MPC Beats Masterclass Full

[Music] hi there welcome to the npc beats academy now in this master class we're going to be covering how to make a lo-fi track from the ground upwards using npc beats so we're going to be walking through seven different episodes of how you can start your track from the ground upwards so by the time you've watched this entire series you'll have a really good understanding of how to apply these techniques to your own tracks so without further ado let's dive straight in and start making some low-fi beats now in this series of videos we're going to be creating a low 5b from the ground upwards so we're going to be covering the entire process using npc beats now i'm using my mpk mini mark ii for this tutorial but you can use any midi controller if you don't have this particular midi controller we can go to our factory list and then you can select the controller that you do have and then you can load that midi map and then you'll have all the functionality to control npc beats from your controller so to start our project what we're going to do is start with a brand new sequence so we'll go up to our inspector and here under sequence this is where you can name your beat now i'm calling this making a lo-fi r b-b now i'm going to change it from four bars to eight bars so that means we got an eight bar sequence to work with and then track one we're under our drum mode and i've named my track drums and now i'm gonna select my drum kit which is called lo-fi kit so now i can play my kit directly on my pads as we're using the mpk mark ii mapping now the sounds that i'm using for this master class some of the sounds are from the brand new arab trap cell expansion pack i've got some sounds from drums that knock some kicks and snares and i've got a few melodic samples from splice so without further ado let's get started so let's go to our sample pool and let's play some of them a lot of examples that we're going to work with and let's see what we've got so we're going to take this sample and i'm going to put this onto an audio track so midi is where we do all of our drums audio i tend to put my melodics so i'm going to drag my melodic sample onto my audio track let's name this so we're going to call this melodic loop now we've named that what i'm going to do is well i'm going to turn on warp and then punch in the original tempo of the loop and this will allow us to add any tempo that we want because we're using real time time stretching and pitch shifting and npc beats has the elastic pro time stretching algorithm so it's going to be very high quality so let's change our tempo to 135 and now let's play back our loop now let's expand our grid so i can see all 8 bars let's use our mpk mini as this is pre-assigned so i can access all of my zooms now as we're on midi this is where we're going to record our drums on track one but if you want to go back to audio press the audio tab and we can now see our melodic now if you want to edit the melodic npc beats comes with a range of tools to allow you to chop fade in fade out reverse pitch shift our audio and much more so let's start programming our drums so we'll go to our midi tab then on our mpk mini because this is instantly mapped we're going to turn on our quantize then on encoder 2 this controls our time division so this means our quantize will snap to 1 16 on our grid [Music] so now we're all set up we'll turn on our metronome under tools and we'll go to enable and this will now only come on when we hit our record so let's hit [Music] record wait for our bar to start from one [Music] now that we've finished the first part of our idea let's turn off record and let's turn off our metronome now what i want to add is some triplets to my hi-hats which are very popular in trap so let's turn on note repeat and this enables us to use the pads to trigger triplets so we're going to change our time division to 132 triplet so now when we trigger our pad it will trigger the triplet now let's hit record over dub so we don't record over what we've already recorded let's play in our parts [Music] so now that we've recorded our hi-hats let's turn our overdub record off and let's add some additional textures so we're going to put our quantize back to 1 16 and then turn off our note repeat and now let's play our parts [Music] it's always good to play percussion sounds on the offbeat because it adds more movement over your beat [Music] now to access the top level of our samples on our 16 pads let's go to bank b and our mpk mini and now we've got samples 9 to 16. [Music] so let's add our long reverb clap [Music] this gives like an off ambience [Music] now on the top pads i've got some different types of vocal samples so let's add like a percussion vocal [Music] so this is working with the groove [Music] now let's take off overdub let me hear some of these other ones [Music] right let's add that [Music] whenever you're adding vocal textures to lo-fi it's always good to add a lot of reverb and filter in taking off a lot of the high-end to the vocal so it feels very distant now let's add our last melodic which is like a side chain pumping loop that adds a lot of texture behind the beat [Music] now a very popular effect on hi-hats is automating the pitch of your hi-hats up and down now when pcbs gives us tools so we can automate any feature that we want so underneath our drum grid we're going to pull up our grid which is where our automation is and you can see our velocity levels now i'm going to hide my drum pads so we've got a bigger workspace now i'm going to use my arrow and i'm going to select my pad 3 which is my hats and my parameter is tuning now i can take my pencil tool and i can draw in the automation so we're going to be going up and down the [Music] pitch and there you can hear the pitch how it's detuned and again you can just keep drawing these in until you find the type of fill that you're looking for on your beat now once you're happy with your tuning we could add some pan in to our hi-hat as well to give it a bit more space so let's go down to our select arrow paddo3 this time we'll go to mixer and pan in and now we can just draw in the automation of our pan in from left to right [Music] now if you're using headphones or studio monitors you can hear the hi-hats moving from left to right [Music] so let's close this window down [Music] so on our mpk mini let's expand our view because what i want to do now is i want to move some of our drum sounds off the grid so they don't feel so tight and quantized so make sure we've got quantize switched off we go to our clap and we're going to pull our clap back so it comes in a little bit early [Music] so as we pull the whole clap [Music] see already you can hear it just pushing and then we're going to push