MPC Live 2 One or X Full Beginner Tutorial - How to Make Your First Beats

what's up it's ballistic ballistic beats ballistic productions uh today i'm finally getting around to doing something that i got a lot of requests for and basically is to do a mpc tutorial for beginners from start to finish from turning it on to completing the sequence beat um it's not scripted so i just want to throw that out there first but if you bear with me i'm gonna take you through my process and explain some things of what i'm thinking and how i actually lay out beats as well as explain uh what the different areas of the npc do it would take several hours like days probably to explain everything in detail so this isn't that but it will tell you everything you need to know to make your first beat um while you're going if you come across anything that i don't explain or i don't answer hit the comment section and as long as it's something that i feel that can help others also i can do an in-depth video on just that thing so now that i did this for the whole workflow the next steps will be to do break it down and do tutorials on each individual topic or area um i just wanted to do this so you can get a quick jump start and go through and start making some tracks asap but um not to talk your head off uh just show a little bit of appreciation if you want uh hit the like button and especially the subscribe button that'll help a lot and you also would want to catch some of that other content um just getting started going deep into this if you check my channel i have a lot of beat making videos with the npc and since and all that um so just check me out let me know what you think and let's get right to this uh tutorial all right so here we go the first thing we're going to want to do is turn the mpc on and get the splash screen [Music] i wish it was faster but this is what we got for now it could be worse um when you first get it unless you never changed it you're gonna get this demo screen so personally i turn it off but um i always want to start with an empty project so down here uh if you can see it it says empty project so we're going to start there i'm going to jump right to the settings and project defaults and new project dialog is what gives you that screen so i'm gonna turn that off now before we even start i just turned it back on for this so all right so pretty much what you got here is the main project screen and if you look you have sequences tracks and programs all within a project a project is pretty much going to be the entire thing that you're working on so if you're working on a beat or a song everything in it is a project alright so as far as the sequence that's going to be like a certain part of your song it's kind of like a pattern in fl studio but a lot of npc users don't mess with fl studio um but the sequence is going to hold multiple tracks multiple programs all your instruments you can pretty much make a whole beat or at least the loop of all the instruments and it's all can be in one sequence but um what you're going to want to do to change sequences is like you can have a sequence for your intro a sequence for the hook a sequence for the verse one a bridge and blah blah blah so you can name each one that you can just like make everything the whole song on one sequence and then you can copy it over and take some things out for the next and so on and then uh you can put them all in a certain order and that way it kind of flows as a song at the very end a track you pretty much have this first little four squares here that's like a program usually your drum tracks or sample tracks are going to be on there um then you have this little plug and that's going to give you the plug-ins like tube synth electric bass line or some of the defaults uh you got this keyboard that's going to be a key group and you can use that for putting a sample or sound on it like you can put a little bell one shot or something and assign it across all the pads or all the keys if you have like a midi controller connected so that's a good way to do stuff and make sure you're staying in the right key and all that like even though this is drums i like to put stuff like 808 stuff that you're gonna change the tune of the pitch on and put that on a key group so that way you can play along with the melody or the main sample or whatever you got going the easiest uh clips i hardly ever use um mainly doing hip hop and uh rap r b trap all that kind of stuff um scenes is kind of like ableton if you're familiar with that you can pretty much get like a lot of ideas and stuff just on different paths and just launch them all at different times and play them uh it's it's hard to explain because especially like i said i don't use it so sorry i'll probably do a video on that after i do more clips but if you do regular beats you will never need it it'll just give you a way to get the ideas out different so it could be useful for that midi i actually use all the time because i have a few synthesizers and stuff like that and those hook up through midi through usb or there's midi connectors on here if you have external gear when you choose a midi track it just gives you control like uh these are the notes for pad perform which is different ways to play instruments or plug-ins or whatever with the pads on here so if i hooked up my moog or my korg synthesizer i can play that here using the midi track and it'll record the midi notes not the sound but as long as the sound is connected you'll hear it that will be another video also but midi is dope you can use this as the brain of a big uh setup and it's always cool to have that cv uh the live mark one which i have doesn't have a cv uh the live two and the one and i believe the x also does so that's another way to hook