I Wish I Had This When I Started With MPC Key 61 | Full Beginner Workflow Tutorial

what's going on it's Brandon ballistic ballistic beats ballistic Productions back with another NPC key 61 tutorial this time um I'm going to go through and produce a entire beat from start to finish that's from turning it on for the first time what you need to do to get off that demo screen picking your sounds from a flash drive or thumb drive um going through putting them in a program making the beat using the internal sounds and sense and sequencing it at the end so yeah I might have left something out but I'm just going through this is my workflow when I'm on the NPC k61 and I decided I'll should share that it's p du I did one or two of these for the NPC live and I'm doing this and more for the NPC key so this will not be every little thing um but I do plan on touching on most things in the future so this is a good chance for you to get started it's going to definitely allow you to make a beat from start to finish um you can also leave a comment if I left anything out particularly that you hop that I would cover but I didn't necessarily get to and that way when I make my next video or series of videos I can include those topics as well but um I don't want to have this intro go too long let's get right to the tutorial and it's a long one so have something to sip on or have a little snack and get your NPC key out if you want to try to follow along hit the pause hit rewind do whatever you got to do save it come back to it it's a reference material anyway um so yeah let's get to it and if you like it of course hit the Subscribe button and there's other NPC even my NPC uh live things a lot of that if not all of it also applies to the key 61 they work exactly the same way uh the live of course just doesn't have a keyboard so they all use the same software the same touchcreen menus all of that um but yeah let's get to it all right so going to turn on my NPC key 61 it takes a little bit to start up it don't take as long as some instruments though so ain't really got no real complaints there and the screen looks good so let's give that a second all right so if you haven't made any changes or if you just got it it's going to load up to this splash screen uh it's a demo screen really you could pick a bunch of different demo projects and there's some pretty cool songs in there and you can check out what they did like you can go through the different parts of the songs and see what instruments they used what effects they used and that's pretty much what you can do with demos um a lot of times we don't touch it at all so the first thing that I would do is to go in here and choose empty project and after that it'll bring you to your instruments page um we're not going to go directly there yet so we're going to click the main button and this will take you to your main screen and this is pretty much where you control everything um there's ways to go behind in the menus and go deeper but this is where you'll see the whole layout uh and see exactly what your song has going on see what your project got going on all that good stuff so from here on your main screen uh is broken down into sequences tracks and programs so yeah you're going to have a sequence and that'll be like all of your sounds like your whole Loop like your instrument whether you got a synth going a bass going some drums going a sample going or whatever little sounds you have that'll all be in a sequence and one sequence can hold lots of tracks I think it's like 128 and most people I've seen never get anywhere close to that and yeah it goes up to 128 tracks in one sequence you really won't need all that I promise if you're doing if you need all that you're doing something wrong on a track you're going to hold a program and a program is what you actually play that's going to be if you click this little grid icon you'll see that's a drum program and a drum program is going to hold your drums or it can hold your sample chops or whatever you uh whatever sound that you're going to make and that's what you'll actually use on that track and you'll play through and record a loop a loop means how many bars you have your song set to it's going to play that many bars over and over so if you have a four bar loop it's going to play Four Bars and it'll start back over and play that same thing over and over and then you usually want to go in like multiples of four so you'll go to eight bars and 16 bars and things like that for traditional songs anyway way um there's no rules you do get experimental if you want to but that's typically what most people stick to and then the BPM is the tempo uh how fast the song is so that'll make more sense when we get into it so for the BPM I'm going to go around 150 and I'mma do four bars to start something simple and when I get ready to make a beat this is where I start I said my bars and my BPM and I'm on track one and I'm going to click this first little four boxes which is again drum program and we want to pick sounds to pick your sounds you'll go into the browse button and you can get there many ways you can click menu and click browser from the top right of your menu that'll get you to your sounds I'm going to click main to go back you can you see Under menu it says browse so that means it's a secondary command you could double click menu that took me to my browse screen if I go back you can also hold shift and click menu and that'll get you there too whichever is faster I like to double click but the shift button will come in handy anytime you see those little words up under a button that means that button has a secondary function and you could either double click it or you could hold shift and hit that button uh to get to it like hold shift under copy and delete under 16 level you got notes Under full level you got half level that's comes in handy when you want things to not be too loud but again we'll get there later uh for here so it loads up by default to the internal drum sounds