MPC Live 2 Standalone with Ableton Live - How To

hey everybody so today i want to show you how i use ableton live with my mpc live 2 and just use ableton live as a sound module i don't use the mpc software as a plugin inside ableton live because i think it's just a little bit too complicated the workflow doesn't really work for me instead i use midi actually just media out from the mpc live too and to do that i just got this really simple device it's a usb to media converter um it's called a mio i got this one at guitar center it's pretty cheap i think it was like 30 bucks on one end we have two midi cables a midi in and a media out just classic five pin midi din and the other side is a usb so i plug the usb end into my laptop and then the midi goes into the actual midi ports on the mpc live too so let's do that so what we're going to do is plug the midi cable from this little usb to media converter into the media out a on the mpc live and then of course we have to plug the usb end into the computer i just have an old macbook but this will work with any computer windows mac whatever so now that we have this plugged in we have the basic hardware part set up so that we can send midi data from our mpc live 2 into ableton live but we first need to set up tracks on the mpc live and on just to send the media and we need to set up ableton live midi tracks to actually receive the media and then put instruments on there so let's do that all right so on our mpc live we need to go ahead and create an empty new project and then what we need to do is create a track that's going to send media data over to ableton live right so here we've got our blank project first thing we'll go and use just track one here we need to set this to be a midi track which is this little icon here we set that to be a media track and then we need to tell it where in what channel to send it on so we're going to come over here to this little eyeball we're going to open up our channel strip thing here and to get to the media information we need to go to these three little lines and then we have our media information over here so right now it's taking media input from all ports that's fine we can talk about that later what we need to do now is for midi output it says none so we're going to click on none and we're going to change that with our little control wheel just to mpc a which is our first port that we plugged our midi cable in back here and that's pretty much it this little one here it's already set to channel one but there are in any midi cable in any midi channel there are 16 or i'm sorry the other 16 channels on any midi set so right now we're going to leave it on one and this is going to send it and that's actually all we have to do for the mpc side now we can move to ableton and set up ableton to receive this data when we hit our pads all right so back over here in ableton we need to now set it up to actually receive the media data so i just have a blaze a blank live set opened up here and what we need to do i'm going to go ahead and add a new midi track so we'll right click insert midi track and then for this media track i'll go and delete this basic one here that just shows up automatically for this media track we created we need to tell it where to get our midi from right and so it defaults to all ends right here we're going to change this remember the thing that i have is a mio if you've got a different branded device it'll show up differently here i'm going to set this to mio so now it's listening to the mio thing which is where we're plugged in on usb and then i'm going to change this from all channels i want it to only listen to channel one and that way i can create another one of these and only listen to channel two for a second instrument only listen to channel three for a third instrument so on and so forth and this is really all we need to do so this should be set up now if i hit some of the pads on the npc we should see it receive some media data in ableton and you can see this little yellow dot here that shows up for channel one that's it receiving the actual midi data on channel one from the npc as i'm hitting these pads over here now if your midi to usb device is not actually showing up right here like if you click on this all ends and you only have keyboard or configure if you don't have anything else you might need to actually turn it on in your ableton preferences so we can actually hit this configure button here and this will take us to our ableton preferences for link and midi and we need to make sure that your midi ports are actually turned on so as long as you've got your device in you should have this little midi port section here and you may have a couple of things i have a bunch we're going to minimize some of the things that i've got on here you need to find the name of your device on here and you need to find the section for input right so mine is input mio if you aren't seeing yours you may have these all turned off go ahead and turn them on and then close this out and then you should be able to see whatever your device is on here and select its channel so our next step for this would be to actually drag an instrument on here so we're going to take this let's do we'll just do the the basic analog plug-in here and this is just like if you were producing if you had an ableton push or just a regular midi controller and no npc at all it's the same vibe right so we've got an instrument on here we have a device on the track but it's also listening for the input from channel one so now if i hit these pads on my mpc it's going to receive the meeting but then it's going to play it through this instrument now before you can actually hear anything though just like with any other device you need to make sure that input monitoring is set up correctly right so we can see right now if i'm hitting the pads i'm getting no sounds we need to either arm this track to record with the little red arm record button here now if i hit this you should be able to see here there we go so now i'm hitting the pads on the mpc we can set full level and we get plenty of sounds and those are coming from the analog plugin in instrument over media in the whole thing that we just set up right if you don't want to have to arm this or if you have multiple tracks playing back from the mpc you can instead of using this regular arm you can just set this input monitoring from auto to in it'll turn blue and now even if the track isn't armed this will give you sounds so if you like have some midi data if you like five tracks on your mpc and you wanna hit play and have them all go at the same time without arming each one just let the monitoring to input in so that is how i use my mpc live 2 with ableton as basically like a limitless sound module um so this was just setting up one track on the mpc and then one track in ableton live but what i would recommend you do if you want to do this and this is what i've done is on your mpc create a user template file with 16 tracks pre-made and each one of those tracks set to output on a different midi channel remember you can do up to 16 midi channels over that single one single media port and you've got two on your mpc live so you could technically do up to like 32 instruments like this so set up a template file with 16 tracks that are already just pre-set up each one is a media track outputting on channel 1 channel 2 channel 3 channel 4 and then set up a template file on ableton with the exact same thing 16 tracks channel 1 channel 2 channel 3 channel 4 to receive those and that way when you're ready to go you can just open up your template file on both devices set up your instruments however you want it and then you basically can use your mpc live in standalone mode only you've got this like limitless limitless like sound module in ableton you can put contact instruments on there you can put ableton instruments on there you can put omnisphere on there whatever you want one of the other added benefits of doing it this way is that you don't need to worry about syncing play start record because you're still sequencing everything on the mpc as if you were in standalone mode right so you don't need to worry about like oh when i press play on the mpcs it can actually press play on ableton or anything like that because ableton is just listening for meaty as if it was just like a big fancy hardware synth so i hope this was helpful for you guys if you have any comments or questions i can try to reply to them leave them in the box below have fun making music [Music] thanks [Music] you

Channel: Zhan Knight

Views: 3,961

Rating: 4.9663863 out of 5

Keywords: MPC Live 2, MPC Live II, MPC, Ableton, Ableton Live, How To, DAW, Midi, standalone, controller

Id: 3ZhTiY8RJr4

Length: 7min 33sec (453 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/zhanknight]

This is a video explaining how I use my MPC Live 2 in Standalone mode with Ableton Live as a sort of limitless sound module. This will work basically the same on an MPC One or MPC X, and on basically any other DAW - Logic, Cubase, etc.

I prefer this to using the MPC software as a plugin inside a DAW. This way I get to use the Standlone workflow that I love, but get access to all the plugins I've wasted my money on over the years. It's pretty awesome opening up Kontakt in Ableton, but being able to use the pad perform functions on the MPC.