MPC Basic Sample Syncing and Timing

what's up youtube this is tube digger in this mpc tutorial i'm going to show you various different ways that you can time up your samples to get them nicely in sync with your sequence before i get into this video i just want to thank all my current subscribers all my patrons on patreon if you're interested in becoming a patron of mine on patreon please head over to www.patreon.com forward slash tubedigger there's a link in the description i've also got an mpc masterclass video course if you want it's a higher quality higher production so it's definitely worth taking a look at no adverts and there's some techniques tips and tricks in there that i've not yet shared online so please do go and check that out if you haven't already subscribed to my channel please do so and please hit the like button and also the bell notification symbol all those things help to keep my channel bobbing along and increasing in numbers and i'll be most grateful in this first example we're just going to take a simple drum break we're going to edit it so it's a perfect amount of bars and we're going to re-pitch that sample to the bpm of our choice so this is the most fundamental or rudimentary way of changing the speed of a sample by changing its pitch so this is really basic stuff but i'm going to take you through this all the way through to more advanced techniques to time up your samples so this is kind of a beginner's tutorial but there's sure to be some techniques in here for intermediate users maybe so please keep watching so on my first pad i've got a break beat sample this is that sample [Music] okay so as you can hear it's one and a bit bars so first of all we can press and hold menu and press pad 13 and that will take us to sample edit and because this is the last sample that we pressed or the last pad that we pressed this sample appears in the sample editor so let's just take a look at that again so as you can hear all we need to do is remove the kick that comes in after the first bar which is this kick here so we just need to move the end point to there spread our fingers on the touchscreen and zoom in as much as we can and we can see that these little transients here it's pretty much exactly there where we need to discard so let's pinch our fingers together press process in the bottom right hand corner of the screen and just choose the first option discard and now we should have a perfect one bar loop if we press pad 16 this will play back this sample in a loop [Music] so if we look at the bottom of the screen towards the bottom left you can see that it's calculated the bpm of this sample as a hundred and 107.14 beats per minute we can double check this by pressing detect and then press detect again at the bottom of the screen and it's recalculated it to something slightly faster 107.2 that's fine that .29 really doesn't make that much difference so we can set our sequence tempo to 107 and you're really not going to hear any difference or timing inconsistencies with that so let's close that so let's say we want to work with this sample but at 100 beats per minute so let's go to the main page let's change our bpm to 100 beats per minute let's press and hold menu go back to sample edit which is pad 13 and let's press from bpm just at the bottom left hand corner of the screen and first of all we need to change the amount of beats so there's four beats in a bar so let's reduce this by turning our data wheel anti-clockwise to four beats and you can see that it's showing the bpm as 107.2 now what we need to do now is press match what match will do is it will re-time this break to 100 beats per minute which is our sequence tempo if we press 2 sequence it will change our sequence to match the bpm of this sample so our sequence will change to 107.29 but we want to work with this sample at 100 beats per minute so if i press match and if you take a look at the very bottom left hand corner of the sample editor you'll see that it's reduced the pitch of this sample by minus 1.22 semitones so if i press on that and highlight it you can see that's where the reduction has taken place i'm also going to normalize this sample so i'm going to press process and move my data wheel a few clicks clockwise until we get to normalize i also must remember to do the from bpm on this sample so i need to press match and as you can see it's now reduced this new sample 1.22 semitones as we did with the previous one so let's go to the main page now i'm going to put my sequencer into record r mode and press play start after the four beat counting i'm just going to press this pad once on bar one and twice on bar two so that's the basic way to re-time a sample by means of re-pitching it to get it to a given tempo of course we can go the other way let's just change our bpm to 125 press and hold menu press sample edit and now we can go to from bpm and it's showing the correct pitch of our sample it's four beats it's minus 1.22 semitones which makes it 100 beats per minute and let's press match again and now you can see it's increased the pitch by 2.64 semitones so we don't need to do anything else it's programmed into the sequence this will be in time with 125 and you'll notice that the sample is naturally higher in pitch so i'm just going to press undo and undo again and again so we're back at 100 beats per minute and our sample is reduced back to the pitch that works with 100 bigs per minute so what do we do then if we want to match another sample to this sample so on pad 2 i've got this sample here [Music] so it's a section from a buddy rich song i'm not going to play too much of it just in case there's a copyright flag on this video so let's press and hold menu go to sample edit and you can see again because that was the last sample i pressed we now have that sample as the focus sample in sample editor so i'm going to choose a section from this sample that i want to be a loop that's going to go alongside the break beat so let's just have a listen to this [Music] so i'd actually quite like the sample to start on this section here and then do that so i'm just going to grab this bar here so let's just zoom in so i'm pressing pad 1 to trigger that sample just to get it dead on so i'm doing that by ear and by sight obviously [Music] and our endpoint is pretty much there and again