MPC One as a hardware Sequencer // Real world example with walk through

[Music] welcome back to the channel my name is teffty today we're looking at the mpc one and what it means as a sequencing hub and how you can route things and set up your hardware and also kind of my approach to it as well the mpc is very powerful as you guys know if you're if you've been looking at what you can do with nbc i mean it's basically like a daw so you kind of have to pick and choose your features that you really want to use with it because it can be a little overwhelming at first if you're looking for an mpc video that's going to be exclusive to just the npc and making sounds directly in the npc that's not going to be what this video is about it's gonna be a hardware-centric focus on what you can do with other pieces of gear and incorporate it into the mpc and how you can route that with an analog mixer and kind of figure out how your setup could be and then potentially use that to go into ableton live let's get right to it so first things first i'm gonna make an empty project so recently akai made an update to the firmware for the npc's the the most recent npcs and put it to 2.8 it's i think it's a little bit past that now at this point but 2.8 introduced usb midi which was quite a bit of a game changer because before you could only use the midi in and out on the mpc live or the uh not mpc live sorry pc one a lot same thing with the live as well uh you had basically limited functionality for the um for midi with the usb function you can hook up a hub and then plug in a bunch of your hardware via usb so it simplified the connections and then also expanded your potential for connectivity because before like for the mpc one you only had 16 channels of midi that could be sent out or received now each box can potentially contain 16 channels of midi so for instance the electron rhythm uh you are able to control each one of these voices via midi inside the mpc one there is a fly a freaking nat that just showed up so i think the best way to show this is real world examples so i'm going to set up this setup which does include these keyboards by the way well not the microphone i don't have that plugged in it's going to include the sequential pro 3 and the novation summit badass keyboards they don't exactly fit on the desk though so let's build out our project on the mpc one so again everything is plugged in via usb except for two pieces of gear the model d and the novation peak and the reason i did that was because i ran out of usb ports so basically i've got a splitter a midi splitter right here coming out of the midi out of the mpc one then it's each being split into the model d and the novation peak very straightforward so those will be off the mpc midi channels but the pro 3 summit rhythm mark ii and the analog 4 mark ii and the key step arcturia key step are all being uh midi'd via usb on there so a little clarification right there so in terms of audio routing i have everything routed into an analog mixer a mackie onyx 1640i and i'm not using the firewire in that device because i don't have firewire on my computer anymore but it's a great analog mixer and allows me to send channels um i can route bus one and two or three and four out to something else so what i did was i routed one and two into the mpc one so if i want to sample any of this stuff i can easily route it into the inputs of the mpc one via the mackie board that's to my right and that's a nice convenience type of thing so if you guys do go a hybrid ish setup with your akai devices or any kind of sampler in general you could also route it technically via audio interface in your computer if you set it up that way there's tons of ways to set up your gear obviously so i'm not saying that that's how you have to do it all i'm saying is it's nice to be able to route your audio through a mixer so you don't have to uh unplug the quarter inch jacks all the time all right so back to the template and how we're gonna set this up so first things first let's get the midi stuff out of the way so if we have a track let's go uh midi right here and we're going to select the midi port which is going to be npc because again this is these two devices are set up on the npc and if you take a look at this we've got summit pro 3 npc electron with the mark ii analog 4 mark 2 and the key step so already nice convenient i mean i didn't have to do any kind of like you know make sure you see this device type of crap in the settings or anything it just automatically showed up what i did have to do which i i guess i'm going to point out right now is i had to select sync on some of this stuff so if it's not finding the clock when you play the mpc one or live or whatever it is that you're using and your devices aren't getting synced from that one thing could be the case you might not have the sync selected on the preferences here and if you don't know how to get there very simple you hold shift you hit menu which goes into preferences then you click the midi sync and then all your options are right there both input and output so very convenient and also it's nice to be able to not sync stuff if you want something running on its own clock or something like that so a little tip right there next thing is i always like to tell it which midi to receive and it's the key step so i'm going to be using the key step as the midi input because if i didn't do that if i played the summit it would also send notes to everything and also any sequencer data that's on the electrons would uh would also send out into midi inputs on the mpc1 for anything that's receiving all that data all right a little bit of housekeeping out of the way so we got midi channel one what is this yeah this is let's find a different patch real quick so innovation peak is on channel one and let's title that real quick we'll say peak one thing i'm definitely i'm still like it's not the touch screen on the mpc one is just not it's not like an ipad it's like atm bank touchscreen sensitivity anyways it's besides point all right so we got the peak setup on channel one next