MPC Live, Making a Song From Start to Finish

hey everybody what's up this is catechist and today I'm going to do a review no not a review I'm going to do a tutorial on how to make a song on the MPC live both of my reviews of the MPC live I included a tutorial at the end but I don't have a video that is dedicated specifically to making a video or making a tutorial so I'm going to do that today I'm gonna try to make it as simple as possible just from like beginning to end how to make a song I'll be overlooking a lot of the like deeper features of the MPC live because you don't really need them in order to just get a song done I will be using my phone camera I'll be holding it in my hand so the shots might not be perfectly steady and I'll have to do all the stuff on the MPC live a single-handed like one handedly but I think I can make it work so without further ado let's get started on the video okay let me just turn this around okay so here we are on the opening screen just I'm going to start a new project empty right there and but the first screen here so you've got three parts on the start here one is your sequence bar one is your tracks bar and one is your drum programs your sequence makes everything happen in single sequence your track is all the things that happen in a track and you can have unlimited tracks in a single sequence and then you've got your drum program so I'm gonna show you how to make a song as simple as possible and we're gonna start by determining the bar length I have an 8 bars you can have it for you can have it too you can have it one if you want to you just have to decide that for yourself each bar is basically four count so one two three four that's that's a bar that's each bar then you've got your BPM right here so set that to where we want I'd like to work at 100 BPM for almost all of my songs for some reason then you've got your track down here and right now it says unused because I haven't done anything in it man out this is clear I haven't done anything yet then you got your program barred here now program just tells the pads what to do so the first thing you're going to need to do let's say that we're gonna start with a beat okay so a sequence one is just gonna be the beat the first thing I need to do is determine what the pads are going to play right now they do nothing they make no sound so we're gonna go to assign samples like that we're gonna go to browse and then we've got a whole bunch of drum packs here when I click on each one of them it's gonna give a demo of that drum pack now that doesn't mean that you're using that drum loop it's just showing you like that's just showing you the different sounds that are in that pack but when you actually go to use it it's not that same one drum beat there's actually no drum beat whatsoever so let's choose ourselves something simple we're gonna go for a house what I'm listening for right now is the kick the hi-hat and the snare drum that I want in my my drum pack I [Music] like that kick and I like that snare so and the hand clap so let's I can double click on that or I can click this knob in here like that and it will load them so now if I go back to the main right here it's selected deep house kit sometimes it stays on program one and so after you assign it you're thinking like where are my sounds I don't I don't understand I just chose one you just have to select it down here so go from program 1 to the deep house and then I have all my sounds okay so first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna do a 4 on the floor beat that's we're gonna do that first so I'm going to because I only have one hand what I'm going to do is I'm going to hold shift here and I'm gonna click on note repeat at the top right here ok so now what that's done is I'm also gonna put full level on there so that the track levels don't like depending on how hard it rests now it's all one like full level they're all as loud as they can be now right now you'll see the division is 1:16 that means through instead of 1 eighths digit to do and 1/4 is boom boom boom so we're gonna select 1/4 and I'm gonna hold it very easy ok now I can either do the drum beat doing one sample at a time I'll show you let's click on record please start okay that's fully recorded now so if I play it it's just gonna be that one boom boom on top of that I can also add I can add that in there to have a little diversity however I don't want to click record play start because if I do that it's going to erase what I've done so you need to click on overdub play start now I'm gonna add in my snare drum [Music] okay that's done now it's kind of boring it's just boom boom it's a start but again it's kind of boring so what we're going to want to do is turn our divisions up a little bit so now it's so we can add a little bit of like a but flourishing here so click on over dab play start okay little bit more detail in there now another thing we might want there is some high hats I'm gonna put them off beat so let's do overdub before [Music] [Music] not bad okay the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna turn the divisions up one more time so now it's and then I'm going to add a little bit more nuance I like you not being able to come up with a word that I want I'm gonna add a little bit more like flourish in there to add some more diversity to the beat so click on overdub play start [Music] okay so we've got a basic beat down here beat down we've got a very basic beat here let's just play one more time it works okay so it's not an amazing fancy beat but it works let's say next we want to add a bass line so what we're going to do from here is we can either do everything in the same sequence and try to spread it out later or we can just start by clicking on this button right here that's the edit button and then copy this is from sequence 1 the sequence - let's do it and go to main here and now we're on sequence 2 and it's