transpose a note from them so let's just grab this entire chord and let's see what happens if we transpose it so let's copy it make sure you're in nudge mode let's just bring it over here and let's just transpose it down one semitone let's listen to those two in context [Music] that might work let's just copy it again and nudge it over and then transpose it down again [Music] so we could use all of those i think they would work with these other chords this might not be technically a proper way to make a progression of chords but it will give you a nice palette of chords in pad performance mode if that makes sense so let's just bring that over bring that down again [Music] we could do it again we could keep going with this let's just bring it down a few more semitones this time [Music] okay so how many have we got now let's just count one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven so we've got eleven chords again let's copy this now i'm gonna do the one note shift on this so let's just grab this note it's a minor note this one at the bottom of this last chord let's just transpose that down to another minor key no that doesn't work let's bring it up to the major [Music] i mean it works as a chord it doesn't sound off but i'm not too sure if it works with this actual progression so let's grab another one obviously this is trial and error for someone like myself that doesn't really know how to program chords as a trained musician would [Music] that works quite nicely that's quite a nice chord that fits in with the melancholic feel of these other chords so let's just do it again copy nudge let's now grab another note and transpose that up maybe to here [Music] now this one does sound a little bit off but i quite like the chord it's quite interesting to me so let's just copy it again and maybe let's shift this note um right down to here and nudge that out of the way by a mistake [Music] kind of works now there's a chord here that i'd like to put a kink in with a different note i think it might be this one just after bar nine no it's these two i'm going to grab these two press copy let's nudge those over and then we should have 16 i think let's just maybe nudge them a bit further that way let's give ourselves a couple more bars and again just a quick way that we could do this is just literally transpose let's go up actually with these [Music] now this is how you create the progression you need to grab all the chords that you want to appear in that chord progression in pad performance mode so we've selected all the notes we need to go to the main page we need to press the pencil icon in the track area and then press convert to progression just bear in mind that this wasn't available in standalone mode until mpc 2.8 so if you're running anything below that you're not going to have convert to progression available so let's just go through this i have shown this in the 2.8 update video that i made six or seven months ago we can name the progression so i'm just going to name this melon colic just missed out the eye there melancholic now just underneath here we've got the root note it says d3 i'm not concerned with that it's got the scale type major i'm also not concerned with that under here we've got chord so these are all the chords that you saw in the grid so we can play those back we've got a play button here it's gray at the moment it's quite dim we've also got the type this is where we start the progression on either the root note or normal or below root i'm just going to keep it at root and it shows you what the chord is and it gives you the chord names but that's fine if you know you've got all your 16 chords and you're happy with them all you need to do now is press do it to get access to your progression you go to pad performance and make sure you're in progressions mode and if we double tap where it says chord you can see that i've got melancholic here these are other ones that i've made so let's choose melancholic and now we've got all those chords in pad performance mode that 13th chord there isn't to my liking so what i can do is go back to the grid and check chord number 13. i think it's this one here now it sounded fine in the grid from what i remember maybe i was wrong [Music] no sounds terrible so let's change that um let's just transpose the last note might not work well that works not too sure if i'm happy with chord 15 either [Music] i can't pick out which note isn't working for me but let's just grab that note i think it might be that one let's just shift it up [Music] now i've shifted it so it's going to be the same as this chord so let's actually just grab the top note shift that up to there okay that works for me if we now go back to the track area and press convert to progression now if i rename this to melon colic again it should overwrite i've not done this before but i'm just making a logical assumption and again we've got all those options we've been through that let's press do it yep there you go so we can just replace it so that's good that's shown you that you can actually go back in and change the chord just by knowing which pad it appeared on so it's going to be in numerical order and then you can go back into your grid find where it is in order on here and make the necessary changes to make it sound correct or what i believe to be correct so let's have a listen anyway so we've got that chord here now i assume it's going to be the same we don't have to