our hi-hats forward so they are slightly off as well these will feel a little bit more humanized on our next lesson we're going to add some tape stop and lo-fi effects to our melodic see you next time [Music] hi there welcome to episode 2 of making a low 5b at the beats academy so i'm going to be adding some low-fi textures to our melodic using some real cool techniques to kind of really grunge up the sound and then we're going to add some low-fi tape stop so down at the bottom of our ui you can see these little tabs now these are our mixer tabs this means that we can see the mixer levels of our pads and then next to that we can see the mixer levels of our entire program that means our whole drum kit and then we've got the actual track level now what i want to do is i want to change our workspace to advanced because we need some advanced features so now you can see inserts on our channel strip and you can see time correction quantize has now popped up and you can see metronome and we have some new menus where our home button is we have like sample looping and a whole bunch of other new features but the features that i want access to are the inserts which you can see now which were graded out this is where we can add our effects so each pad and each track you can add up to four effects so let's click and we're first going to start off by adding the mpc 3000 emulation to our drums this will give our drums a little knock roughly around about 120 hertz so now that we've added that we now go over to our audio melodic and we're going to add some low-fi grunge to that so let's click on audio and there's our melodic loop now we'll go over to our inserts and the first thing i'm going to add is a filter so we're going to take some of the high end off so we're going to put a low pass filter so let's play our melodic and then we take the cutoff frequency and we can bring that down to about two kilohertz so everything above to up to 20k has now disappeared so let's add lo-fi now this will allow us to change our bit rate to really grunge up our sound so let's take it down to 12-bit add some noise and some anti-aliasing and we'll add a bit of clip distortion very popular effect in lo-fi and then we can balance the mix levels between the effect and the original sample so it doesn't overpower the sound now let's go to our third effect under modulation we do pitch shifter and i'm going to re-pitch the whole sample down a whole octave [Music] so now if we increase our mix level you can hear a real low version of the melodic now the reason why we pitched it down -12 which is a whole octave so it regains its original key otherwise this effect would be out of key now the last effect is one of the most popular and one of my favorites which is tape stop so under harmonic go to x y effects now let's open this up and under the menu presets go down to tape stop so what we need to do now is automate this so let's make our workspace bigger let's hide our pads now under our automation section let's select the insert effect which is tape stop and enable now using our pencil tool we can now draw in when the tape stop is enabled so let's go to the end of the melodic let's draw in a tape stop effect here there you go come straight in automation on npc beats is a real fast way to add so many different effects over your beats and you can graphically see everything as well which really helps the process so you can fine-tune the way that you draw these in to find the type of effect that is right for your beat now let's draw another one in probably roughly around about bar four to five and then let's increase it so it enables the effect [Music] so now when it comes around we hear it again here we go and we'll just keep the last one at the end of the eighth bar and listen to it so we've made a lot of improvements adding these effects to our beat now i'm going to add a master filter over our beat which will affect the whole track so we can now make the whole track low-fi but if we only want to affect our drums let's take our air filter and let's drag it across to our drums insert so this is on the program tab at the bottom with the four squares and now it's affecting the drums the melodic is keeping its original sound and effect so this is a great way that we can add a lot of movement to our beat to give it some diversity so on our next lesson we're going to add some chords over our track see you next time hi there so in this lesson we're going to start adding some instruments over our beat so we've got our foundation already so what we're going to do is go over to our track inspector and we're going to select track 2. now let's name this track let's call this roads so just double click type in roads and then below this is our track type so we're going to change this to plug-in and we're going to be using the plug-in called electric now electric comes with npc beats so you'll have that in your list now let's go to program edit and let's hide our pads and now we're on our program editor so we can now see the ui of electric now let's go to our presets in our inspector and let's go down to tremolo and soft tines trim that's the preset that we're using now we can play this from our mpk mini now you can hear the sound has got a lot of texture that really fits the mood now if you want to use chords mode you could follow one of our beats academy tutorials of how to use chords and scales but i'm going to be playing the chords directly from our mpk mini so you can play the kind of chords that you want over the beat now you don't have to have music theory to play chords i play a lot of my chords by ear so i find different types of chord shapes until i find something that fits over the style of b so now we've got some ideas let's hit record now let's jump up the octave [Music] we can add some sparkle over the top this adds a shimmer to the sound [Music] so now that we've recorded our chord progression this adds a lot more life to the track so on our next lesson let's add a bass line directly over our beat welcome back to the npc beats academy so in this lesson we're going to start adding our bass line now let's go to track three and we're using a key group sample this time so what i've done inside the arab music expansion pack there was a loop it was a base loop and what i've done i've taken one snippet of the base loop and we've put that sample into a key group so it's now expanded across our keys so let's double click the sample where we took the sound from now you find a section in the sample which just has a clear note so here we go this gives me one single sound of the bass now i've got my start and end point in green and red and then we go to key group open up our program edit now this will give us our editing features in key group mode we