exactly the same so the next thing we want to do is go to track 2 not track 1 because we're already done track 1 we're going to track 2 here and we're gonna select a plug-in now I'm not guaranteeing that this is gonna sound beautiful I'm just gonna make it functional ok so right here if we click on plug-in it shows us plug-in 1 don't worry you can rename that if you want to we've got tubes synth and then preset default that's the first sound on there it actually has a name but it's just called default we're gonna go from tube synth right here that's the kind of plug-in it is there are three plugins in here there's the baseline plug-in the electric and the tube synth so you're gonna do most of your meet with the tube synth down here Electric is really nice but it's electric piano so it's kind of a very specific sound and we've got our baseline synthesizer we're gonna start with a baseline so let's click on that just click that down and now if you press something kind of sounds funky and weird what you need to do is select a higher bank so that it's like a higher octave don't worry about how nasty the bassline like the sound itself is because we can change that in a minute so what we're gonna do is we're gonna start by making the baseline so I'm gonna figure out the melody here basic so we're going to first we're gonna hold note repeat right here and check what our sound division is it's 116 that's okay this means that it's gonna automatically quantize it's gonna put sounds in the spot to be in time with the music instead of them being sounding like they're totally by hand and maybe like out of tempo with the rest of the song so one sixteenth is good that's enough detail that you can get a pretty complex baseline or melody if it's one eighth you're gonna find that it shuffles them so that it doesn't sound like the baseline that you put in so one sixteenth is good 1:32 unless you're really good with your finger drum paint or a finger like your timing 1/32 you're gonna hear things being out of time so one sixteenths is pretty good now I'm gonna try this I can't guarantee that I'm gonna get it right on the first try but let's give it a shot a little bit before I play because I often make mistakes cuz I forget it [Music] [Music] everything is in the right time one thing you want to make a note of is if you record something in here you click record and play start and you like record a whole eight bars or how many bars you've got selected there when it's done it's gonna automatically switch to overdub so if you press anything else after that it's going to like include that it's gonna start over dubbing that in so when you're done recording the the eight bars press stop even if you want to add to it after that press stop and then over dub record the reason is the undo button works / / / dub so if I record something and let it play through and it plays through and then I want to add something to it and it's still on / / dub and I start recording that in there and then it's still on / dum and I start recording something else and I make a mistake if I hit the over dupe or the undo button it's going to undo everything in that little session right there so you want to record something that you like and that is those eight bars press stop then / dub record record something else press stop that means or that way if you make a mistake in a single little session right there you're gonna back up just that one thing and not back up through all of your work in that entire session so now that I've done that got that done there I don't really like this bassline it kind of like doesn't fit with the beat let's listen to it real quickly while we click on default here and we're gonna scroll through some diff Prince synthesized plugins okay are so different some different baseline patches okay I actually like this one it's a little bit late starting the envelope is a little bit late starting but I like it I think it sounds nice with the beat let's listen one more time [Music] now let's say you like this here but you feel like the envelope it starts a little bit too late you want to start just a little bit faster what you can do from here since I'm on the plug-in I can click on menu and I can go to program edit and in here it's gonna bring up that baseline synth and everything that you can adjust is right in here so you've got some different options you've got your oscillator filter an envelope your velocity your mister I don't know what that is and your chorus I'll probably know what that is once I finish the videos like good Zeus you've got your delay and your compressor and height whatever hype is so we're going to adjust the are we gonna adjust there's the envelope right there and the attack seems to be fully at the beginning that's okay I can't really adjust the envelope anymore than it already is so let's just leave it as it is it's really not bad for some of them you you'll find that the envelope is like already set where it's for having perhaps like this if I started up here then it won't do anything for some reason I don't know I don't know what I'm doing here okay let's move that envelope back down here for the baseline synth it's pretty basic just make sure it's targeting here for the baseline synth it's pretty basic you've only got a few options down here down here for the tube synth it's a lot more complicated and we'll see that in just a second so let's go back to our main screen just by clicking the main button we're back here and next we're going to copy this we're gonna do edit and copy and go to the next sequence it says sequence 1 2 sequence 3 I hope this coming up on my camera click on do it ok and then main and now we're on sequence 3 and everything we've already done is in sequence 3 so now we want web SEC simply click the stop button now we want to build down it even more ok so we're going to go to track 3 and we're gonna go to plug-in we're gonna add another plug-in