refresh it by loading it back in yeah okay so let's listen to this in context again i'm going to play some of these chords in and get a nice little kind of drake style trap melody and i can also show you how to put some effects on this tube synth patch so let's just find a little melody out of these chords [Music] before i put in this melody i just want to change something in tube synth now you might be able to hear this if i press and hold one of these pads it starts to wobble the pitch [Music] and i really don't like that it's a default setting it seems for a lot of these patches in tube synth so if you go to the setup page you can see i've mentioned this before in other videos we've got the depth control here for the lfo1 depth and it's at nine percent and that lfo on this page is controlling pitch okay so let's just take it down there we don't really need to as long as we take this down to zero and that should clear that press and hold shift if you want it perfectly at zero [Music] okay so that's got rid of that now the other thing that i want to do is just go to the track mixer go to the synth here so it's our second program and in the insert so let's just first of all add a filter and it's gonna be a low pass filter now i know what you some of you might be saying is there's a low pass filter in tube synth but i actually want to use this dedicated filter for the whole program let's just bring that down [Music] right let's record this into our sequence [Music] so i'm not too happy with this chord at the end let's um bring this down again i think one more yeah that works so let's just play it again from the start and then i'll add some drums because i think i've spent enough time on the synth side and the progression side [Music] there you go you've got a nice little melody there well i i've got it you haven't but yeah of course if you want the project for this i'm going to make a nice little beat so you'll get access to all the drums you'll get the progressions of course and whatever else is coming next week and the week after that too it's a good deal guys get involved patreon tube digger right let's get some drums in i haven't got any drums so let's go to the browser expansions i'm going to choose this one here great expansion this drums that knock put it into waveform view type kick [Music] that's nice let's have that and for this let's just choose a finger snap maybe something kind of unintrusive [Music] and obviously we need a hi-hat of some description i've typed in hit that's not going to get me a hi-hat is it it's going to get me a high hit i think i'll use that one as the main hat but let's try see what we can come up with just something simple like that and then we can do some fancy stuff for the hats [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] okay so i might do a little bit of extra sound design for tube synth let's just go back to the track mix and let's just see how this sounds with a low-fi effect on it let's go to harmonic lo-fi now the secret source in this insert effect for me at least if you switch on the anti-alias filter and then bring the post and pre both down to around nine o'clock just maybe ten o'clock nine ten o'clock should be fine that kind of takes off some of the ringing edge that you get from reducing the sample rate so let's just see how that sounds i'm going to reduce this until we get a sweet spot [Music] do [Music] right so i'm going to go to track three you can see it's looking at tube synth so let's now create a new plug-in program and let's choose one of the new npc drum plugins let's choose the kick [Music] it's a little bit too high that's because we've got it in progressions mode let's turn that off just be wary if you've been using pad performance and then you go to another key group program or a plug-in program and you find that your notes sound a bit wonky it might be the pad performance setting or mode that you've got it in so let's go up to pad bank d maybe c yep c is good program edit there's glide so let's increase this [Music] maybe we have to increase the hold [Music] let's now increase the glide time even more let's now go to distortion [Music] and let's actually put that mix amount up is that the second knob yet [Music] that's how you create chord progressions that's how you create a drake style melancholic trap vibe as well i've shown you some effects i've shown you some drum programming hopefully there's a lot for you to digest in this video i'm sorry i went quick on some of the parameter changes within the drum synth for the bass but i just got into the groove that's what happens sometimes if you do want more information about that obviously you can check out my drum synth tutorial video if you want private lessons for myself please contact me at tubedigger gmail.com patreon is www.patreon.comtubedigger and any questions comments put them down below i'll try my best to answer all of them that's it i will see you on the next one this is cheap digger and i'm out you

Channel: Tubedigga

Views: 20,739

Keywords: mpc chord progressions tutorial, mpc chord progressions, mpc chords, mpc one, mpc live, mpc live mk2, mpc live mk1, mpc x, mpc x tutorial, mpc x beat making, mpc one beat making, mpc live tutorial, mpc live 2 tutorial, mpc live 2, mpc pad perform mode, mpc pad perform, mpc live pad perform mode, mpc 2.9 update

Id: WgTFTKBzbQs

Length: 23min 50sec (1430 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 27 2020