MPC BEATS - Complete Beginners Walkthrough - Start to Finish

what's up youtube you already know who it is and i'm coming back at you today to give you my full mpc beats walkthrough after this you should have an overview of exactly what you need in order to make a beat in the lbc beats software start to finish follow me [Music] so obviously the first thing we have to do is open up the mpc beat software here we go okay now we have the mpc beat software open i'm not going to use any templates for this we're going to go to an empty project and we're starting from scratch in the case of people who may have uh an mpk mini um if you don't have a new one i actually do have the mpk mini 3 on order it's not arrived yet but it will be soon but for people who don't this is the mpk mini 2. so the first thing you want to do is make sure that the device is enabled and i'll show you why in a second okay so what we're going to do is go to the default mpc beats sound preset so that is something that everybody will have available to them so that's what i'm going to use we'll go to the program because the programs are the actual drum kits unless you unless you're using the f9 then the program could be the key group for the f9 so everything will be down here in this list and um at first preview won't be on um so you click the sounds you won't be able to preview what they what they sound like what you want to do is go down here and you have a play that's a manual preview you can use that if you want to but i like to turn on the speaker icon which is the automatic preview so as soon as you click a drum program it'll automatically play the sound [Music] i kind of like that [Music] so now um in order to load that you can uh double click it or you can take it and drag it and drop it into the same double clicking it is a little bit faster so that's all i did i just said double click now that we have uh this drum program uploaded the point i originally wanted to make is that you have to have your mpk activated or enabled in order for it to function properly um it will function without being enabled but everything won't be mapped properly for instance in the drum program [Music] so all of those sounds are playing properly and this is bank a which are the top eight pads uh in your drum program so right here the top eight pads [Music] now if you select bank b it'll turn red and that's supposed to select the bottom eight pads now as you see it's playing for the pass and the other paths aren't doing anything see these pads aren't playing any sound so they're not mapped correctly now how we fix that we go over here to the bottom right corner and there's this little icon it says midi learn click that and then you've got learn enable in the mpk mini you want to enable it now that it's enabled that turns on the default mapping so everything is now properly mapped so now when we play these pads it'll play all of them [Music] and we'll go to the other bank and play the bottom eight [Music] [Applause] so now you have the full functionality of the device um otherwise you would be wondering why only some of the pads are playing not all of them so that would be the prime cause so now we want to set a bpm i usually like to work around 80. so you can go up here and click and drag or you can double click it and type it in so we'll go 80 bpm that's probably fine for me for right now you can select whatever you want um if you want to do double time you can select 160 150 or whatever it is that you like to use all right so now that we have that set what we're going to do is record a some type of a drum pattern and i'm terrible at finger drumming i got a lot of respect for people who know how to finger drum and are good at it just not my lane i prefer to slow walk it but i get the job down when you first record a track if there's not anything on the board you can use record or overdub whichever one you prefer but keep in mind that if you've already recorded something on a sequence and you hit the record button when you record it the charter overlays sequence it will record over everything and everything that you previously done will be erased so if you want to keep what you previously done then you want to use the overdub and i tend to always use the overdub just so i know that i won't lose anything i've already done i hardly ever hit the record even when i'm first starting out i always stay on overdub so now all we have to do is play from the beginning or press the spacebar and we can uh get started [Music] now what i'm going to do is uh overlay some hi-hats in this and i'm not going to really do a lot of fast-paced hi-hats all the time so i just do like a i don't know a half step i have i don't know what you'll call it but i do it often so here we go [Music] not nothing spectacular at the moment so there we go track one and i like to rename track one so i'm gonna name it drums just so i know that my drum program is on track one uh i'm also on sequence one i'm not gonna mess with that yet i like to build out my full song then once i get the full song build out then i'll copy over the sequences and start mixing the track and sql center track after that so now i got my basic drum pattern we're gonna go to track two i'm gonna load some type of keyboard sounds we're gonna stay within uh the default akai products that you will have to work with it is on a drum program right here i'm going to select the key group and then i'm going to go over here to my sounds and we're going to select the f9 expansion that comes with the mpc beat software and pick one of these sounds to work with [Applause] why not let's go with it double click it to load it up and now that we got it loaded up what we're gonna do is go to the program and it says program two what we're gonna have to do is select the f9 key group we just loaded and there it is the f9 bales one so we select that now that we have that selected so i kind of figured out a program i want to start with um [Music] so [Music] and we're in the scale e flat natural minor and let's get started so i'm gonna put it in overdub where you start [Music] [Music] real simple something basic and something that you can build on um now that we have that i don't think i need to do anything to it what i will do now is name track 2 bails now i do know that we only have eight tracks to work with in the mpc beat software but there is a way around that we can make this to unlimited tracks if we need to but for now let's continue we're gonna go to track three we're gonna find another cube maybe a bass sound [Music] i kind of like that one i kind of like that so the f9 sir [Music] all right so now that we have that set what we're going to