here if I can there we go plug in 2 we're gonna change oh there we go it's already on tube cents so have a listen well notice that the bank is still up here so that's basically the oscillator range now remember if we record the melody with this patch we can still change it right after so let's just start by recording it with this patch and then we will adjust the sound later we just wanna get a good melody for it another thing I recommend doing is using the arpeggiator so I'm gonna hold shift and hit note repeat we've got it down let's just listen to our song real quick [Music] I think we can do that so let's put that little melody in there okay so I'm gonna click on record this is a fresh track so don't have to worry about recording over so I can use a record button play start [Music] after I did it I hit the overdub button to stop her from overdubbing you don't have to hit stop you can also hit overdub so I hit the overdub button and it stopped it of course that'll keep it playing but it stopped the recording that means that if I make any mistakes in future sessions on the same track that I don't erase it by clicking the undo button like I just mentioned okay so let's have a quick listen here it's not bad but let's just say that the food synth is kind of like I don't know it's not quite right so what we're gonna do is we're going to change the preset so again we're gonna click on the default button and then as it's playing we're gonna go through the different defaults and find something that totally fits another thing to mention is if you want to make it yourself you can go into the menu button right here go to program edit and you can change a whole bunch of things so if I hit play start here [Music] okay so without even choosing a different patch I actually like this one after I've made some adjustments to it um if you do end up making a patch that you like you can save click the Save button right there and I recommend not saving on your internal drive always save on an SD card or an SSD drive so let's go to plug in saves tube let's call it shelter why not I don't know why I'm calling a shelter I'm just going at that I'm afraid some of this text isn't gonna show up perfectly on the camera and I do apologize for that it's just very contrast II so some of the words that are underneath the like white bars and stuff might not show up I do apologize for that okay so let's play this again [Music] okay very good so again we're gonna click on the edit button we're gonna go to copy this sequence we're gonna do it we're gonna do it again let's just imagine that this is the part of the song that plays through a couple of times without changing so it's letting you enjoy this part of the song so number three and number four are exactly the same that's where we introduced that new tube synth but number five which is now what we're on mmm sequence five right there even though it's called sequence one that's just because we copied it so it copies the name as sequence one you can name all of your sequences if you want to just by clicking on the edit button and then up here you can change it five so there we go this one's called five so on here we're going to introduce a change of some sort so let's go to our let me just click on you see that right here down on the bottom it's all the divisions of time that's because the note repeat is selected if I click it to uncollected alright disconnected then I've got some menu options down here again including the MIDI and audio and my phone's going blurry okay so from here what we're going to do is we're going to go back to track one that's our beat we're going to mute it now this mute will only be for this sequence so one two three and four will all have the beat and then five is suddenly going to have no beat so if we play it [Music] good okay so now we're gonna go back to track four this is the new one that we haven't used yet and we're going to introduce a new sound so I'm gonna actually you've add another plug-in right here so plug in three its defaults to the tube synth and I'm gonna select the electric so have a listen to this [Music] okay so let's see if I can find a chord or a few chords to go along with us now you'll have to bear with me I'm not the best at doing chords on here but I know the first one will be I'm just gonna do a melody cuz I'm not gonna work on the chord so I mean I'll hold shift and click note repeat sorry I had to move the camera when I do that so it's shift and note repeat that's to latch it on there right now it's on 1/16 I'm gonna change it to 1/8 [Music] [Music] [Music] that should work kind of repetitive but it doesn't matter it's just adding a new element to the song so we're gonna hit record play start so I totally messed up there what do I do like that's absolutely messed up hit undo once and now we're back to the start again so that's the only one so click on record click on play start [Music] [Music] [Music] okay that works that's a nice new element and let's add another element to the song let's add track five and we're going to add another plug-in don't worry about the CPU usage on here if you have a look there's the CPU right there it says three B's I'll read it to you because probably not very clear when I click play even with all those all three of those plugins running it was at 28% and half or more than half of that is just the system running itself or like all the samples and stuff like that you can run a lot of programs on here in standalone mode and not have to worry about it using too much of the CPU so don't worry about that let's have another plug-in here I'm going to something soft here so let's let's go through some of these in here something [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so I think you [Music] so load it fast I hope I can get this right I've got to really be fast on the the finger padding here but let's see [Music] because I could if I had two hands and a