for the NPC k61 and you see you got your acoustic your chill trap house German base dub step they still make dub step got EDM [Applause] house hip hop and if you notice those demos sound kind of fast it's because sometimes people like to record in double time anytime you get like over a 100 or a little bit over a 100 um that's like double times so let's actually take this BPM back down instead of 150 I'm going to start at 75 and let's see how those demo sounds sound at [Music] 75 a little bit slow but still that's better but today I'm actually not going to use the internal drums I'm going to put drums on my flash drive and some of y'all might do the same um using my own drums you go through the same way to access them but the first thing is I'm going to plug this into the back into one of the USB ports back to browse and to access that USB drive I'm going to click the places option at the top on the left and I have internal which is the sounds that come with it NPC BP is my ballistic Productions SSD drive that I have in installed on the inside of this I added a 2 tbte SSD so I should always have plenty of space cuz uh most sound samples don't take up that much space so that 2 terab should go a long way uh and then ballistic here is the removable uh thumb drive that I just attached and I have my remedy drum kit here that I'm using this my newest drum kit and I will leave a link to that in the description also so if you like the sounds you can pick it up it's some good quality drum sounds um and it'll help get you started too cut through the mix and all that good stuff so yeah let's pick some sounds I'm going to start with a kick I double clicked on that kick or you can use this wheel here and go through and pick your [Music] sounds I'll pick that first one so what I'm going to do I like that sound uh to get it on the pad I'm going to click this pad and you'll see it highlights green and then I could click load and now that kick is on that pad I'm going to click this up Arrow at the top next to the little uh foul path to that drive that takes me up a level back to the categories so now I could pick a clap I'm going to pick that clap and I like to put my clap over here load so now I got my clap and my kick on there go up a level pick a h hat I'mma pick that nice little trap hip hop H hat I'll put that open H hat to right there all right so we got those and a snare that snare works with a lot got my drums that's good for now I clicked main to get back to the main menu I'm going to click uh track one here and turn the wheel to get the track two you can do that or you can go back to track one you could click track plus or minus here at the bottom it'll automatically go to the next track these sounds here now I want to get a sound to go with my drums so I could click the sounds button here and this takes me to the sound selection screen for the plugins that are installed in here or I could click main swipe and sounds is right there as a option too so now under sounds um I added some plugins into mine like the Jura and the mini D I bought extra but I'm going to use I think I bought well I bought fabric before it does come with with the NPC key so we'll use fabric once you click a sound plugin that you want to use you'll see this screen here this screen just has plugins uh presets on it so in fabric Excel we have bells click there you have a bunch of bells presets you click strings you need some strings you got pages and pages of strings you click sense they got even more of those and you just click a preset and go I'm actually going to use that cuz uh it sound pretty cool like I could come up with something so I'm going to click main to go back to my main screen I got everything selected here my bar selected so I'm going to choose overdub and the difference between these I typically use overdub like 80 90 % of the time cuz what that does is lets you go over and over with the loop and keep adding to it and I'll give an example of that right now something [Music] simple so now that it's looped overdub lets you continuously make more changes so it's still recording because I had overdub [Music] there so that's still going I deleted that um by using the undo button because I want to do something different from that that was just to show um but yeah when you use overdub it keeps going and every time it goes around you can add some so you could do your lows it Loops back over then you could do some high notes or add a Melody to your chords or whatever without stopping and that's good for workflow um if you use record after it goes through through that four bars that you set it to it'll stop recording at that point so anything else you do is not going to record but that's good in case you want to continue to work out your Melody so I'm actually going to turn the tempo up cuz 75 was a little too slow so I'm going to go to about 82 and you see I ain't got room to go down here because there NPC and stuff on my desk but say you're at a comfortable position on the keyboard and you want to record higher notes and this is too low you can use your octave button on the left side and they have octave down octave up I'm going to go up and that'll take me up a octave down back up so if I want to be around there I don't have to move I can just change [Music] that and let's do a recording so I'm going hit stop over duub play start so it'll start at the [Music] beginning [Music] and if you do overdub and you're in a habit and it and you still want to mess around before you record something else just hit overdub again and it'll stop if it's playing and you want to add something real quick you can just hit overdub at any point and just start recording and and then hit it again to stop so you really don't have to get out of your workflow this [Music] way so that's cool for that the next step would be to go to your next track hit sounds and I want to pick another sound this time let me see about a piano I'm going to hit play start and mess around with the posos to find