MPC Beats Software Tutorial - For Complete Beginners

are you looking into making beats and getting into the npc workflow well in this video i'm going to show you how to make a beat using npc beats check it out hey my name is matthew with matthewgrading.com on this channel i bring you the best tips and tools on creating music if you're new here consider subscribing so akai professional has just released some new software called mpc beats i think this is a great opportunity for anybody that wants to get into the mpc workflow all right so this software is based on the npc workflow and you get eight different midi slash instrument tracks to work with as well as two stereo audio tracks so you get a lot to work with to start out with and it also comes with the three mpc plugins it comes with baseline tube synth and electric and you also get over 80 effects that you could actually use you know when you're making your beats which is a nice inclusion in addition to that you know it comes with its own sound library so you get demos you get templates you get loops and samples to work with so you know you get enough to get you started into making beats okay so in this video i'm going to try to give you like a basic overview of how you can make a beat i'm not going to cover everything about the npc beats software because there's a lot to it it is very powerful software but i will get you you know kind of acquainted with the npc workflow and how you can actually get started making a beat let's get into it in this example i'm using my akai professional lpd8 wireless this is a midi controller and even though it's called wireless i'm using it as a usb midi controller so the usb cable is going into my computer and this way the software is going to pick it up and i'm using my focusrite scarlet 2i2 as an audio interface and this way i get low latency and i'm able to actually hear what i'm actually playing i'm going to use my headphones here now i will leave show notes in the description of this video so make sure you do go into the description and check the show notes i will leave different leaks and stuff about what i'm talking about but let's go ahead and get into this beat so i already have the software installed i'm just going to open it up here so whenever you open the mpc beats software you do get this startup screen so you could do an empty project or choose a template there are several templates here okay and then you have demos here so if you want to get an idea of what it can actually do you can load up a demo all right and then your recent projects will show up down here so what i'm going to do is load up basic so i'm going to load this up you can load this up too if you do want to follow along um you know maybe you want to have like your phone next to you and you know have this on your computer you could follow along if you do want to because i want to use all the sounds and everything that come with it so i'm just going to open up the basic right here i'm going to double click that now when that does load up you can see there's a lot of stuff going on here and it's really more simple than it looks but at the same time it is quite deep there's a lot you can do with the npc beats but i want to try to show you a couple things to keep it streamlined and simple so when you're first starting out you can kind of follow along with this so up at the top you have your different modes this right here where there's a house is your maid mode if you hit control 1 it's going to take you back to this mode and then you got different modes over here all right you got track view you got program edit so right here's program edit and it does have a sampler so you can use sample edit and make chops and different things like that and then you have your mixer so this is your pad mixer and then you got your channel mixer you know you got your sampler here and then you got your looper and all the different things that the npc does come with okay and then all your menu here you got song mode and everything like that i'm not going to go over all these different modes and what they do i just want to show you how to make a beat let's get started making beats okay now before we get into this i will make a setup video as well i will leave that in the description so if you do want to check that out you can check that out but what i want to show you now is kind of the workflow in here so you look right here you have something that says midi so this is where your eight midi tracks are going to be over here it says audio so this is where your two audio tracks are going to be so you'll see right here this template does have one two three four midi tracks and then down here are audio tracks they're kind of separated and they already named everything for you so you got drums keys synth pad bass and vocals in this template now all right so under here where it says midi you do have something that says sequence okay now you can kind of minimize these things if you want to but let's go ahead and just keep them open all right so up here is your sequences and then you have your number of bars in your sequence here so right now it's on two and then right here is loop so if you have this highlighted it's actually going to loop that sequence over and over when you hit play okay if you take it off loop it's only going to play that sequence once all right let's keep it on now you can go through your sequences you can have a ton of sequence so if you go through here you can actually see how many sequences you can have which is 128 okay now underneath that you have your tracks so you can have eight different midi tracks now we can select our tracks by tapping that arrow and going through so you got drums keys synth pad bass and then unused so you we have the option to add up to three more tracks on this one down here we have programs so what your programs are is your programs basically contain your sounds all right so in short they contain your sounds all right it goes a little deeper than that because there are different types of programs but this first one right here is a drum program so this is actually going to contain your samples so this is going to contain your drum samples now right here you know it says drums and then you got your key groups you got plugins you got midi programs you got clip programs and tv all right we're not going to worry about a lot of these other ones right now we're just going to focus on drum programs and plug-in programs for this particular tutorial now any point of time you can add new programs by pressing that plus but this is the program that's selected okay and you can play this program with your pads let's go back to main so you make sure you're in main here and then you can play that program with your pads now underneath program we have insert effects so this channel here on the left is your program channel for this particular program and we have four insert effects that we can add to each program so you