Master the MPC One - Project Level Q-Links, the Soul of the MPC

what's up everybody welcome back i'm jack today we've got another video about the mpc one we're going to be talking about the soul of this device project level q links let's get into it so let's get into it right now i have a beat i like it i think it needs a little bit more polish a little bit more shine here's what it sounds like so far so i'm pretty happy with that but like i said it needs a little bit more polish i need to extend it more than just that four bar loop and so i'm going to apply the project level q links there's a few different ways you can do that the first is going to be to hit this button right here you can see it says cue link edit if you tap that twice or alternatively if you like holding the shift button hold shift hit q link it's going to bring you there i like just double tapping that button brings you to the q links menu so you can come here you can click on project you can see that i have all of these empty we're going to go ahead and build these up the way i like to do that is i like to take a row per interesting part of the song for example maybe this first row is going to be the lead maybe i have one for the bass the snare hi-hats the project as a whole if you want to have let's say a delay coming in or out or let's say a cut off for a filter you can apply all that here really almost anything on this device that you can manipulate you can tie to the project level q links and really expand what you can do with the project that you're working on so the way you want to start is you want to listen to your song and find the parts of the song that you think might be the most interesting or might need a little bit more of a lift i like the lead on this right i think that's really nice but i think it could use something extra so let's get into that so what this is it's the height plug-in we have the bend voice string pad i've made some changes to it but if we come here what i'm gonna do essentially is i'm just gonna play with these settings until i find something that creates a unique effect creates something that i think would be a lot of fun to play with as the song uh progresses so let's do that what you want to do is just play your beat let it just play on loop and play with these settings until you find something that's interesting so we're here messing with the synth and i want to change to screen level q links well rather than exiting the screen i can actually hold the q link button when i do that you can see we have a quick menu for the q link settings and so i can tap screen let go and i'm still on the page where i was at this is incredibly useful it makes the workflow much quicker on the mpc one so you can come down here you can get a little bit more intricate with your q links and see exactly what you're changing and where but this is amazing hold down that button it's going to speed your process up tremendously so i've done that i've changed to screen level now it's time to turn on my beat and start changing things around and see what sounds nice all right so i found actually a handful of things that i think are really fun so i'm going to show you how i want to apply them in a really quick and easy manner so i'm not messing around with the q link menu too much so for example i like the oscillator mix i think that's a pretty neat parameter another one is actually the cut off here i think that's a pretty good one for a lead so one way you can do this is you can go to your q link menu you can go to project and you can fiddle around here you can see you can go with midi track audio track program so we can go back here to plug-in one we can go to the program we can start searching through the parameters and find the ones we're interested in that takes forever it can be a little bit frustrating so i'm not going to do that let me show you the much better way to do this so i'm on this page what i can do is i can hold down that q link button i can go to project and you see here it there's a learn button if you hit that learn button you can see it highlights one of these pads right if i turn another one you can see it jumps i turn that one it jumps so what you're going to do is you're going to turn the knob that you want to change i've done that here and then just tap on the parameter just give it a turn you see i went to 49 and back to 50 and now if we look here you can see that lives there now let's say i want to do the next one well turn that pad go to the cutoff change it up real quick and you can see now i've set both of those when you're done you want to turn learn back off because you can see if i left that on and started messing with other parameters now this is reverb i don't want that so i'm going to put it back on cut off i'm going to hold that button down i'm going to turn learn off and now i've got those two living in my project level q links so those are pretty neat i like the lfo depth that's a pretty neat thing so i'm going to add that on now so turn line back on i'm going to tap that third q link i'm going to turn the depth knob now that lives there as well another one i thought was pretty neat is the uh the pumper another really nice one so once again i'm gonna tap learn make sure i'm on that pad or on that q link knob hit the depth one give it a turn now i've got four really nice effects that i can apply to the lead let me show you what these might sound like if i play with them little you can see already we have a lot of variety that we can apply to this simple four bar loop so we're gonna keep on going now i think i'm pretty happy with what i have for the lead i'm gonna start messing with my drum pads uh one that i think is kind of plays a an important role here would be the snare so what i'm gonna do if you're the that sound right there what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna go to that snare so we're gonna go to our drums and one if you forget which pad it was uh i used one of the pre-made kits the rnb ballad ready kit um sounded pretty neat but i'm not sure exactly what lives where so if you hit the program edit button you can hit play and you can see which pads light up when and it will tell you which one you're looking for you see that that's you see that that pad two is lighting up every