we can press pad 16 to loop this over to double check that the loop sounds good [Music] so that's not too bad let's press process and roll our data wheel anti-clockwise until we get to discard let's press do it and again i'm going to normalize this sample because it's relatively quiet you don't always have to normalize but if the sample is a lot quieter than this then i do recommend it let's press process normalize and there you go so let's press and hold menu go to programming it by pressing pad 14 and there you go we've got our buddy rich sample already there because this was the original sample and i discarded everything outside of it so first of all let's time this up and then we can think about actually getting this to trigger from here and then this be in the second half because although i like the sample i don't really want it to start from where it's currently starting here i actually want this to start here so there's no way that we can easily just chop this and move it in the sample editor we have to either trigger it from two different pads or we need to split the sample up and trigger it that way etcetera etcetera but let's just get it timed up at the moment so let's press and hold menu let's go back to sample edit and let's do that same from bpm process again so first of all we need to detect and do it again it's showing it as 118.01 which i believe is probably going to be half of that so it's going to be about 59 beats per minute so let's close that let's go to from bpm and as you can see because the beats are already there selected as four it's showing it as 59.01 that's fine we know the loop is good and we know that it's 59 beats per minute so again let's press match and this is going to pitch this sample up quite considerably and as you can see it has done in the bottom left-hand corner you can see it's 9.13 so let's press an old menu press pad 14 go to program edit let's just take a listen to the sample okay so it sounds a bit wonky because it's quite high pitched and that will bring me to the next section of this video where we can talk about using this sample at the original pitch but have it at this speed for this sequence which is 100 beats per minute let's just try it over the top of the break beat [Music] so it sounds alright but it sounds a little bit cartoonish for my taste but what we can do i said i want to have it start from here so we can just move this up to the start of this section press and hold copy press pad 2 you can see we get this red bounding box around our pad grid then we just need to press the destination pad to copy it to whilst holding copy that will go red take your finger off copy and now that's copied so all we need to do now on pad three is bring this back to here and isolate that section of it so let's now put those two sections of that buddy rich sample into our sequence [Music] because i don't like the pitch of these samples and because there's not too much rhythmic content in them we could probably get away with reducing the pitch back down to what it originally was or there and about so i'm going to try that now and because we've chopped these samples and because they're going to be slower and therefore longer than our sequence which is 100 beats per minute we know that they work over a bar within this sequence so they're definitely going to work if we pitch them down the only place that you're going to get some weird timing inconsistencies is these sections here where you can see there's some smaller hits inside that sample but i wouldn't get too hung up on that i think it's more important to get your downbeat which would be the first section of a sample whether it's this one or this one so this is our downbeat for this section it's more important to get the initial hit and any bigger kind of event that happens inside a sample pretty much timed up but there's so many ways that you can get away with things not being so exact you don't have to be so anal about it it's sometimes quite nice to have your musical samples a little bit loose and have your main break be or drums doing all the rhythmic and precision and driving kind of stuff so let's reduce both of these pads 2 and 3 down -9 which is pretty much what happened in the sample editor [Music] and now let's listen to this [Music] and as you can see it just does exactly what you want i'm really not fussed about any of the little tiny little rhythmic things that might be going wrong in that sample because we've slowed it down and therefore it's not at 100 beats per minute anymore it really doesn't matter so this brings me to this point i very rarely if ever use warp there's no need to use warp it does work for some samples and you can kind of get away with it but i've said it many many many times before in my opinion it puts too many unnatural artifacts into your sample and makes things sound a bit weird and wobbly and stretched out you can obviously filter a lot of the high frequencies out and mask any of those weird wobbly artifacts by using a low-pass filter but in my opinion i would much rather spend two three four maybe even more hours completely chopping into a sample to actually re-construct it myself just by chopping into it and then replacing it on the grid where it should fall to get it exactly in time and i only usually do that when it comes to break beat samples i don't really worry about that when it comes to musical samples as i've shown you with pad 2 and pad 3 here you can actually change the pitch and get away with quite a lot so i'm going to erase those so press erase and press those two pads [Music] and let's see if reducing that pitch down to minus nine semitones will allow us to place pad two our first hit on bar one and place pad three our second hit on bar two so if we wanted to use this sample at this pitch over two bars as you can hear it's too fast for the sequence meaning that it's stopping before the end of each bar so let's just listen to it again [Music] now some people might want that little gap to give it a bit of funk i don't mind it but if you didn't want that to occur this is another way that you can get your sample to last for that duration without stretching it or without doing any weird warping stuff so again let's press and hold menu let's go to program edit and let's deal with pad 2 first of all [Music] we need to go to