could do that right there and right here these are your sin effects so i believe by default this one is going to have a reverb so let's turn this up now let's hit the pads you can hear there's a reverb all right we could take that off we got our dry signal again now we have four different sins that we can use underneath that we can select a program here okay and then underneath that we have our output so this particular program is going to output one and two underneath that we have mute and solo so if you mute this you're not going to be able to hear anything all right if i unmute it we can hear it now if you solo it you're only going to be able to hear that okay now over here this is your write in read automation when it's on r it's going to read any automation and automation is just like you can program the parameters in here to be automated to automatically do certain things we're not going to cover that too much in this particular video but under here we have our pan so we could pan things to the left or the right or we could simply undo that by pressing control z and right here we do have our program volume so right now it's on 0db and we can change it a few different ways we can actually click it and move this slider up and down we can move this particular q link right here so this area are your q links we can actually change the program level you can see where it says program level we could change the program level here or we can actually use the knob on our controller so i'm going to turn the knob on the controller and you can see i'm actually changing the level of that program and then again i can use my mouse here or over here okay i'm going to hit control z to undo that alright so that's your channel strip section so that whole section is your channel strip now to the right of that is this is going gonna change depending on where you're at so right now it's on output one and two and any insert effects on your outputs are right here okay so if you click that effect this is gonna be all the parameters that control that effect there's a bunch of other stuff at the top here right here we got our metronome you could turn this on or off here we could change the volume of it here okay we have our time correct here so now the time correct is on you can see it says timing correct right here we have our bar and then our b in our tick so this indicates where our play head here right here there's a playhead so if i click over here i can change where the playhead is so if i click this kind of blue area at the top here green blue whatever color that is i can change where that playhead is so you can see i'm changing it there all right now over here we have our bpm so that's how fast it is so i'm going to slow it down we can do it by clicking it or and dragging our mouse or we could just tap or double click all right and then we could type it in so i changed it to 90. all right and then we have over here kind of where we can actually control our playback we can hit record here overdub here alright and then we have our retrospective record here our punch in and out stop play and play start so the most common things you're probably going to use is overdub and play start now if you look spacebar does actually start it for you now if you hover over some of these things it's going to give you like what it actually is so if i hover over that it says records it also gives me a shortcut so r is going to arm for record you can see i pressed armed and now it's armed for record and then shift r is going to give me overdub okay so these might be useful for you if you're going to be using your keyboard stop is stop which is going to be spacebar and play is shift spacebar and then play start is just spacebar so if i hit spacebar it's going to stop start the playing but whenever it starts it you don't hear anything that's because we actually have to program something inside of here so if you look at this big section here this is our grid you can see it says grid right here then we got wave and list we're worried about a grid right now because we want to get something in our grid so we can hear something so if you look at the grid we can actually double click in there and start programming things so you could do that very simply all right now if i hit spacebar we do have something programmed so that's one way to program all right i can program a whole drumbeat in there by just clicking in there if i really wanted to now there's going to be different ways you could do things but this is just one way to do it okay now you saw that all right and if i don't want these events in here anything i double tap in here is called an event by the way so if i don't want one of these midi events i could double tap it and delete it or i could tap it or click it i should say and then press delete and delete it that way now if i want to delete multiple things i can select multiple events and then press delete okay okay so now we're back to a clean slate all right now down here we do have some different modifiers in our velocity all right cover that later on maybe in a different video but right now let's get a beat going so let's use our pad so i i do recommend having some kind of controller some kind of usb midi controller that you can control [Music] and you can hear it's very easy to play when you have an audio interface now i do have an audio interface that has an azo driver alright so the latency or the delay between when i hit the pad and hear it is very minimal if you do not have an audio interface download azio for all okay and then that's going to help you out all right so let's go ahead and get something in here [Music] all right we can use our pads and here are the different sounds [Music] and i always say when you're working with drums if you can sing it you can play it so if i want something that's like boom boom boom you know i could be able to do that you know boom boom boom chat all right so that's one simple method of kind of coming up with the drum beat one good thing to do is turn your metronome on so let's go ahead and put the metronome on so right here i want to click where it says metronome or you could actually push shift and m to start that but it's on now so when i hit spacebar you're gonna hear the metronome okay now it's gonna give you something to play too so okay i have something to play too all right now what i do want to do is use my q links to kind of zoom back out so now i'm using my controller to control the q link so this q link right here this is the fourth q link actually controls your zoom so if you pull it all the way down you're going to get the entire picture right there all right so let's record something i got the metronome on i'm going to push um shift r and that's going to arm the overdub and then when i hit space bar you're going to hear a count in and i'm going to be able to record it's going to record that into it okay so let's go ahead and do that two three four all right so i'm going