do is put it back over that and we'll play our baseline [Music] like i said nothing too extravagant we're keeping it simple and we're going to name that track base and we're going to move on to track four now for track four we need like a mid sound we got a high sound we got a low sound we got drums we need something to kind of feel the mid range or maybe something to add something to the heart like something airy maybe some string choir type sound something like that [Music] [Applause] [Music] so we just loaded up this warm pad sound [Music] okay so now we're going to go here put this tracking overdub and get ready to play next pattern [Music] so like i said it's real simple real easy to do okay now say that we wanted to sample something we could go up here to the sampler so now if you want to sample directly into the mpc beat software what we want to do you want to select the input from which you'll be sampling from depending on how you have your audio device set up as in your audio interface on mine i do have uh inputs three and four set to where i can sample anything that i can play so i set it to three and four as you can see i'm starting to get levels um and that's normal it's picking up my voice right now but uh as i go play a sample [Music] as you can see it's picking it up very well you can also adjust the level so um i'll raise this up just a little bit because if you keep it all the way at the bottom it would be checked detect that noise floor signal and it'll automatically start as soon as you hit on the track like it just did so i didn't raise it up high enough i want to raise it just above that noise floor level on the track and now it's waiting to hear a signal now as soon as it hears the signal it will start sampling [Music] so i didn't want the whole thing i just wanted that first part you can name this i'm just going to leave a new sample for now leave the program to none because i don't want to set it to a program just yet and um i won't change anything yet any everything else you can fix later so i'll just keep it so here's the sample and now that we have our sample we want to go to the sample edit okay now we're in the sample edit screen and drag that to cut off that end part so i want to try to make it a perfect loop now to preview the same point you have to do is click in it and hold it [Music] give your eyes a little pop so it's a little bit more let me stretch this out a little bit and get that little click out of there how that [Music] better now what we're going to do is go to this car and what that's going to do is get rid of everything that you don't have selected in the sample so everything outside of the sample range will be removed now we're going to select do it so now we have just the sample that we want from here we're going to go over here to chop now you can set it to threshold regents and bpm which are kind of like automatic sample chop positions or thresholds it'll just go and uh make samples according to where it thinks uh some of the transients are to automatically find samples that's not normally what i like to use i'm going to get rid of all of those i usually either go to regions because it makes even sample chops if it is a even sixteen or eight bar or four bar loop whatever they look with the even loop it'll make even sample chop [Music] and actually that that sounds kind of good i may keep that like that for this particular instant um otherwise i would go to manual chops this is the one i use the most and then well actually i use manual chops the most because i kind of like to be able to get in and get surgical with my sample tops and then what i use the second most would be regions i don't use threshold very much and bpm sample shops i use that never but that's just a personal preference of mine you might find some uses out of it and find a way to utilize it better than i do and if you do more power to you so now that we got our sample chops we got a chopped up in regions we're going to go to non-distracted convert sample to pad and we're going to create a new program in our new program we're going to select pad parameters because that will put each pad on its own individual slice and you can manipulate each sample individually if you like if you put it in um non-destructive slice when you pitch one sample if you don't want to pitch it all you get one paddle turn it all up so pad parameters will make each slice its own individual sample so that's what we're gonna do now we're gonna go to uh track five which is unused select our drum program and we're gonna select our new sample let's record it in overdub so [Music] okay now i wanna put a little wetness put a little water on the sample so let's go in here and we're going to add a reverb so i'm going to go with the air reverb on shot channel one now this particular part i don't care for um in this instance i would rather use plug in because uh a lot of the default card plugins look like this and what that is is um the numbers that control the parameters that you're changing now i like to be a little more visual this is one of the reasons why i don't use a lot of the akai plug-in uh per se now um if you're using on the mpc for instance they do give you a nice uh visual layout for you to adjust the uh parameters it makes it a little more easy but on here as you can see it's all numbers but i'm gonna go to a preset um basic medium room i may not have to change the preset usually i don't change the presets much when i'm using a reverb i just kind of go through the process and find one that i feel fits what i'm looking for so let's try this out see what we got [Music] okay so that's cool now i'm gonna go here and add a delay and i air the layers one of my favorite delays i use this delay a lot but again on here you just get numbers on the mpc you get a nice visual layout um same thing as far as the eq's and all of that when it comes to the akai plug-ins i wish they would fix that but until then i will still probably prefer to use my third-party vsts but for this particular instance because i want to show you that you can do this with all the default settings i'm not going to change that now what i'm going to do is go to uh the follow me delay which i use probably too much this is my favorite one and i always go to 5 8 or three quarters i'm just going to set it to three quarters and then from there uh what i like to do is take the feed back down to about 15 or 20 and i'll also take the mix down about the same range everything else can pretty much stay where it is sometimes i may take it down to like 15 or so this is about where i normally put it [Music] it's about my speed right there so let's solo it if you want to