time the snare hit so i know i know that's the one that i want to play with so i'm going to hit that and once again you're just going to go through and find what sounds neat so i'm going to do that real quick and i'll get right back to you all right so i've found four things that i think are interesting for the snare really it's just the semitune the pan and if we go over to the effects it's pretty fun to mess with the ring modulator and the decimator so let's add those real quick and i'll show you just how quick this process can be so i'm going to come here i'm going to go to learn oh make sure you're on project level click on that second row and i'm just going to hit the semi give it a little turn hit the pan make sure i'm on that second one give it a little turn you can see now i have layer one semi-tune and i got layer one sample pan if we go to the effects we're gonna tap on over i'm gonna still on learn so i'm gonna go to this third one turn the ring modulator turn the fourth knob turn the decimator you can see i've already filled all four of those so now i have four different parameters i can play with my lead four different parameters i can play with with my snare and so let's hear what that snare sounds like [Music] alright pretty neat now one thing i'll show you uh if you change things around and you don't like how it sounds it's pretty easy to fix all you're going to do is hold down that cue link button and just keep tapping undo until you stop seeing those parameters change so i'm just going to tap tap just keep rapid fire tapping that at some point they're going to stop now i'm changing other things so just hold down shift keep tapping until you get back to there you can see right there that the the hurts changed on my ring modulator so i'm just hit undo one more time and now i've reset everything that way you can see it sounds exactly like it did before i started playing right really easy to undo the things that you do uh with your q links as long as you know that trick so i've got four different parameters on my lead i have four different ones on my snare i've got that rim shot sound in the beat i'll show you that it's almost playing the role of the hi-hat in this uh this beat i think that might be really good to have some parameters on so i'll play with that i've highlighted it and let's have some fun here and see what i can find all right i found four parameters for this uh rimshot sound um go ahead and load them up real quick so we're going to go to project level i'm gonna make sure i'm in that third row and i'll tap on that tap learn and what i like was actually semi again so i'm gonna turn that hit knob two i like pan now for the effects this one actually is pretty neat with the ring mod as well but it can get kind of intense so i'm going to add the gain in addition so let's make sure i'm in the right place i want to be here and hit ring give it a turn hit that fourth knob hit gain give that a turn and you can see i've added four parameters there as well made a little mistake here i'm going to leave those now if you put something that you don't want there and you don't want anything there you can actually go here to the q link menu go to project click the thing you don't want hit reset you can see those are gone now another little quick tip so now we've messed with that i'll show you what this sounds like i think it's pretty neat so we'll go to project level and make sure i'm in my third row and let's play around i think that's kind of fun um now obviously you're going to want to play around find the things that work for you i'm just kind of grabbing some quick ones uh but really at the end of the day what you're gonna have are 16 different parameters that apply to anything you want in that song and it's gonna give you a lot of freedom for just performing your song finding things that sound good but also it's gonna make it quick to add automation to your song which when you're turning a four bar loop into let's say a 60 that's going to be very useful now for this last one what i'm going to do is i'm going to actually apply things to let's say the entire drum rack and there's a fun way to do that so if you don't know if you go to track mix right here we have sub mixes what i've done here is i've actually sent the drums so if we look here you can see that my drums go to sub mix 1 we go to track 2 that's my lead that's going to sub mix 2 if we go to my baseline that submix 3 you can see i've got some things here i was playing around with the bass because i wanted more parameters to add that i could play with and it actually ended up making my song much better just because i was hunting for project level q links let me show you what i did here if you listen to the bass now you can hear it in the background it sounds like this fills the space in the song but it could be a little bit more interesting so i'm going to do is i'm going to turn these all on and because i have a lot of things like the fuzz the distortion it needs to be turned down quite a bit but i think you'll agree that it's a very unique aspect of the song now so you can see that plays a pretty interesting role in my song now prior to messing with my project level q links it was a pretty basic thing debate it was just the baseline plug-in i used the thump 2 preset that i changed around a little bit and while i was hunting for parameters i noticed that there really wasn't much that would change the interest of the baseline so what i did was i went to my inserts and i added some inserts to see if i could find something that would create some interest in the baseline and really i kind of found a combo that really on its own enhanced and uplifted this song so even though i didn't add anything to the project level q links uh just the search alone improved i think the song dramatically so let's keep going as i was talking about when i got into that little side track is the sub mixes so what i have now is i have different sub mixes for different parts of the song the bass is in sub mix 3 the lead is in sub mix 2 and my drum kit is in sub mix 1. so if we look at the sub mixes you can see that i've made some changes here really um usually what i do is i'll add the air para eq because you can do a cut off both a high and a low cut off and you can also do