How to Use the Akai MPC | FULL Walkthrough

what's up y'all in this video I'm going to show you a comprehensive walkthrough of the MPC workflow we'll be covering things like sample chopping drum sequencing recording and more and I'm going to show you how to use the splice integration which is a really big unlock for the newer NPCs now I'm going to use the NPC OnePlus but you can follow along with any MPC and in fact if you don't have an NPC maybe you're just curious about this Hardware workflow this video can still be valuable for you I have just started my MPC 1 plus and you can see the starting screen I recommend exploring all of these templates they're a great way to learn about the instruments and sounds that's already on your NPC but let's go ahead and select empty project and this is the main screen that shows your sequences your tracks and your drum programs this is a very important hierarchy to understand when working in the MPC workflow if you're already coming from a digital audio workstation you can think of them as maybe your scenes these are going to be your tracks and your programs are going to be your individual instruments so your drums your syns your baselines so there's a few ways you can load sample you can use the SD card you can sample it directly using the inputs in the back we've got a short on our Channel explaining how to do both so we need some sounds to start this idea I've actually gone to splice and gone through this Dusty crates pack if your NPC supports Wi-Fi which most of the new ones do you can sync splyce sounds wirelessly to your MPC I'm going to hit menu to go to preferences and this is actually a great screen to look at this is where you can access basically all your panels I'm going to go to preferences and I can go to splice to make sure I'm logged in if you don't know how to log in we'll have a video link to quickly show you how so going back to this main section I could go to menu and I could go to browse browser um but there are dedicated buttons and depending on which NPC model you have you might have to hit shift and another button to get to your browser say the NPC live or on this NPC 1l I can just directly hit the browse button so in the content section you can see the built-in drums instruments and samples you can see your splice directory right here and splyce already has it organized by some useful categories and a really useful trick I like doing so I'm going to go to the pack this is the data knob and I just scroll through you can Al use plus or minus here um and I'm going to go to the dusty crates pack so if I want to actually bookmark this I can hit shift and then one of the folder options so if I hit shift and one now if I go to two and go back to one you can see it's bookmarked at one you can adjust the audition volume right at the bottom turn it on and off and have it warped to your project as very useful let's go to the loops and load in a melodic loop we're going to go to song [Music] starters oh yeah I really like that [Music] one yeah I really like this one I'm going to select this one and we're going to load it by hitting load now even though I just hit load it did not load to any of these pads we need to visit the sample assign window and there is actually a way to directly load it to the pad but just in case it's good to know this your sample assigns here these are going to be your sample pull with all your sounds just simply hit the sample and whatever pad selected hit the enter by clicking in on the data knob so now it's up here double click on the stop button to stop the sample now there's a few ways we can work from here but I actually kind of want to chop this sample up a little bit so to get to sample edit you can go to the menu section and go to sample edit at the very top left but there's a dedicated button on the NPC 1l which is really nice so from this screen where we were the browse menu we can go to sample edit so the green button starts the sample red pad stop it and if you want to adjust where the sample starts it's as simple as dragging on the touch screen which I I I actually really love doing this and then zooming in um pinch to zoom so that's a good way but as you could just see I actually brought up the Q knobs and that's a very important MPC workflow so these are quick links this quick link will essentially map to any of the parameters that have this little Q icon now these four knobs are all mapped to the start and they just do it at different intensity so this is very minor adjustments versus very very minor adjustments versus more macro adjustments so all four of these knobs are actually adjusting the start uh and now the end at different degrees but actually I want to chop it to different pads and there's a few ways to do this of course there's a few ways to do everything as you see one of the cool ways is just to go to the bottom hit trim and it'll actually switch to the Chop panel and as you can see there's four methods if here manually chopping so we can hit it from the [Music] start [Music] so that actually just jumped into a different bank even so our banks are over here Bank a bank B so I'm actually you could see in Bank B now if I hit Bank a now undo is a very important um button and actually the most important button I kind of talked about it about shift so if I wanted to get into any of these other Banks shift we'll get into bank C so there's anything below it and there are a lot of important shift commands and actually if you notice anytime there's a menu down here holding shift will I'll generally give you another option which we're going to go to convert in a second um so really quickly we're going to go to bank a where this was I'm going to hit undo very important um and it'll undo each manual slice which is nice uh and the other methods are threshold so this will automatically detect very similar to maybe simpler sensitivity uh and regions which will just be kind of even regions or BPM um which you can Define I like threshold and I'm going to take it [Music] down going to manually adjust it right here that chop is no [Music] good and two has been kind of truncated so I'm going have to zoom in zoom in if we don't do length slices this can actually [Music] not get chopped up you saw that issue where I dragged three before two and then two became nothing it's like oh no so if that ever happens to you you can actually unlink slices that's a very useful tip it's actually nice to get like variations on [Music] slices all right so then let's expand these actually I'm going to undo undo let's get back to sensitivity like this is nice home base all right so I found an [Music] [Music] idea o that one's nice oh sh wrong one now the last important step to get this into a drum program so we can play it in one of our tracks is to convert it using the shift menu and hit convert and we can say a new drum program using slices non-destructive so that