lot more time I could pick on here and I could actually write the sequencing here using the the pencil right here and then just start writing it in here and it will write it in according to the size of your division down here so if I click on 1/16 it's gonna make it smaller 1/32 it's gonna make even smaller and so on and so forth but so forth but right now we're doing it on eights and I'm not going to use the pencil drawing in here because I'm just trying to do this in time so I'm gonna use the arpeggiator again just to add a new element to the song so our chords are or arpeggiator arpeggio is [Music] [Music] I'll try to do that anytime with the thing and I'm probably to make mistakes but let's just see how I do okay let's try it out just press stop and undo and [Music] oh well you know what I want to do let's just do something a little more basic so I've still got that mistake in there I'm gonna hit the undo button if you play back there it is without it okay another basic thing again if I had more time and I wasn't holding a camera I would do it a lot better but we're just adding elements to show how to make a song in US so let's click on record start step [Music] [Music] okay now one problem that we've got right here is that this sound is a lot like it's a little too overpowering first it's the patch and secondly it's the volume of this so the last track that we did this one right here whoopsie is closed and it's got a solo and if you listen to it this one's being overpowered by track five so we want to start doing that so let's turn off solo because we just wanted to hear it out go back to track five right here and we're going to go to this button that's our levels track five right here we're gonna turn this down a bunch and we're gonna give it a try so right there whatever you do don't hit overdub like don't let it be on overdub when you adjust the volume on here so if you record something on here and you're listening to it you think it's too loud so you click on level and then you adjust the volume it's actually gonna record that automation into the song so it'll start off with a loud and go quiet and it's really hard to undo so it's always recommendable after you've finished recording a single like however many bars you have two four eight you click the overtop button to turn off over dub and then make any future adjustments whether it be recording a new part or adding to it or adjusting the volume okay always turn off overdub between stuff otherwise you can get into a real mess of things so let's have a listen to it now [Music] okay there we go it's not overpowering it anymore but I want to change the sound so let's go back to main and we're gonna go to wall of bright that's the the patch we have right now and we're gonna start listening for to some meds [Music] okay so that's good enough good enough this is not gonna be a hit song so now that we've got all this done we've got two new parts or two new tracks in sequence five we're going to copy sequence five and we're gonna copy to sequence six it's defaulted that way click on do it get out of here to main we're going to go back to track one where our beat is and we are going to reintroduce the beat back in it so i unmuted it for this sequence remember if you unmute it in sequence six it's still muted in sequence five and so on and so forth however if you copy a track if you copy a sequence with a muted track they need to be muted in the next sequence unless you unmute it so let's hear how this sounds [Music] okay so this is gonna be a really short song one thing we're gonna do here is like just good practice is if you introduce let's say a couple of tracks like we did in five and you bring the beat back in six and you're going to want to copy it to seven do it and copy its eight do it and then in eight introduce changes that's because you're allowing people to enjoy that part of the song where it builds back up again that's the main sequence part of the song so you want to have it more than just one part you want to have a couple sequences instead of one sequence so now we're in a sequence eight and this is gonna be the one where we start killing things down to create the end of the song so I'm going to go to track let's say - let's have a listen to this yeah that's our baseline we want to keep that in there track three I think that was one of the loud things okay we can mute this we're not gonna have this we're gonna start reducing elements to get down to the end of the song so track three is going to be muted track four will keep in track five will mute and there is no track six so have a listen to it now [Music] okay that's good and then we're gonna copy this to sequence ten do it and then for sequence ten go back to the main screen here for sequence ten we're going to mute some more let's see here we're going to will keep the baseline we're gonna meet the beat so have it just about to beat that'll work okay and that will be the end of our song so what do we do in order to turn this into a song well it's quite simple what we're going to do is we're gonna click on menu we're going to click on song right here and then we're gonna start introduced art inserting sequences so we insert the first one I don't know if you can see that on here but the first one says five and actually everything after five says five but you can see then there's a number beside it it's let's see if I can get it to focus on that you can see that it says nine okay so we're gonna turn that down to one then we're gonna insert turn that up to 2 insert three we'll just keep doing this for the length of the song I believe there are 10 sequences in total I think there are 10 maybe there are just nine yeah okay ten is on you so we're gonna delete that sequence so it's nine sequences long not too bad so after we've got all these things sequenced if we hit play start it's gonna play all of them sequence by sequence so it's gonna play the