something that I [Music] like that's extremely simple but this this is a [Music] tutorial I messed that up so I'm going to hit undo and it's gone forgot where I [Music] was [Music] [Music] that wasn't it but I'm going to change the [Music] [Applause] sound all right so that piano is okay but it sounds really plain and something you can do when you have something that's really plain just to add a little bit more to to it is add some effects so if I want to add effects to that piano um I want to listen to it on its own and see how good I can make it sound so I'm going to hit play [Music] start going to hit this little eyeball icon right up next to the home [Music] button and this brings me to my inserts I'm going to stop it for this actually the first insert you see is going to be a little square and that's a pad if you're using a drum program and say you have your kick on pad one you could click the pad and hit pad one and that will let you add effects or change things on just that pad we're not in a drum program so we're not going to do a individual pad we're doing a plugin so that's going to do the second option next to the pad you have four squares and that's the whole program if you have the is on some drums it's going to affect all the pads if you're on a plugin it's going to affect of course the whole plugin so we want to do that the next option is uh the tracks and you can make changes and uh change the volume sends if you want to get into some intricate mixing you could send everything to like a sub miix track and things like that and you got master and you can add Master effect so this will affect the whole track all the sounds all the drums all the samples everything um most of the time unless you're mixing you're going to use Master for that but otherwise I'll use either individual paths or the program option hopefully this is making sense um so I'm choosing program because I want to affect my plug-in program I'm going to an insert number one click there and we can add some re verb to that I know so let's start it so I chose Reverb large and as you can see it gets kind of drowned [Music] out um if I want to hear just the that instrument by itself I can click solo back on the main page under the program option right under that insert area there's solo mute and uh automation I click solo and now we have just that piano by [Music] itself and you can hear what that Reverb did let me remove that say I want something cooler than Reverb um I actually have the air flavor Pro plugin from aai in [Music] here that's under the harmonic section and it gets kind of interesting using [Music] that have all these different presets kind of dirty at up vinyl can mess with some of the [Music] filters that sounds pretty pretty cool this is without it this is with that I could also add under Dynamics a compressor just to keep it kind of [Music] tame presets will usually get you most of the way there and you can add anything else that's you see [Music] fit without that kind of a lot of variation and that keeps it more together so I'm going back to my main page I'm going to click solo again to unsolo [Applause] it and that's pretty cool so now I'm going back to my track one where I had my [Music] drums for my high hats I like to start with high hats first a lot of the time um you could either click it in like this you could hold note repeat and do it that way or you could hold shift and hit note repeat and that'll do latch note repeat which you don't have to hold the button down which I like to do cuz then can do your your cool stuff your variations and change the timing on it um I like the k61 because you can hold it down I'm used to doing this on my live and I could use the touch screen to change these but I always got to go back to my timing uh with the k61 you can use the touch strip and it always returns when you let go to whatever timing you set it at right now I have it set to e and I could go up there and that's pretty cool like as soon as you let go goes right back to where you set it and let me get my H hats in [Music] [Applause] [Music] here [Music] [Applause] [Music] right [Music] here that could be cool like sometimes if I'm making beats I'll leave a a mistake like that with that little pause I didn't do it on purpose but sometimes if it sounds good it's good there's no rules to music really but for the case of this I'm going to show you how you could fix that you could hit undo and do it all over again or you could hit note repeat to turn it off and click this little tic-tac-toe grid icon here on the main screen that takes you to the piano roll and if I zoom in there using the magnifying glass I can fine-tune that and see where that mistake is [Music] so I can see there's a gap right there and I can zoom all the way into that Gap and I want to add um a extra note there so I could click the pencil the pencil to add notes the Eraser lets you take away and then there's this little dotted square that you can hold to highlight specific notes like multiple notes at a time that you want to uh effect so I'm going to take that off hit the pencil go right there where I think that note that's missing should be it's too long so I'm going to click it and edit end that's good to know too if it's on nudge at the bottom you can use this here and it's just going to nudge it over one space you can do edit start and it'll change where it starts let me zoom out some so yeah it moves the front back and forth through the bars uh if you do edit end it'll make it longer or shorter from the end and that's typically what you would want to do uh you also got transpose where you can use the wheel to move it up and down on different notes so I am going to put this back to nudge and move it over here see how far I can go in there to get it shorter those were 16th notes I think or eighth notes I'm going to have to change the timing so I'm hitting note repeat this is a lot you could skip past that if you want I'm hitting note repeat and hitting uh 16th so now I can edit