up certain synthesizers uh euroracks and all that so that's a quick overview of that um one of the first things you're going to want to do of course is get some sounds so there's a few ways to do that um if you have a 1 or a live 2 you probably have a browse button on here the menu button has a secondary function of browse which means i can hold shift and hit menu and that will give me my browse screen if i go back to the main menu i can double tap menu and that will give me my browse or finally you can hit menu and then go to the browser there and i said finally but there actually is one other way um a lot of people really like the one and the x because it has all the extra buttons and stuff the live does have fewer buttons but it does have some cool shortcuts too like you can literally hold menu and press the pad that corresponds with whatever's on the screen here and go to that thing so if you want to go to sample edit and you get used to going to sample edit a lot you can hold menu and hit that pad and you're in sample edit oh me you hit this one you're in program edit list edit browser uh whatever you want to do um you want to change the color of the pads oh menu hit that last one and we're in the pads colors you can have it going by the velocity that you hit the pass you can change it to fixed if you just want to set the pass to a certain color and boom i'm gonna do this uh what looks good with this let me not get distracted yeah forget that we pinned it back on classic and we're gonna continue with this um so i'm going to browser in the browser you have content like under this content thing you have all your internal sounds and all that even your my files which is your own stuff and uh splice on uh i think the one has splice but i know the others does so you can connect your splice account that's another thing too but um it's cool you can download all your splice content into here and that's just dope i'm gonna go to places and this is where you see all your drives the internal is the internal uh hard drive for your your npc a lot of people don't want to use that because if you connect in controller mode to your computer or whatever you really won't be able to drag things from it won't see that drive you won't be able to drag things from this uh npc into the computer if you want to say put your stuff in ableton or another dog just to finish it up uh so this npc live here is actually my internal ssd that i put inside and that's what i work off of mostly i'm going to go to ballistic sounds and go down to ballistic drum kits this is just the path of folders that i put in my drive elixir drum kit uh you can't even see it probably how can i do that you can't see it but this is the elixir drum kit now you can see it um that's my personal drone kit it's available on my site if you like it this ain't about that but just throwing it out there so um the first thing i'm gonna do is find a kit [Music] that's pretty punchy and the way i like to assign samples is to find the sound click the pad it lights up then you can hit load on the screen and now it's there i think that's the quickest way so say i want to go and get a hi-hat like that hit the pad hit load now i got that um let's go to open hi-hat that's cool hit that load [Music] and we good with that another way um is to use down here this assign samples or sample a sign um let me get some more samples first and that'll make more sense back to browse so that's a way to do it if you're like just going through and you're like okay that's cool and so just pick it that's cool that and you don't even know if you're going to use everything but you can just go through load a bunch of samples [Music] and what i'm doing is i'm pushing the jog wheel in to pick them so i picked all those samples i don't know if i'm going to use them all but when you go to sample assign all the samples that you picked period show here so if i want to put that snare on pad three i can pick it here or over here and then click and it's there so it's just another way to do it um if you just want to get a whole pool of samples first and then go through um what else i need a clap cool simple right there um anything else oh of course a 808 [Music] let me use that one [Music] all right so you picked your sounds now you're ready to make a beat um one thing you want to check first is the bpm uh mine is currently on 140. i set it to 140 by default by going into the main menu clicking this gear for settings and project defaults and there's a default tempo here so i set that to 140 because i did come from fl studio and still use it but i started there i got used to starting at 140. a lot of trap stuff now is 140 because a lot of people use fl and just just get in and start making it so that's pretty much why a lot of people use that um it's the same as 70 140 is just considered double time and you can set the default bars and all that here too my default bars is four you can go up to 8 or 16 or however you want to make your track we're gonna start with four and so all those drums i loaded up are already on this program one track and basically um i'm at 4 bars 140 bpm i'm gonna record uh you can hit record to arm it it starts flashing then when you hit play it plays from wherever you are i just kind of get in the habit of always using play start because it'll always start at the beginning when you start recording and it'll give you that count in too so um [Music] let's hit uh play start and record some hi-hats actually actually i'm gonna start with the clap [Music] all right i had to turn that down it was coming in kind of hot all right so as you see once it got through that four bars it looped back over and it switched to overdub automatically i always use overdub anyway because that's just how i like to