to actually turn overdub off by clicking it and i'm going to turn the metronome off by clicking it [Music] then you can start freestyling the drums over top of it all right i'm going to hit um overdub up here [Music] all right i'm going to take overdub off [Music] all right i put overdub on just for second so i can record that one midi event all right so we got a drum beat in there remember i'm just using the template here so you could follow along with this if you want to all right so if i hit spacebar you're going to be able to hear that drum beat [Music] all right so what i'm going to do now is actually go to a different track so there's a few ways we can do that we can actually click over here all right where it says tracks so we got all of our different tracks here so we can select a different one i'm going to select keys right so that's one way we can change the tracks another way is down here where it says tracks you can see it says track right there right and it says current track so we can actually go through the different tracks okay let's go ahead and go back to keys so we're on keys right there so we got a drum beat in there let's hear what the keys sound like [Music] all right so we could play one note at a time [Music] multiple notes at a time all right and we can also use pad perform all right now if you look down here we got our q links we got our pads and then right here it says pad perform all right so under where it says pad perform we can actually change this to chords for example and then we could change our root note there we could change our scale so maybe we wanted a major scale and then we can actually right here change our chord type okay so let's just pick this one for the fun of it alright so that's what that would sound like 135 sounds like this [Music] all right and then right here is our octave so we can actually turn that octave down [Music] all right and we could pick a different scale so here's all the different scales so let's pick natural minor all right you could change the root note all right now so if you don't know music theory don't worry about it too much just pick something here and then like kind of stick with it throughout the song as far as right here where it says root note in your scale keep the scale the same through the song and you'll be okay so let's go ahead and keep the root note at c and the scale as natural minor now what i'm going to do is i'm going to hit the spacebar and kind of play to this [Music] all right let's listen to it all right so that's not too bad but let's go ahead and make this um sequence a little longer you can see it's two bars here but if we go over here to the menu we can go to edit and then under where it says sequence what we can actually do is double the link so you can see where we're at we're in the menu edit sequence double length if we click that what that's going to do is actually make this four bars now all right not only does it make it four bars but if we go back to our drum track it doubles that drum track up so we'll be able to hear drums throughout the whole sequence so let's go back to keys now let's listen to it all right that gives us a little more play room right [Music] all right now i'm going to actually use my q link to zoom back out again so we can see the entire sequence here and then i'm just going to keep it very simple now you notice when i push a pad while using pad perform i get that chord okay and you basically just play around with the chords find something you like pick numbers out of the hat whatever you want to do let's keep it simple i'm just going to use this first pad kind of the second pad up here and then add that at the end of it so let's go ahead and do that overdub and then on hit spacebar [Music] all right so now we can listen back to it now if you look over here you can actually find your notes alright so these are the midi events up here and you have a zoom over here as well so now i think the timing might have been a little off i think i want to pull the timing i think i'm going to change the timing a little bit so i'm going to select these three notes and i'm going to use this little thing right here so if i left click i can actually select these nodes and you can see there's this white line around these events which are the notes and then we can actually use this weird looking tool here to bring it back and then we can do it again for this okay let's see if this maybe sounds [Music] better i'm going to keep changing it until i find what i like here [Music] all right i think that sounds a little better so since we actually have something in here we go to menu and i'm going to go to right here where it says file you can actually save the project okay now i created a folder in here so when you first see this it's not going to have a projects folder but i just went new folder and made a projects folder and then went into that projects folder all right and we can save this so i'm going to make it npc beats this is the second you know project i worked on so i'm gonna put two all right if you push enter it's gonna save it or you could click save if you're finding value in this video remember to give it a thumbs up don't give it two thumbs up just give it one thumbs up and do that below i really appreciate you for doing that it's going to help this video get seen by other people who want to see this information appreciate you all right so now we do have a sequence but i do want to show you this if you click right here where there's four squares it's going to take you over to program edit now when you're in program edit you're going to be able to see what we're actually playing so this is the electric synth okay now there are different presets here that you can change but before we mess with the presets i just want to move on to the synth pad so now we're here this is actually called tube synth all right and you can see all the different parameters that we have so this is called tube synth okay you got these two main oscillators here and you have a sub oscillator which generate the sounds for the synth and you got all these different controls let's not get into this too much right now but i did want to show you that's what it looks like let's go back to main all right and again if you look here we're going to use pat perform [Music] that's what it sounds like so i'm pushing this first pad pad a01 that's one thing i want to show you right here it says a01 a zero two a zero three a zero four now up here you can see where it says a that's what bank we're in there are actually eight different banks okay but right now we only get access to three of them because of the particular type of program we're in but right now we're in bank a so right down here it's going to say a01 all right let's listen to it [Applause] all right so you know we could just keep it simple keep it a couple chords we can actually change the octave as well now keep in mind i'm keeping the root note the same