track we're doing the same thing in fact we could actually copy this yeah copy track to track two unused and we're gonna call this one model d do it so track two now i think this is midi channel 7. i'm going to find out real quick yep if you have not used the model d from behringer obviously it's clone but it's a very cheap clone in comparison if you haven't tried this thing out it is awesome i mean for 300 bucks it just has like this flavor to it so anyways that's the um the midi side now moving on so we got the pro three let's grab that midi port and go pro three right here also i need to change the inputs which i should have done archery a key step great i'll probably just copy this from here on out perfect that's a patch that i made in the previous video on the sequential pro 3 pro 3 great now i am going to copy this actually i'm going to go copy track track four we'll call this summit okay and we're going to go [Music] there it is see summit excellent so that's working great as you can see really easy to set this up so far okay moving on next track actually i'm gonna duplicate this as well copy track we'll do a4 on this great here's a4 and we're gonna make that the electron analog mark four quick note what i did on the analog four before i started this video was i made a patch that was polyphonic if you didn't know you can actually use all four voices as a polyphonic sound on the analog four so you can actually treat it as like just one patch it does sound really cool now we need the rhythm so let's go here copy track rhythm oh my god this touchscreen drives me crazy sometimes now we need to change the input as well perfect and again this should all be arturia keystep yeah great so now we have six instruments set up on here that we can uh utilize one thing i didn't mention was a lot of times i like to use drum machines with the mpc one um the sampling capability and percussion drum type of stuff in the npc is great but if you're using it as a sequencer triggering sequences on and off and all that uh i find it a bit cumbersome to want to do any kind of like pad mutes in between changing up of sequences and all that actually sorry i shouldn't say sequences because a sequence is a broad term on the npc one i'm saying like a chunk of midi data basically or a track i guess because you can go over to track mute and then i can now mute any of these if i had midi data in there which is great for performance so let's say on track nine i had a a drum kit set up or layered a bunch of drum kits on there so let's say i wanted to mute the hi-hats on and off or just some sort of simple example some sort of percussion element that need to go on and off but at the same time i also had to trigger the track mutes it's one of the other at that time you can't really juggle that with a separate drum machine you can easily do that so i can come over here i can like alright this stuff is already muted so these are the hats on the analog rhythm i can easily just mute those on and off while it's playing and then also uh trigger this stuff by the way i should have explained this as well i have the rhythm on here and that is uh track one i believe [Music] so the kick essentially is being on midi channel one what's interesting is you can actually do multiple midi channels so that's track two track three four all the way up to twelve so interestingly what i can do is actually split out the restrictions of the sequencer from electron and put it into the mpc one obviously the electron sequencer has some great stuff about it with like the probabilities things and you know it's just it's a fun sequencer but sometimes you need a specific 12 bar loop that's different and uses a bunch of different stuff and you can't really do that on electron gear if you wanted to have finite control over that stuff and look at it from a sequencer point of view you'd be able to see all the notes on the mpc one sometimes it's apples and oranges when comparing that type of stuff but i do find this pros and cons to both of these and the pros of the akai sequencer the npc sequencer is that you have lots of options in control and no polyphony issues or anything like that so let's make something here i'm actually going to do a different track so yeah we got a different sequence on both these i guess i'll do some percussion first maybe we'll do something let's see let's set up the we're at 120 right now let's slow it down to like 95 i guess that's what i was working with let's just do like a four to the floor at the moment [Music] yeah something like that quick note on the analog rhythm mark two i have it routed through a drummer 1978 giving it some extra bite and crunch i'm a fan of analog compression yeah let's get this uh slap on the let's just you know super basic stuff all right so nothing crazy right now if i hit play on the npc one my quick little sequence here super basic is working i am not using any midi data on here so this is a bad example right here fully admit that uh but i just want to show you the clock is working everything's good to go in there now if we go to a4 let's try something here i'm kind of playing a bass line in fact if i'm playing the bass line let's go to the model d [Music] something like that uh so we need i think four bars by the sounds of it so i'm making my global sequence in the npc one four bars and then i think i'm just gonna try recording this [Music] kind of float me in there that worked so we got ourselves a little baseline [Music] great that's working now let's go to peak peak is pretty wet right now [Music] oh no it's gonna clash i love uh changing up harmonies like that we're gonna stick with that let's try it actually oh you know what i should do i should double this length here so this is what's really nice about this i started with four bars but because we have the flexibility npc i can double this and then treat this line as an eight bar loop and i can keep that four bar for the base because i have the freedom right there so we want a double length let's go double length please and now we have eight bars now if we go back to the model d