record record goes through once but when you're looping overdub is actually gonna allow you to go back in and add other notes without erasing what you just did um so the reason i skipped the hi-hat was for one that ain't a hi-hat no more i changed it earlier in my example so where i went back into um the browser sample assign that's my hi hat that i had there so i'm just going to put it back there [Music] um the reason i went i stopped because i need to explain these up here so you have note repeat which you can hold down or you can double tap and it'll latch or to latch you can also shift and hit note repeat and that'll give you this and you see it's velocity sensitive so if i push it a little it's low if i push harder it gets louder that's by default unless you hit full level which is this other button uh then it's always going to play as loud as it can you can also double tap that or shift tap it and you get half level which is a good pretty good i'm gonna leave this at half level actually um 16 level i'll show that in a little bit so let's get the how hats in i'm gonna use um these options down here give it changes to speed so you got eighth notes 16 32nd 64. and triplets over here you can use this on any of the other ones it gives that triplet so yeah just get creative do what you want to do with that so i'm here overdub play start and start with some eighth notes so yeah just play around with those different speeds and you'll be good so now we got the clap in the hi-hat um i'll add a snare next and you can just keep it playing and that way you can just hit overdub at any time and add your next sound in [Music] all right so one of the next things we have is uh 16 levels 16 levels is going to take one sample and spread it out over all the paths and that's what's used a lot for like 808s and uh if you have a instrument sample that you want to play different notes in so this is the 808 pad if i hit six first you have to hit the pad that you want to do then hit 16 level and it'll affect the last pad that you uh hit so that's the 808 for me um there's multiple ways to do it what i just described was tune that's uh that's the main sound and you can go up [Music] and you got that velocity it gives 16 levels of velocity so you can go uh [Music] and of course you got that that's like the same note but you change the velocity for each one and you got other ways too those are the main two that i use um and that'll get you going so let's record a 808 i'm gonna just freestyle [Music] so now we got the 808 going um i'm gonna add a kick over top i have to turn off 16 level first and now i can clean my kick i'ma wait for it to loop back around and hit overdub [Music] all right so i think that's good for a drum track what i can do now is move on to a new track uh because i want to add a sound in like a um everything's a sound uh instrument so i'ma click this multiple ways to do it you can double tap go to the next unused track which is track two or you can just highlight it and turn the wheel and go to whatever track you want so i'm gonna track two um i'm not going to put another drum track on here right now so i'm gonna choose the second thing for plug-in tube synthesis default um so i'm gonna click where it says default for the sound and find the actual sound that i wanna use you got synth lead pad all those different things so imma choose a synth you can highlight it here and just turn and switch through [Music] i don't want to waste too much time but gotta be something decent let me just do that so basically um if you hit pad perform you have the option to choose a certain key and that'll only put those keys on your pass for you [Music] so that's pretty cool to help you um get things and stay in key without knowing too much theory you also have chords and that'll actually use the same thing you choose a key choose the octave which means you can play this c sharp chord there you can go up [Music] and change that to one three and five you can put it on progressions and that is cool um so now that i'm doing the melodies it's uh easier to do the 808 for me after the melody so this is a chance to show you how to delete something if i want to go back i'm going to go back to track 1 because i want to get my melody in before that 808 the 808 is there so i'm going to choose this grid option here and if you choose the grid you actually have all your sounds laid out there for the track that you're in [Music] like that's the hi hats and you can click the pad that corresponds to that sound and you can delete one or all of the uh each little thing is called an event you can delete those so let me show you this right here um [Music] this magnifying glass gives you the option to stretch and move around on here the next thing the square is how you select things so you can select these notes these whatever uh next you have the eraser which self-explanatory you can tap on something and erase it and click undo and bring that back and the pencil which means you can put in notes and undo gets rid of them so let's say i want to go deeper in and take a few notes out of the 808 that's my 808 on uh row six i'm gonna play it and pay attention to these two notes right here say i don't want those two notes i'm gonna hit the selection thing get rid of those two notes like that i can hold shift and cut and now they're gone or i can get the eraser and just tap on them and they're gone and now we got this [Music] all right so that's that but i want to get rid of all of them so if i click away click on that track it highlights everything on that track and if i hit shift and cut now all my 808 is gone that's just the kick left so now let's go back to track two back to pad perform and let's find something to put in here so simple but let's do that so since