end and go even smaller with that and I can hit Noe repeat and go to 30 seconds and since this is a high hat it only lasts for a split second so I just made that a 30 second note hold note repeat hit 130 seconds and I was able to get that note smaller now I can move it right down using trans pose into that spot and let's [Music] see so that note won't line up right now because I'm on a regular grid whether I'm on 30 seconds 16th or eth my grid it won't let me line that up unless I put it on triplets cuz I was doing triplet notes when I recorded that so now I should be able to nudge it to where it [Music] goes and that's better so that's a little Advanced but it works works and it's good for you to know you might not be completely new at uh making beats so that's good information um back to my main screen we got the high hats done now I'm going to do my clap it's stop over du play [Music] start [Music] next is the [Music] [Music] snare I'mma do my open high hat [Music] next hitting overdub to stop recording and that open high hat is a little louder than I wanted so I'm going to hit this eyeball again and use that pad button I was talking about now I'mma click the pad that has it it's selected now I can click this volume knob and go [Music] down all right so we got all that now I can do my uh kick [Music] all right so we got that and pretty much that is a good Loop actually let's let's add one more instrument so a lot of times you want to listen to your stuff and it doesn't sound finished to you you might want to add something else so I'm going to hide that information with the eyeball button uh go back down go to another track so track four I didn't use yet so I'm going to go there click sounds and maybe a lead sound would be cool over all of this so to get that think I'll use op4 opx 4 I don't know if I paid for that or not but um it doesn't really matter lead let's find a [Music] lead so we'll use something something like that back to my [Music] main I'm going to go in eyeball program inserts and add flavor Pro to that also [Music] I added a sample rate down preset on there just to make it a little more [Music] rough so that's that so now we have this whole sequence done um no we don't we need base always got to have base so one more sound going to click track go to the next track I need to add a baseline so back to my sounds um I'm going to use mini D for my base I'm going choose new program to make sure I don't undo something I already did face I always like that one back to main [Music] [Music] I like [Music] that [Music] I like that so instead of redoing that I want to change that last note so I'm going back to um the grid View and I found all of my stuff right here and I'm going to zoom in all the way to the last note get my dotted box here and highlight just the last note choose transpose and I'm going to take it up uh note until I find something I like and I can click the time at the top the bars to not have to listen to all that or you can use these arrows to skip through the bar so you don't have to to listen to your whole loop again didn't like that [Music] note that one's all [Music] right I like that all right back to main now we got our whole sequence together that's pretty much a whole beat I'm actually going to go through and show you how to put a beat together uh so if you want to sequence that in here I typically would export all of those sounds and use it in Ableton or something and I arrange my beat and add a intro and hook and versus and all that in there but to do it in the NPC what you want to do is copy that entire sequence to another sequence you don't have to do it this way it's just the easiest so I'm going to click this pencil icon off to the right of the sequences and you'll see similar options for the tracks too so you can go into tracks and copy track and bounce to sample to your hard drive or double speed and do all that that stuff would be mostly for another video but you can go in and experiment with the options you have there but I'm going back to my main hit the pencil under sequence I want to copy this whole sequence to sequence 2 to a new blank sequence so I'm going to click um going to name that one so I'm going to create a intro in sequence 2 and then do it now it's going to copy it to a new sequence number two and call it intro go back to the main now you see I'm in sequence number two it's called intro sequence number one has the default name let me uh rename that uh over the pencil I could click the a with the little cursor and rename sequence one that we just made to main slash chorus cuz I'll pretty much use my chorus or my hook to have everything plann at the same time under intro that's not the intro of course but since we are on a so sequence a different sequence I should say I can go in and get rid of everything that I don't want in this sequence so so yeah one way you can find which instruments you want to use in a particular sequence um I can go to menu and go to track mute and that adds each track in the sequence to a pad and you can click the pad to turn them on and off so let's [Music] play and right now that uh last track is the base that's what we did there so the first one track one is my drums P two it's the first Melody we did that piano was the third thing let's do that and the base [Music] maybe that might work definitely not [Music] that so of course that's basic but I'm going use just that sound there for the intro and let's go back to the main track cuz that's the one that has everything and I'm going to copy that sequence I mean the main sequence excuse me copy that sequence over to sequence three and I'll call this verse uh yeah verse one that doesn't mean for me it's not going to be the first verse it's going to be the first part of the first verse so I'm going to choose verse one for that I'm going to go ahead and make another one and call it verse two and get the rest of the song together I'm going to make another one and call it outro and you can do bridge or however