means we can kind of expand the slices or make them smaller rather than it committing to each individual chop and then we'll just say do it so now let's go to the main menu so main section uh I reference sequence track and drum program at the beginning we're just on our very first track we're going to go to this one and rename it chord chops you can cycle through your programs with the data knob on the drum program and cycle through tracks this way as well same with sequences there's actually a next sequence button dedicated right here boom goes into the sequence mode and you can actually kind of go through your whole song this way this is like the song mode so let's go ahead record and now we're going to go to the clip hit shift stop to go to the very beginning stop will just kind of stop you there pause it play start will actually always go from the beginning so we can or shift stop will get you back stopped at the beginning so go ahead hit record and hit play [Music] [Music] I'm going to stop it and if I hit play again the metronome is still going and we can kind of change the metronome Behavior right at the very top under the metronome icon so on the enable field let's just go back to play and turn it off so now let's get in some drums by going to a new track so the two is unused we can go to a new drum program by Hing plus go to our directory one which was the uh Dusty crates pack go to one shots drums and actually looks like they're separate already here so I'm going to go to kicks whatever pad's highlighted now is with w low to so cinnamon and then you can go back go to snare sounds pretty nice [Music] I like playing the pads in but you know you might not want to and we can sequence the pads as well so if you want to step sequence you can go to the dedicated step sequence button on the MPC or you can go through the menu remember the menu has everything and once you're in the step sequence whatever pad you hit is not the sound it's it's where in the sequence you're inputting notes and the velocity of the notes so that's nice you can really quickly do you know different velocities oh and let's make the bars one length so that pad is our high hat we can keep going down so ao1 is our kick ao2 is our snare AO3 is our high hat and if I want maybe the up Beats I could go like this make it a little harder right and then go to minus so the snare will do on two and four nice and Loud nice and loud [Music] so now it's clipping pretty badly so I'm going to go to the mixer and that's important so we can do pad mix or track mix track mix there's three tracks again this first track disregard so this will be the cord chops and this will be the drums we can take the levels down right here so you can see the step sequence pattern fully here in piano roll but I actually want to record my drums so I'm going to go ahead reset this by hitting bars 4 and then going to the main section and clearing this track so now it's empty it's four bars go back to track two and reset the drum program on the bottom and let's just record in a pattern so we're going to hit record play and actually that's going to start at measure 2 so I'm going to hit shift stop record [Music] play that was time corrected if you can tell it had time correction on if I don't want it to have time correction I can undo and if you hit the time correct button or you go up to your menu there's a Time correction in the main section here TC uh this will bring up time correction and that's important right now it's on you can do you know a percentage the strength I'm actually going to go to the strength and just lower it I could turn it off completely or you could apply quantization afterwards there's a lot of methods of doing it I like kind of doing it with a low time correction on so we're going to hit shift stop record and play [Music] now if overdub is on if I put in more notes it's going to add them to the pattern if I want to delete this One Singular note I can just hit this erase button justas R right there just going to the main section here we've got you know two tracks with drums and a top sample with two different instruments maybe I did want to actually add a third track with a VST so that's cool to show um let's just get in a sound they have great sounds I'll get a melron really quick some strings or choir that's great Voice Choir uh great yep and we can actually edit the instrument right here very cool now to get the kind of preferences we're going to go to pad perform and we can select our key here so [Music] minor I kind of want to get some effects on this track 3 plugin and we're going to add it as the next sequence so to get this next section of our song we're going to go copy sequence and copy it to the next unus sequence we're going to name this like with um choir add in you know we could have maybe called this Verse Chorus different sections of your song essentially but now we have two sequences and they'll play they're the same right now so let's go to sequence two and add in that choir line and track mix really quickly let's get in a Reverb so we can go to the delay Reverb or Reverb you know anything those kind of things are going to make sound good maybe a spring [Music] reverb I want to switch octaves really quickly I can hit the different [Music] banks I think just more [Music] subtle so this is going to be four bars hit record and hit [Music] play now for sequence one I'm just going to remove the drums by going to track two doing the same thing going to the edit events and clearing the track yep is not going to mess it up [Music] for now if you want to trigger your sequences right away you can go to sudden mode so right now it's playing through this length of the sequence four bars you can [Music] see and another fun thing to do at this point is in add in the XY effects you can actually hit shift XY to get right there on the MPC one plus and there's a variety of different types of inserts uh you can go to setup and and change them you know this could be just a low pass filter oh with some LFO [Music] though now we go to the performance page we go to the next sequence and we can hit sudden hit [Music] play all right so I hope you learned something or gain some inspiration if you did subscribe to the channel and I'll catch youall on the next one later a

Channel: Splice

Views: 7,712

Keywords: Splice, Music Production, How to Make Music, Music Samples, Samples, Plugins, akai mpc, mpc pro, mpc, mpc live, mpc one, mpc one plus, mpc tutorial, how to make a beat on the mpc, how to make a beat mpc, mpc beatmaking, MPC tutorial, mpc live 2, splice mpc, splice samples, splice pack, dusty crates, splice originals, splice sample pack, how to use sampler, sampler, hardware sampling, hardware sampler, how to sample, how to sample splice, mpc beginner tutorial, how to mpc

Id: lqM-MG3qTcM

Length: 18min 2sec (1082 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 20 2024