and the scale the same and i'm just going to change the octave maybe a little higher you know experiment [Music] [Applause] all right maybe we didn't like that let's try an octave lower which is actually going to be at 2 so we're octave lower from the original octave all right and if you haven't figured out by now the octave number changes the actual pitch so the lower the octave number the lower the pitch the higher the octave number the higher the pitch i think that sounds fine so i'm going to actually click over dub right there and then hit spacebar and then start recording the pads alright so i'm going to go ahead and hit the spacebar and record onto the pads get the count in all right sounding pretty good take over dub off [Music] all right push space bar to stop it so that sounds pretty good let's go to track four so track four is base let's go over to program edit this is the baseline synthesizer all right this comes built into the mpc beats software we got this one so i'm going to do something different now with the pad perform let's go back to main right here where it says pad perform i'm going to change the type from chords to notes so what i did is i took pad perform off of chords where it's playing three notes at once or it's playing more than one note at once and i changed it to where it's going i'm going to play one note at once this particular synth is a mono synth so it's only going to play one note at a time so there's no point of picking chords because it's not going to play three notes so we're going to go ahead and play one note at a time [Music] all right so that's what it sounds like so i want to hit spacebar and kind of listen to it [Music] it doesn't sound too bad right but let's change the octave down and just you know see what that sounds like now a lot of making music is experimenting so you don't know what it's going to sound like until you actually try it so let's go ahead and try it adds a little more thickness to it [Music] now you don't have to conform to the same notes and everything like that i'm just keeping it really simple and since this is a bass line we can kind of make it groovy if we want to like we could play other notes right [Music] you know we could do different things i'm just going to improvise something i'm going to hit overdub and then i'm just going to go into it by pushing the space bar [Music] all right i think that sounded pretty good i'm going to take overdub off all right so i'm going to hit this square which is stop and i think that's a good spot to actually save the project i like to save often it's just a habit i think it's a good habit to get into you never know you know when the power is going to go off or something's going to happen right so at this point i think we got a pretty decent sounding sequence now we can add more tracks to this we don't have to you know conform to the template we can improvise the template so i'm going to go to a fifth track and i'm going to push this plus icon so when i push that it's going to add a new program and you can see right there plugin004 is a new program which is a plug-in program now right here it is the tube synth program and it's the preset is default so let's hear that all right that's what it sounds like but i think the octave is too low so i want to change it maybe the octave four all right and then right off the bat i'm just going to turn the volume down all right i'm going to use my encoder here just to turn it down [Music] all right so we got a lead i'm going to improvise a simple lead like that so i'm going to press overdub and then play start just to program that in there let's go ahead and do it two three four [Music] there we go take over dub off all right and we don't have to use that preset we could change the preset so if you look right here there are different presets you can hit this arrow to go to the next one right [Music] now you can see i'm changing the presets as it's playing [Music] that's interesting right you could always come back to a preset [Music] so now if you click where the preset name is you can actually look at the presets and you got different categories so we got synth lead pluck pad bass organ effects etc but let's go ahead maybe pick a lead hard seek maybe [Music] all right simple simple square i mean sounds pretty neutral a little mellow i like it simple uh let's try to put this into the reverb all right i want to click where it says send it doesn't actually say send but all right [Music] all right so what i did there let's take you back i turned up the send so it's going to send this sound to the return right here you can see this return has this air reverb on it so it clicks right there okay and then it brought up the effect and then i simply just increased the room size to kind of give it more of a dramatic reverb and let's listen to it [Music] i want to turn off the effect by pressing this power button so that's what it sounded like before turn it on all right so there you go that's how you can add effects i think we got a pretty decent beat going on right now i think this is a good place just to go ahead and you know save our progress i said there's one more thing i want to show you you know just for this first tutorial here right here is our channel mixer so we can actually change the different volume levels right here so each one of these lines right here is called a fader we can change our volume [Music] i think it sounds pretty decent right this is just a rough mix to kind of make it sound a little bit more pleasant because uh sometimes some sounds can get louder than the others all right so i just wanted to show you the mixer i'm not trying to give a big mixing tutorial i just wanted to show you okay this is where you can change the levels and you can see all the different levels all at once all right you could do that right there alright so this is the channel mixer mode so this software is deep if you're just starting there's a lot to take in so if you need to go ahead and re-watch some of the sections in this video you know ask questions below if i get enough of the same questions i'll make a video about it so go ahead and ask the questions all right and hey i think this is a great piece of software if you want to get into the mpc workflow this software is very capable and we've only scratched the surface okay so this is just one of the templates and it's only showing a little bit of what you can actually do with this software so be sure to ask your questions below okay so i will have more videos about the npc beats software click or tap the screen over here to take you to the playlist that's going to contain those videos subscribe right here my name is matthew hey let's continue creating music i appreciate you guys for watching we'll talk soon

Channel: Matthew Stratton

Views: 264,602

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Id: b77lQoB1pRk

Length: 34min 53sec (2093 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 21 2020