lfo modulation and we need to change the sample playback mode to note on which will allow us to loop this sample and let's also do that for pad three let's go back to pad two and you can hear now that for as long as i hold this pad or tap it we're just getting a short burst of this that's what note on does if you haven't already used note on before so it allows us to control the length of the sample by how long we press the pad for but it also lets us loop a sample so pads have to be in note on mode for you to loop them so let's choose pad loop which is just towards the bottom right hand corner here and i'm going to choose the ping pong loop because it's the smoothest one now you'll notice that we've only got a start and then end anchor for this sample that means we need to go up to the gear symbol in the top right hand corner of the screen and set loop lock which is the middle option here to off and now you can see that we've got a third anchor point which is our loop anchor point so it's just a simple case of choosing a desirable place for this to start looping so if i press and hold the pad you can hear that that loops now so maybe we need to move this forward a bit so we don't get that little click it's actually at the end part of the sample so let's move that back and move the end forward that sounds fine to me that's going to close the gap in our sequence and let's just do the same for pad 3. so this one has got a definitive kind of transient or hit which is that piano so let's move that up to here so once you set that loop lock in the settings up here in the top right it's set for all pads now so let's press pad loop so we've got the ping pong on this as well okay that might work we could move it away from the transient of that piano but it might be a little bit too short it's not too bad i'm just going to go with that i'm sure that's going to be fine now let's now go to the main page and press the grid symbol over towards the left hand side of the screen and this is our grid editor and you can see that if i press either pad 2 or pad 3 which will get highlighted all the notes of which will get highlighted let's see if we will have to be kind of here to see them let's actually zoom vertically so you can see pad 3 is highlighted if i press pad 2 that will highlight any notes corresponding to pad 2 or pad 3 and you can see that the notes are really short because they're in no on mode they're only going to play for the length of the note or for as long as we hold the pad so because we've recorded them into the sequence it's basically like we've just tapped the pad for a split second [Music] so you can hardly hear the sample at all they're so short so we could manually just make sure we've selected a note so let's grab the selection tool at the top towards the top of the screen click in the grid drag it over one of these notes and we would choose edit end and we can just roll this up to the start of bar two or the end of bar one so that's one way that you can do it you can also do this let's go to main page let's go up to the top of the screen where it says tc that's your timing correction or quantization menu and we need to select legato so that is basically just going to elongate the note to the end of the sequence it's not going to do it for the note that we want which is our second note or pad three or this note here the reason it won't do that is because legato only ties a note to any other note that comes after it and as you can see we don't have any notes that come after it we've just got this which is at the start of our sequence so what i'm going to do is grab this one elongate that just to show you that's the manual way to do it let's reduce this back to how it was or thereabouts and it won't let me reduce it anymore because of our current time division so if we press and hold down note repeat button you can change your time divisions or you can actually switch them off so i've switched mine off now and that will allow me to reduce this back to a really short note so let's go back to main press time correction again we do have to switch it on but we don't need to worry about the time division if we press do it now the legato will join that first pad or pad two up to the start of bar two so let's press do it let's go into here and as you can see it's automatically elongated this note so if you've got a load of notes that you want to tie together or bar the last note in your sequence because it won't have another note to tie to that's how you tie your notes together if they're in no on mode even in one shot mode those notes will elongate if you choose legato i only ever use it when i've got pads that are in no on mode because obviously if i want them to play for the full length that's how it's going to happen so now our sequence sounds like this [Music] so just be aware that there's so many different situations that you're going to be faced with where you're going to think to yourself how do i time that sample up i've shown you some basic methods in this video if you're trying to use a musical sample that hasn't really got a particular rhythm don't worry about it just chop it at the transients and then find a way to rhythmically time it with your beat and it will work you can loop up the sample which i've shown you choose your loop method whether it's ping pong or forward as i said ping pong is the smoothest way and you'll find a way to get those samples timed up to your main beat and vice versa so thanks for watching if you want private tuition please contact me at tubedigger gmail.com and we can organize a zoom lesson if you're interested in my masterclass video course it's www.tubedigger.com forward slash npc masterclass i've also got a discount code to give you 20 off that's all caps mpc masterclass 20. all the links for all that stuff is in the description of this video i'll see you on the next one this is tube digger and i'm out

Channel: Tubedigga

Views: 10,989

Keywords: mpc basic sample syncing and timing, mpc timing, mpc sync, mpc sample timing, mpc, akai mpc, mpc one, mpc live, mpc x, mpcx, mpc tutorial, mpc lesson, mpc live 2, mpc live mk 2, mpc live tutorial, mpc x tutorial, mpcx tutorial, mpc one tutorial, mpc touch, mpc touch tutorial

Id: Nk6Kirpj1ao

Length: 24min 3sec (1443 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 21 2021