i did that on course say i want to put another sound now i can go to track three uh i want to get a new plugin [Music] new sound i'm gonna do a lead [Music] pad perform is still in the same thing and it's still on um progressions i'm gonna put it on notes because i just want to play one note at a time but since it's in the same key everything will still sound alright together [Music] so there's no wrong notes let's figure something out something random simple [Music] all right so now we got that and basically remember what i said earlier about key groups it's a good chance to move that 808 to a key group so i'm going to choose number track 4 and i'm going to make it a key group track um for the sample i'm gonna go to menu and program edit and let's see we'll choose samples at the bottom any screen um there's no sample on there right now so i'm gonna find that 808 which was was it that one [Music] it is so i'm gonna choose that go here pad perform i can take the octave down it gives me lower notes let's find something that works [Music] let me keep it simple [Music] say that lee is too loud um what you can do is let's go to [Music] track view under here we have track view under that grid view so these lines here it's track view uh which track has my lead on it is it three yeah so number three if number three is too loud i'm uh click here on the volume these here goes up to 127 at full volume and you can lower there more so the level i said volume level same thing um let's play it all and i'm gonna turn it down uh to somewhere with where i want it not that low [Music] 808 there put the 808 level [Music] i really don't want the 808 too low maybe there um so say you got the drum track here and you want to turn some drums down that turns all the drums down on that track and we don't want that so to fix the drums um you want to go into pad mixer that way you have a different level for each pad and you can turn down the corresponding uh drum sound so if my snare is too loud i can click here for the snare or if you want to see what it is you can say that's my snare it highlights automatically and turn that down you can also notice that when i click this row this little orange ring appears around here that means that the q links are set up for each one of these four uh pads the four q links correspond to that so my snare would be this third one one two three four one two three boom third one that's the snare if i want the hi-hat i can use this it's the fourth one so i'm gonna use this fourth q link [Music] that actually doesn't work by just hitting it so you actually have to use the q link button and if you see using the q link button it jumps up to the next row i rarely use the q links i probably should more it'll probably make things easy so my bad but that's how you use them let's turn down that uh hi-hat [Music] go back down to that clap i want to turn the clap down [Music] all right so that's that um you can put effects on things uh if you want to put an effect on so say i want to put um some reverb on this lead there's a little eyeball right here which is to show or hide these extra settings uh inserts would be the area where you put effects on things so i'm gonna choose just click in there it gives you the four inserts you could put four inserts on a whole program or on a whole track or on each pad can have four different inserts or effects on each pad which is dope this is for the lead though so let's go you can put an eq on it [Music] let's put a high pass filter on there to cut out some unnecessary low end or whatnot you can click the pencil it gives you the actual thing here i can adjust the frequency right there so everything under that frequency is cut out because it's a high pass filter let's go up somewhere around there oh that's unneeded because it pretty much sound the same so why have that frequency in there and that's good enough i really just want the low end to come through so i can click back and go to the next effect and put that reverb on like i said we use air reverb just found a preset that's cool i'm gonna click mix and anytime you see that q and that orange uh exterior you can use the q links for it turn the mix on that down turn the room size down sound too about right there but you can mess around and go through and see what effects are available back here so say i want to put some reverb on uh my clap so i'm gonna hide this and we're gonna go back to [Music] the drum track for one and we're gonna show this if you look up top there is a pad there is these four boxes which is program edit and you have track edit and you have this crown for like master i'm gonna go to pad and you can click the pad and it selects that and you can have different effects and everything on each pad so i'm gonna choose that snare click inserts go to error reverb and we got some reverb going [Music] let's get it here that's more like it [Music] boom i had my drum solo now don't all right so we're going kind of long um i'm gonna show you how to get different variations of your tracks going and map it out um if you have anything specific that i jumped over or didn't mention uh definitely hit this uh subscribe yeah do that too hit the comment section and uh let me know and i'll circle back and try to do a dedicated video on it um what i'm gonna do now um so everything playing right now is in this sequence so i'm gonna hit the pencil and i wanna copy this whole sequence and it's gonna copy from sequence one to sequence two and you can name it whatever you want like if you want to put a verse section and now we're gonna do the verse you can name it verse or whatever i guess i'll do that verse boom do it now it's going to copy it to sequence 2 called verse we got sequence 1 which we didn't name i'ma just put chorus on there