many sections you want your song to be now I can go to the verse one [Music] [Music] part and I'm going to take out that uh piano for the first part of the verse and then halfway through the verse I'll let it come back in so that's that intro just that so I'm going go to the second part of the [Music] verse menu track mute and I pretty much want everything in except that sense sound that [Music] lead and I'll just have that comment on the hook for outro what are we going to [Music] do track mute um outro maybe no drums and no [Music] lead actually that just piano and Baseline and this is where you really get creative with it this is what changes the loop that you have into a song so you can play around with this as much as you want um I like doing it in a doll because you can have more control over it you can cut things easier uh halfway through or you can have them come in at odd times and add effects and automation real easy you can do a lot of that in here it's just going to take more time um once you have all of your sequences laid out like that it's time to put the song together and to put the song together you're going to go to song mode so I hit menu and we want to choose song All right so to start we want to hit insert and it's flashing to figure out what we want to bring in first and to do that I click main right there which it defaulted to I'm scrolling my wheel until I get to intro and now intro is highlighting and the number of Loops is this little arrow like how many times do you want that intro part to play I'm leaving it at one so now I'm going to insert again and now it started with intro to double that but I don't want that this time this time I want my main chorus to play so I'm going back to that and I want that to actually play two times so it's four bars we want eight bars for our cor so I'm going to have that play twice next I'm going to hit insert again now of course we want to change this to verse the first part of our verse and next I'm changing the uh I only want that to play one time and verse two I'll have that play two times and then that'll be give me a 12 Bar verse so one time for the first part two times for the second that's 3 * 4 which is 12 like that math huh I'm just kidding that's basic uh hit insert again so after the verse we want to go back to the hook or the chorus and we want that to play twice and after that insert we'll do outro so this is basic this is one verse but usually what you'll do after that you'll go on into your next verse or your Bridge or whatever and you just lay the song out however you want it I'm just doing it short for the purposes of tutorial and that's still pretty long but I'm going to play through it so you can see how that works so let's go [Music] [Music] yeah [Music] [Applause] [Music] yeah [Music] and that's it it just played through my whole song The Way I had it laid out the sequencer is actually good for what it is especially if you make a certain type of beat and you don't want to go and be too crazy with it um if you want to just get down what you played and have it ordered out that that'll do it for you um I know it's a lot of stuff I didn't touch on like the Q links and the buttons uh the additional buttons on here but again this was kind of to show my main workflow I use a lot of sounds and sents when I make beats um so it doesn't go all the way into the other stuff but I am going to make videos on that other stuff and just uh stay tuned hit subscribe if you want to see more and leave a comment if you want to add to that next video or add something specific that you want to see in there and I'll make note to add that in as soon as possible all right so yeah once again that is what we have um we made a Beat from start to finish uh there was hopefully it was followable if not just let me know um anything that you want to see more particularly um I could try to zoom in more next time or whatever it might take to uh change things but I think that will definitely get you from start to finish making your first beat or your first several beats and just play around with it don't be scared to mess around with anything in the menus I didn't touch on all of the insert effects just start putting effects on and the trash cans right there so you can take them back off so just go through and get a feel of what all of those things do on your own you're not going to break it those buttons exist for a reason so just that's pretty much what most of us did uh just go through click buttons see what it do learn oh I shouldn't do that anymore and just hit undo and uh keep going but if this helped you please hit the uh subscribe button uh this did take a lot and I just want that motivation to continue if I know y'all checking in and hitting subscribe hitting like to show that appreciation um I appreciate that and I definitely do um also if you like the drums in this or you want to support you could click the link in the description for my remedy or my Elixir drum kits uh those are the only two I have up right now but more are coming soon and yeah just let me know what's up comment do all that and until next time and I'm dead serious about leaving a comment to let me know uh anything else that you want to see and I'll try to make a video to help everybody because you're probably not the only one that wants to see that particular thing but yeah y'all hold it down

Channel: Brandon B'Lystic Lee

Views: 11,322

Keywords: mpc live tutorial beginner, mpc live tutorial begginer, Music Production, MPC, MPC Live, MPC One, mpc beginner tutorial, mpc beginner, mpc beats beginner tutorial, mpc one beginner tutorial, mpc x beginner tutorial, mpc beats beginners walkthrough, mpc live beginners, mpc live 2 beginner tutorial, mpc software for beginners, best beginner mpc, akai mpc one, how to make beats, Mpc live 2 begginer tutorial, mpc key 61, mpc key 61 tutorialtu, mpc key 61 beginner, mpckey 61

Id: 2u1zJqyeSJ8

Length: 49min 28sec (2968 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 18 2023