turn our polyphony to mono because it's a bass now we got one sound and our note range is going to be from minus c2 to g8 which is the full length of the keyboard then we select the sample and that's all you have to do so now when we go back to our sound we can play this on the keyboard and it will play the entire range of the keys and you can do this with any type of instrument so let's play our track and let's see if we can work out a bass line that goes along [Music] let's put on our quantize [Music] we're on 1 16 [Music] and now that we found a bass line that complements the beat we can record this straight down so let's hit record [Music] now with bass lines you always want to make sure that they're working with the kick and the melody now you can hear that this bass line really brings the beat to life [Music] once we've recorded our bass line we can actually go in and use our piano roll to edit the notes so we can select the notes move them up to different notes [Music] now that we've recorded our bass line on our next lesson we're going to add the additional instruments over the top of our beat see you next [Music] time [Music] [Music] let's hit overdub [Music] so now that we've recorded our pads let's go to our piano roll now we can see all of our notes so there's a there's a note i want to change here so let's just move our workspace so we can see all of our grid and with our mouse let's just pick up that note and move it up to an a now on this sound i want to add a gated effect so it pumps to the beam so let's go to air effects we're going to go to dynamics i'm going to select air pump up so let's open up the plug-in and then let's change the depth so it's more subtle and let's solo this [Music] so you can hear it's added a lot of rhythm over our beat so let's go to track five and we're gonna add some shimmer we have some bell sounds over the top that gives our beat some high end [Music] and we're playing this like a crescendo so we're going to turn off our quantize so it doesn't snap to the grid [Music] now if you don't like what you played use the undo feature or redo so if you made a mistake we can just go again and we never have to stop our beat so now that we've added our bell shimmer to our track let's go to track six and we'll add some strings just to give it a final touch let's put quantize on for this so it snaps to our grid let's hit record over dub [Music] now on our next lesson we're going to arrange our b into a song structure so hope you enjoyed this lesson and see you next time [Music] welcome to the npc beats academy now in this lesson we're going to look at structuring our beat into more of a song this means if you want to send it to some top line writers then you've got it in more of a structure so they can work with the arrangement so there's a number of ways we can do this but i'm going to show you a more linear approach in the drum editor so we're going to go over to edit and we're going to go down to sequence and we're going to double the length from 8 to 16. and then we're going to do this again so let's just zoom out and see our grid and we're going to double the length again to 32. now you can keep doing this up to 164 128 bars whatever suits your requirements on your beat but let's work with 32 at the moment and what i want to do is erase the parts that i don't need from my tracks so on my beat track one i don't want my beat to come in until bar five then on my roads i'm gonna bring this in on bar nine so my intro will have no roads and then i'm going to take my roads out from bar 17 for eight bars which will be kind of like a drop down for maybe a verse melody so let's just select those notes there and we'll just erase those and now let's go to track three and we'll look at our baseline so i don't really want my bass line to come into bar nine so let's remove all of the notes now that's done let's head over to track four we're going to go to our pads so let's do the same now i don't really want my pads to come in until bar 17 so that gives us the intro and the first verse so let's remove those and then we'll go down to our bell pluck sound now let's remove those from the intro and then we'll go down to our strings now i want the strings to come in near the kind of the back end of the beat so let's go up to roughly about bar 29 then we'll go to our second pluck and again let's remove these from the intro and from the verses and this is going to come in at the same point as the strings so once we've done all of our parts i'm going to go back to our drums track one and i want to automate the filter so when my drums come in i want them to feel very low-fi so we hit record and play and let's open up our filter plug-in let's drop the cutoff down so now it's a roughly around about 300 hertz and we'll bring this up and you can see it's recording the automation on our timeline turn off record and that's recorded so it's a very easy process to record automation inside npc beats so let's record another pass and bring down the drums again open the filter [Music] now this could be the opening of a verse [Music] bring them in so now that we've got our track arranged into a song on our next lesson i'm going to show you how you can export your beat and send it to a friend or to a songwriter or share it online [Music] hi there welcome to the npc beats academy so in this final lesson i'm going to show you how you can export your beat and then you can email it send it to a friend to a songwriter and finish your production so let's go to export audio mix down now this gives us some different types of files so we could do it as a wav but we're going to use mp3 bitrates 320 so it's going to be a small file for us to send and if we want to send stems to say a mix engineer we could select separate programs wav file 32 float and now we can send the maximum quality and all of our individual tracks will now be stems which is a great way if you want someone else to mix your track but we want to send our track out as a stereo file so let's go stereo output mp3 and press export so now it's going to render out our file so let's give our track a name and press save now once your track has finished rendering we will have our track as an mp3 so now let's play this straight back [Music] thanks for watching this master class of how we can make low-fi beats so if you want more information about mpc and npc beats software head over to our academy and you can watch all of the other tutorial videos that we have so you can improve your production skills today see you next time

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Views: 195,025

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Id: BArLY_z9Bv8

Length: 31min 3sec (1863 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 21 2020