so to rename uh click this little a symbol with the cursor next to what you're trying to do if you're trying to rename the track do it on the track sequence right here and just call that hook because i usually want everything to play on the hook or you can name it hook one for the first part of the hook hook two for the second so let's go back to verse we got the same thing that we had on the other thing going but now i can take out something so say that synth line i want to take out um so we'll go to track three which was that i can hit solo and see like we don't want that to play when the verse come in so i can go to track view that track view i can go to um grid view and basically select all of it everything's selected and i'm gonna just cut that all the way out there's other ways to do it but that's how i'm gonna do it right now so we got this [Music] all right so say that's the whole verse it's basic but it's just a tutorial um so let's go back to one because we got everything planned there and let's copy that again i'm going to copy sequence to three and i'm gonna do uh intro boom copy of the three call it intro we on that now so let's say i don't want any drums playing for the intro what i can do is go to track one which is all my drums click there and i can hit clear that's another way to delete just delete it completely that just took the plugin off and everything if we go to like another track it's still there we go there it's gone so i want to do the same thing with the 808 uh on this intro track so my 808 was on four [Music] i'm gonna go to the pencil clear that out again if you want to keep the instrument there and maybe change the melody you can just go to track view i mean grid view and change out the melody make it hit a few times or just kind of make it more interesting i'm not going to use it for this beat so i just cleared it out completely so now we got that sequence for the intro this sequence for the hook and this one for the verse um so to put the song together one of the main ways in the way it's kind of meant to do it people found easier ways that work for a better workflow for them but you want to use song mode so i'm gonna go in my menu and go to song so you want to hit uh insert as many times as for as many sections as you want um i'm gonna hit here i want the intro to play first so i'm gonna put that for number one i want the intro to play for four bars which so that's one loop then it'll go to the hook the hook is also four bars but i want it to be eight so i'm gonna click here next to one i want that to loop twice um go to the verse i want that to loop like three times that'll give me a 12 bar verse and then if i hit insert again i want to go back to the hook uh loop twice and let's use the intro as an outro two so let's say this is our quick song and you wanna play that whole thing it goes like that [Music] to the verse [Music] so this is one way to do it um i actually like to export everything and put it into a different doll but um as far as working all the way in the mpc uh this is one of the best ways to sequence not the only way but the most straightforward way say that's a quick one verse song with two hooks and then i go to the outro there that's gonna play twice [Music] and there we go um what you can also do with that you can convert the whole song to a sequence uh this convert to sequence button down here it will go to the next available sequence which is four i would probably put that somewhere way down the line that i won't be using so i'm gonna put it on like sequence 10 and click do it now if i go to sequence 10 i have the whole song there so if i go to grid view let's see let's go to track one where we know some stuff is go to grid view you can see it actually laid the whole song out on that track and you can do that for each track and basically change stuff up uh individually that's kind of the way some people like to do it instead of going and doing the song mode some people just like to set their bars for like the length of a whole song and just copy the whole thing over a long a long grid and then just go in and piece it together and take things out individually so later on i think that would be a good thing to do i don't recommend starting that way just to get the feel and know how things were made to be then you can come up with the tricks and learn little tips and things like that all right so that's what we got for today i pretty much feel like we did cover everything you need to make your first beat again if you have any questions that i didn't answer hit the comment section or hit me up on my socials it's at ballistic productions spelt the same way as this channel on instagram ballistic on twitter um also hit the subscribe button hit the uh like button if i helped you at all if you learned something hit the like button and subscribe and tell me what you think do all that um i try to answer everybody and i will accommodate i'm trying to get content together so um suggestions helps and i'll probably make a video on most of those things but um that's what we got y'all stay safe till next time hope to hear from you go make some beats

Channel: Brandon B'Lystic Lee

Views: 31,033

Keywords: mpc live tutorial beginner, mpc live tutorial begginer, Music Production, MPC, MPC Live, MPC One, mpc beginner tutorial, mpc beginner, mpc beats beginner tutorial, mpc one beginner tutorial, mpc x beginner tutorial, mpc beats beginners walkthrough, mpc live beginners, mpc live 2 beginner tutorial, mpc software for beginners, best beginner mpc, akai mpc one, how to make beats, how to make beats for beginners, how to make beats without a computer, Mpc live 2 begginer tutorial

Id: XA0x_8myYaw

Length: 46min 59sec (2819 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021