some eq and so that's a really nice thing to add but if we look here at my drum kit i was messing around and added this air half speed now this i think is really interesting so i'll show you what i can do here so if we go in and i start my song listen to the drums you see how that adds an extra layer to the drums so i liked playing with the obviously the on off for this effect but the loop length and the mode are pretty interesting too so let's go ahead and just add those to our project level q link so going back to project i'm going to go to learn click on those q link buttons the top one i just want to be start and stop and then we have loop length and finally mode oh there we go you can see if i turn that off i have on off loop length and mode so now if i wanted to play with that all i would have to do is start the song start turning knobs so pretty neat i like that a lot so the last thing i think i'm going to add is just a way to kind of pan my drums down um so two different ways i could do this i'm on my drum track make sure you're on the the track right here keep hitting that not the pad not the master right here for the entire kit and what you can do is you can go to your project level q links go to learn make sure you're on that last knob and you can actually turn the master volume and you see that lives there right now so that's what this would sound like so that can be pretty nice now the another way that's nice to do this if you don't want something so extreme is you can go to something like your sub mix so for example here on my drum submix i have this air para eq and if we go to the high low cut off you can see i've got a relatively high db so 18 db i think it goes up to 24 pretty extreme 18 is pretty good but what you can do is you can actually go to your project level hit that knob and if you turn this frequency right here you can see that now i have that on here and so that's kind of a different way to pan your sounds out so let's listen to that you can see how that's pretty nice now now that we have our project level q link set up there's a few things you can do obviously i've shown you that you can do performance on this you can just play around with your song but another nice thing is if you go here you can see i have a four bar loop now that gets kind of repetitive obviously you can sit here and turn knobs and make it more interesting but if you click on this pencil icon you can double the length now i've got an 8 bar loop and so i can do some interesting things like let's say if i go to that that sound right there what i can do is i can there's two ways to do this you can hit this button up here that's now reading automation for any knobs that i turn uh i don't like doing that i like to just do shift automation because i can see that this is red now you don't even have to hit record things will start changing so what i'm going to do is i'm going to come here i'm going to hold this down so i can see what i'm changing and start turning knobs now you can see when this starts over it's going to start playing that automation back so let's take a look at that there it goes right there you can see that really just diving into your project level q links will immediately improve the quality of your song you'll find different aspects that you like for example i like my bass a lot more now after i started searching for good project level q links i can add interest to my drum kit obviously my lead is a lot more interesting and textural now and that's really just because i was searching for 16 different parameters that i wanted quick access to now once again you can go here to the q link menu this you can see there's a lot of different things you can do but what i like to do is just hold down that q link button and that learn button can be very interesting in fact you'll find out what the limitations of the device are for example if we were to go to let's say um that sound there what i found out is if you look at the samples let's say i wanted to stretch this and change the uh the stretch percent over time you can see if we go to the project level q links let's go here to the last one i have this knob set but if i turn the stretch amount you can see it didn't change anything in my project level q link so now i know that this is not a parameter that i can apply the q links to so learn a little bit more every day using that method but you'll find really interesting and unique things you can do and you'll find things that maybe you wish you could do or once again limitations to the device i think that there really aren't that many limitations this device you can see that the project level key links are an amazing part of what can be done with an mpc one and i hope that was pretty helpful once again this shortcut here holding on that button that's very helpful obviously switching back to screen that's something you want to do especially if you're already on a screen that you want to play around in without having to dive out using this button right here go back in find where you were you just hold that button change to what you want pad scene pad parameter program project whatever you want and you have access to that learn button which is very useful so with that i'm going to end this video i hope it was useful i hope you have some fun diving into these aspects of nbc one and as always enjoy your day make some fun music and i'll see you on the next one bye

Channel: Hi-Jack Music

Views: 1,016

Keywords: MPC, MPC One, Project, Q-links, Q links, improve, tutorial, walkthrough, walk through

Id: JyltSiIzjkA

Length: 22min 18sec (1338 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 02 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/sad_cold_tea]

So slept on! I use them regularly for performance stuff. Usually in a manner that's not recordable in the sequencer sadly but it is what it is!

[u/Hi-JackMusic]

I'm curious what all of your go-to project level q-links are!

[u/Pap3rchasr]

Great video, thanks for sharing!

[u/dj_soo]

too bad there's a bug in 2.10.1 where some of the bindings don't save. It's a pain.

I found mapping submix insert effects don't save to the project so you have to re-set them every project load. I think i've heard of more, but it's not every one. Track-level inserts do save their mapping.