it should have doubled it as well it did yeah sometimes you don't want it to double you just want it to like use the first four bars or something so you can actually go off of beats so if we go 16 beats now this technically should yeah so if you see this it's basically saying the first four bars that's what it's going to be using on there the only issue with this is you have to set up the maximum size of the sequence i think i could be wrong on this if i'm wrong let me know in the comments if your longest midi data notes it's going to be eight bars but you need to set your sequence to eight bars and then uh and then that works then you can have shorter ones subdivided from there i apologize for that super confusing sounding because i think it was let's go back to the peak yeah all right let's go record [Music] okay [Music] it's pretty basic but it works let's go to the a4 [Music] i have this strong pole to want to go to uh to f major f minor we're gonna stick with the f minor okay so we need like a little line we'll stick with uh we'll stay with eight bars as well on that which again showcases the fact that i'm not stuck with the four bar limit on the electron gear because i'm using utilizing the sequencer in the npc one but it's triggering the sounds out of the analog four so there's that cool so i gave it some flavor right there and what we could do is maybe tone it down a bit so it's not so bright and abrasive [Music] still kind of bright abrasive also i think yeah everything is being quantized in here normally i would have turned that off for keys or maybe i just because i want to retain some sort of human-ness to it but i think it's fine for now we got drums we got peak we got bass we got analog 4 type of sounds going on we still have the pro 3 and we have the summit and we haven't done anything audio wise out of the mpc one so one thing that memes and i like to do in projects is we like to keep a audio channel or source free for harmony vocals or some sort of melodic vocal line that can be in there for a track and the mvc one is great for this because memes can record some audio loops or like some vocal kind of phrases or harmonic type of stuff and then they can easily be tracks in here so uh we can just trigger those on and off the only problem when we do our hybrid recording into ableton live is if i have other things in here like drums or synthesizers and those harmony vocals at the same time it's going you know there's only a stereo uh left and right that's out of this and if you perform it live you know if you're actually recording all the stuff live at the same time into ableton then you're you're down mixing that you're anything that's coming out of the mpc one is getting mixed together into a stereo track that is the only caveat uh solution is by a live two or the the big one the mpc x whatever it is i haven't really looked at it uh you get more channel outs in fact i actually have considered getting the live 2 just because i'd have three stereo outs because i i could do some more sampling but this is specifically for a hybrid setup you know if you're just working in the mpc one you could always explode your tracks or load it up into the the the daw version of mpc uh software i guess that's what it's called yeah npc software uh you could load up in the daw version and then work with your tracks from there that's definitely a possibility for this hybrid setup i really enjoy working with the hardware live it has that dna put into it you know i it's tough thing to articulate but there's definitely something that happens when other things are playing with each other people recording bands always say like you know it's different when you play live together versus doing one track at a time and a lot of bands try to capture that together at the same time live feel i really feel like there's something about that that happens with electronic instruments as well i could be just having a giant placebo effect happening inside my brain back to this we have the summit and the pro 3 that we could still do some stuff with so pro 3. [Music] this could just be some like extra trimmings some clicks in there let's go [Music] yeah i think something like that will work out i'm just going to do 16 beats on here because i it's gonna be the same stuff oh you know i should turn off the timing global time correct off thank you now this will be loose and possibly out of time there we go let's have a look at our rhythm yeah look at that sloppiness sometimes you gotta get sloppy guys moving on to the summit so this is a sweeping pad sound i could change it but this is literally the passage that launches with the summit we loaded up for the first time uh more like that yeah we're gonna keep this nice and soft and hollow-ish oh maybe i could do something let's see [Music] [Music] okay i think i got it let's do it okay so i'm going to adjust the volume on this guy pro 3 i brought that down a bit because it's peeking hitting my eardrums a little bit so again simple example of what we got going on here there's some stuff being triggered now this is what i want to show you when it comes to sequencing or these mpc one is a sequencer hub because as you can see i've all these yellow chips on the mpc one are representing the tracks uh except for the rhythm rhythm's out of character because i'd have to actually mute everything on the rhythm right here but keep in mind so i can actually just take everything out and now it's just the rhythm right and i can mute various stuff on here [Music] so we got this going on you know so i can bring in the maldi and start writing the cut off give it some character row three [Music] i can't reach over here for the filter you get it though now bring the peak now a4 and summit maybe hey that was a sloppy example and again i don't have any audio coming out of the npc one yet that was something that was gonna wait for memes to come in do some track type of stuff on there in fact i think now would be a great time to have memes come in take a listen she could say whether or not she likes it or not and we might switch it up