hear it alone [Music] so that's that's the setting that i generally use when i'm putting that eq and reverb on a lot of my instruments i'll tone it down a little bit or wrap it up a little bit depending on how prevalent i want the reverb or the delay to be but most times i try to keep it moderately low and just uh a tad bit in there just give it that little extra just a little extra that's all you know we almost got enough to make a full beat so at this point when i feel the beat is starting to fill out and get to about the space i want it then i'll start pre-mixing my beats now a lot of what i do is very very simple and you can do this your own way there are no rules to it it's it's it's all by ear as far as i'm concerned the way that i do it and i do it according to how i like the music the sound how i like to turn out in the end um it's all based on preference again there is no one way to do it um for my mixes i like certain things to stand out and i kind of bury everything else in the bottom and what i mean when i say that is i'll keep the drums starting out at maximum level i'll keep the bass start now at maximum level i'll eventually turn those down also but starting out i keep a maximum level and everything else that's not in the drum or base category i'll turn it down to somewhere around negative 20 db and then from there i'll begin to pan it if i feel that it needs to be panned or eq in it to create more space and separation [Music] okay now that i got everything kind of pushed slow in the mix it doesn't feel like i need to move anything around as far as panning anything right now so i'm not going to do that but what i am going to do is go to my drum track now i'm going to pull up my mixer and now that i'm in my mixer i'm going to go to the uh kick track inside the drum program and i'm going to add the mother ducker so we go to dynamics and then we're going to add the mother ducker input because the kick is going to be the input don't have to change anything leave that alone okay and now from there we're going to go to the base track and inside the bass track what i'm going to do is go to my dynamics and add the mother ducker now again i hate this interface i wish they would give us the full interface the same one that's on the mpcx but since they don't i'll have to use what i have now i don't really change much in here what i do is i'll change the attack and make it as fast as possible in most cases so it starts out at 10 i'll take that down to one and i'll adjust the release depending on how it's affecting the base because sometimes the slower release will make the bass have that curved sound do a fast release would just make the bass sound like a 808 [Music] okay so about that sounds pretty good to me and what that's doing is making that kick uh making the bass duck out every time the kick hits side chaining inside the mpc beat software [Music] now from here what i normally do is i'll finish uh adjusting levels on the track [Music] so [Music] now i got the track maxing out at about uh negative 3 db which is kind of in the range you want to be for mastering from there once i get all my levels where i want them when i get it sounding like i want it uh from there i will start to sequence the beat and i try to do it in order most of the time so i will change the name of the first sequence to intro now that i got my sequence 9 i'll right click on it and then select copy sequence so i'm going to copy sequence 1 and i'm going to copy it to sequence 2 and i'll name it my drop and then select do it so then we'll go back to sequence one which is the intro and we'll go and mute out the tracks that we don't want to play in sequence one to create a bit of an intro [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] okay now we have enough sequences to build a full beat and now we're going to go into song mode and now that we're in song mode what i'm going to do is show you a trick that i did show in a previous video and i will uh put that video on a card up here in the corner so that you can see it um if you want to go check that video out um it's uh something that i found that works inside the mpc live and x and the mpc one and um as of right now we're going to test it and see if it works uh with the mpc beats software and the mpk mini as well as you can see we have our sequences down here now what you can do with the mpc beat software so the first uh pad is the intro sequence second one is the drop verse one verse two verse three so on and so forth you can drag them and drop them to put them in the order that you want over a song you can put how many times you want it to repeat or if you want it to hold so on and so forth but again we're going to use my ultra fast sequencing technique so what you want to do is go up here in the uh mpc beat software select overdub you don't have to play start you just hit overdub when you hit overdub inside the mpc mvcb software or whatever it is you're using it will allow you to use your pads to lay down the sequencing of your song i believe everything is in four bar loops no actually it's two bar loops everything is too bar loops um it says right there on the screen the but we got two bar loops so i want at least a four bar intro so that means i want to go to my intro pad one get that twice and yes the technique does work now i wanna i'm gonna drop eight bars and then we'll go into four bars of the first part of the verse four part of the second part of the verse and for the mpk mini if you have more than eight sequences you will have to use the bank button so then we'll go back to my drop random model's reverse next time let's start we'll do some different things with it not hit the wrong one up here um delete that sequence all right so we're done we'll take it out of overdub and we'll have a listen to see how the song sounds [Music] [Music] [Music] so there you have it that's basically my full intro basic walkthrough to get you acquainted with mpc beats i hope you learned a little bit about the software go ahead and get into it make some fire baits i hope y'all do something great with it i'm out you

Channel: Ghetto Styles

Views: 67,065

Keywords: 8-6-20, MPC Beats, MPC Software, MPK Mini, MPK Mini II, MPK Mini 3, MPK Mini MK3, MPC One, MPC Live 2, MPC X, MPC Touch, MPC Force, Akai Force, Free MPC Beats, Free Beat, Tutorial, MPC Beats Tutorial, Sampling with MPC Beats, Mixing with MPC Beats, MPC Studio, MPC Beats Academy, MPC Beats Masterclass, MPC Beats Setup, MPC Beats Chopping Samples, MPC Beats Sampling, MPC Beats DAW, MPC Beats Review, MPC Beats Hip Hop

Id: J5FjqlcGY3M

Length: 37min 11sec (2231 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 11 2020