whole song for the sake of this video I'm not going to subject all of you to the torture of listening to the entire nine sequences again we're just going to go onto that next step which is converting it into a wave or an mp3 or an AI F if you just want to straight-up turn this into an mp3 that you can put on soundcloud or you can put on Twitter or whatever you want to then you click on export right here and from here you've got your start bars one you've got a add a tail as one second just enough time for it to finish off you've got your n bar 72 so that's basically all of your 9 times 8 is 72 yeah and then you're going to select your wav format and your bit depth and your sample rate so let's choose mp3 and bitrate 128 44.1 this is not a purists level right here like higher would be better but if you want just CD quality this is CD quality 128 44 one is CD quality so that's all you need if you want to have CD quality audio so the next thing we're going to do is we're going to click on export oops it was over here let me just cancel that oops oh darn it let me do this again export mp3 everything's selected there I'm going to click on export right here then it asks for a name and where I want to save it I really can't stress this enough do not save things to the internal drive okay save things into whatever storage you have but not the internal drive I know those things 16 gigabytes but almost all of it is used up by sounds and samples and system files and just like a phone if you fill up the internal storage it starts acting up all weird so always use whatever external storage you have that you can so here I have a folder for mp3 I'm going to name this and name this YouTube test okay and hit do it and save right down here save and now it's going to convert it so I'll pause this and let it finish exporting and then I'll teach you one more trick okay and it's all done now we're back to the song making screen where I can actually show you another trick with this thing and that is what if you wanted to record vocals into this song as it is currently if you go to your main thing here and you go to audio then audio one if you record in like let's say your microphone you were start recording in whatever it's going to let you record until you're the end of the eighth bar and then the sequence is over and it's going to stop the recording then you have to go on to the next sequence with eight bars and start recording that part you could do it that way but there is an easier way to be able to record the entire song without stopping it and that is go to your menu go to your song then click on convert sequence from here what it's going to do is it's going to take all those sequences and put it into one long sequence now one thing is there's a bug in here where if I just click OK right now like if it has click this in right now it'll say that it's done but it doesn't actually do it so what you need to do is turn it up one sequence and down one sequence always do this ok so when you're going to convert sequence up 1 and down 1 so now it's going to use the tenth sequence let's do do it and for sequence 10 if you look at up here where is sequence 10 where did you go D 1 2 3 did I do that right let's do insert go to here ok on here you can see it it's 10 and mmm there's the BPM whatever but then you see the bars is 72 so it's one sequence with 72 bars so if I go back to main right down here let me just zoom this back out again whoops ok go back to main here and I go to the tenth sequence it's already selected the tenth sequence is 72 bars that's the entire song that's all of the bars and sequences that you've already made and they play in one sequence so this way you can click on your audio track right here and click on your audio track you can arm it and then you can hit record and play start and start singing in the microphone and start recording to the entire thing and you can even pause it or like you can stop during the playing and then hit play and start recording more and then stop and play and if you make a mistake you can go back to the part that you made a mistake at go to just before and record over that and it will keep whatever you've recorded before that this as long as you don't record over it so the way the recorder works is it records record the chords make a mistake go back a little bit keep recording recording recording you don't have to worry about it like resetting the entire audio track just because you stopped it or whatever anyway that's that one trick now the last thing you need to know about this is even though you've converted this to an mp3 you have not saved your project so what do you do for that up here on the top there's the little folder icon click on that down on the bottom you've got a save as button let me see if I can get it in focus there we go save as let's do that do not save on your internal drive click on new volume save it to whatever folder you're gonna save it to let's let's do learning for YouTube do it and then we're gonna click Save down here you've got a wait a second depending on how complex the song it will take longer if you have a lot of tracks with a lot of different samples and a lot of different plugins and whatever it's gonna take a little bit longer I like how the camera just keeps going out of focus like this it's wonderful I'm not being sarcastic at all anyway that's it for my toriel let me just switch the camera around so yeah that's it for my tutorial I hope you guys enjoyed it and if you didn't leave a comment in the comment section down below I really appreciate a like and a subscribe if you had the chance to do so and I hope to see you guys in the next video I make until then this is kata kiss out

Channel: caidicus

Views: 24,185

Keywords: MPC Live, Music Production, Music Hardware, Music, Hardware Review, review, mpc live, mpc, akai

Id: NRbrqEq7Hlg

Length: 44min 31sec (2671 seconds)

Published: Sun May 24 2020