completely or make uh make something out of this all right fast forward a few hours we had actually gone out did some stuff in sacramento yeah and now we're back doing this have some coffee yeah means how you doing i'm good excited to hear what i was thinking about doing is having you uh take a listen and then throw some vocals as like loops okay that's cool i like that drive [Music] so i'm thinking like a four or eight bar vocal loop like what is it oh there we go yeah [Music] okay uh what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna go into the looper so i hold shift press the looper right here and now we've got input one and two check check yeah you see we got some input right there which is good let me turn this up actually so i guess we'll stick with eight bars on here let's just record some stuff and see what happens let me export this i'll call this memes3 because we tried a few examples it didn't quite work it did quite work cool [Music] all right so this is a bit of a crude example uh normally we'd take a little bit more time and kind of polish things but like this is a this is an example of grabbing like a vocal piece to be able to put it as something to trigger in here for the the sequencing group so now what we do we would kind of perform or try out some performance type of stuff on here like maybe i'll take out the kick and a bit of the hat so we'll have like a little bit of bass yeah just a little a little bit of improv on here i'm going to drop the filter of the peak all the way down so it's just barely there [Music] dance [Music] oh [Music] so fast forward next day we decided to work on some ideas right and now we're going to go through them and record them yeah improv [Music] um [Music] i've been in the rain [Music] is [Music] keep you in the in a part of me [Music] pain [Music] letting you go [Music] more [Music] me [Music] me [Music] did [Music] um [Music] [Music] is [Music] oh that i am inside [Music] [Music] [Music] in the feeling that i am [Music] [Music] [Music] me [Music] oh [Music] summer is [Music] taking me where i belong [Music] [Music] [Applause] me is [Music] is [Music] [Music] alone [Music] is [Music] [Applause] [Music] my [Music] yo that was cool we yeah we'd written some ideas yesterday yesterday yeah these past couple days and i had i had a few lines uh that were written and done just kind of like gotten done yeah i'm gonna keep it or not but yeah just to have and then just improving the rest right yeah it's a really cool process so like one thing that i definitely wanted to highlight in this video was the experience of like you do a setup and even just keeping the same sounds you know i like obviously we could go through a whole bunch of different sounds first idea i did actually have a different sound on the peak and then i change it to the electric piano sample sound for the other ideas but like the the showcase behind this is taking like a setup and then doing three four or five different ideas with it and seeing what comes out of it right yeah when you're in the middle of inspiration you don't you never want to edit yourself in the middle of inspiration right yeah that's hard for me because i always want to edit like i don't like that but it's again it's you just gotta go with inspiration right yeah it's such a killer if you edit you start editing yourself amid inspiration because you'll stop coming up with creative ideas because you're like oh well this is edited so i did want to highlight also that we track these into ableton so looking at the screen right here uh you can see all of our tracks multi-track i didn't use the mpc one on this stuff because and i know i was saying i was going to highlight uh being able to have some samples being triggered in the mtc one we didn't end up doing that at all it was just ideas for these beats yeah bit of a change up but i wanted to show that like all this was recorded into ableton but now what i can do is go in and time align the the downbeat for this particular jam to 108 and then it's basically going to be in time in the grid and then we could work on this beat beyond that the initial idea is there like the dna of the idea you can feel it yeah the foundation is there in the track you can feel it and then that's kind of like a launching point to go forward into doing like a finished track yeah yeah yeah that is gonna do it for this video it's been a multi-day video journey yes right uh we uh i wanted to highlight the npc one as a sequencing hub and hopefully this video did that for you guys and we got to share some of our creative process and that's always fun right it's always fun and also like let us know what your creative process is yeah we'd love to hear it well yeah yeah that'd be awesome yeah i'm always curious about that because there is so many ways to go about how you write produce mixed like is it all one shot on like a two-channel recorder or is it highly detailed one track at a time type of stuff you know there's all kinds of ways of doing it it's really cool if you enjoyed this video make sure to hit the like button and sub the channel if you haven't already if you watched all the way to the end and you haven't subbed yet hit that button right thank you very much for all the support uh we've been growing steadily on this channel it's really cool to see a community starting to form around it if you leave us a comment we always read them and we do appreciate that and yeah thanks for watching thanks for listening we'll see you next time for another videos [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Tefty & Meems

Views: 61,111

Keywords: MPC One, Akai, music production, synthesizers, electronic music, teft, teftyteft, mimi & teft

Id: xVt7cZnFCWk

Length: 38min 18sec (2298 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/teftyteft]

Hello, this vid showed my process of using the MPC One mostly as a hardware sequencer with other synths linked up via USB and Midi. If you got any questions, I'll try to answer as best as I can.

Cheers,
Tefty

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[u/StepDance2000]

Nice video