MPC One How to Start Jamming Tutorial

welcome to my mpc one how to start jamming tutorial [Music] hey how's it going everybody welcome to freebeat where i post new music related content every single day so if that sounds good to you hit that subscribe button ring that notification bell and be sure to check out my upcoming free live stream concert free beat live one year later it's on saturday july 31st at both 11 a.m pacific time and 7 p.m pacific time also if you'd like the chance to have your music featured in the show just click the link in the description below hope to see you there let's get started so you just picked up a brand new akai mpc one and you are ready to get started well this video is for you the mpc one can be a very complicated piece of gear there's a lot of features packed into this magical box and uh it can be pretty intimidating when you're trying to get started so this video is going to be a how to start jamming guide we're going to load up our project i'm going to show you how to select different instruments for your tracks and how to arrange those into a basic beat so the first thing we'll want to do is plug in our power right here to the mpc and then you'll also want some sort of audio output in my case i have a left and right out from the main outs of the mpc going into my audio interface however down here in the front there's a headphone jack that will work as well so let's go ahead and power the mpc on you'll see this lovely boot up screen here and the pads will cycle through their little animations okay so here we go this is the screen you get every time you boot up the mpc one it just has a whole bunch of demos on it you can basically ignore this whole screen except for this little button down here that says empty project we want to click on that this takes us to an empty project now our projects can be thought of as songs songs are made up of different sequences you can have as many sequences as you'd like basically sequences can be anywhere from one to i believe 999 measures long or bars long so for the purposes of this video let's go ahead and click on bars and then use the main scroll knob here to set it to one we're gonna have it set to one bar long just a one bar phrase now sequences are also comprised of different tracks and tracks have several different types on the mpc you have drum programs plugins key programs clips midi tracks or cv tracks the two that we're going to worry about today are drum tracks and plug-in tracks so first of all let's get a drum kit so we want to make sure that we are on track one which i am now going to name drums so i'm going to come down to this little pencil i'm going to click the name track one at the top and now using this keyboard that looks suspiciously like a 2013 android keyboard we're going to type in drums and then press do it and then cancel and now track one is named drums so the track type we want to select is the first one which is a drum program so that is by default already selected so that's perfect let's go and press the browse button now this takes us to the file and folder storage of the mpc so if we go to drums right here under content we can see all of our stock drum kits are already loaded up on the mpc let's go ahead and pick the fourth one acoustic kit ac fat kit.xpm you can either click load or click in the main selector wheel there now our kit is loaded in so if we press main right here we are now back at this main screen now we actually need to assign that drum program to track one so we have track one selected let's go down and select the program if we turn this knob we will find any of the kits that we've loaded up so we only loaded one it's the acoustic fat kit there it is i loaded it up we see the pads light up and now we can hear that our drum kit is loaded up so let's go ahead and throw down a drum beat so the first thing we want to do to make this easier on ourselves is click at the very top where it says metro and has a picture of a metronome we're gonna go to countin which is right here and we're going to click record and play that means that when we press the play button it's actually going to count us in first before it starts recording we can click the x now to close out of that and now we can actually turn that on or off using the third q link knob here if for some reason that's not working you want to make sure that you are on page one of your q link knobs we're not going to get into q like knobs in this video but there are four different pages indicated by the four different lights you can scroll through those just by pressing this button and the different pages just basically assign these knobs to different things on page one knob three turns on or off the metronome so go ahead and turn that on now for this video we're gonna lay down a very basic drum groove that is going to start with just four on the floor on the kick drum which is this first sample right here so i'm going to go ahead and press the record button and then i'm going to press play start pressing record arms the sequencer for recording play start guarantees that you always start at the beginning where play will start wherever the playhead is this is especially good to know if you're working on a longer track so i'm going to press play start the metronome since we set it to count us in is going to count to four to us and then it will be recording so once it starts recording i'm just gonna play along with the click just like that so i'm gonna press play start one two three four there we go by default quantization is on so as long as your timing is halfway decent you should record your kick drum just fine and if you'd like you can go back into metronome and set the count into just on record i like it to be on record and play but if you just want to be able to hit play start and have it just play back without counting in when you're not recording you can do that as well so perfect now what we need to do is overdub a snare drum onto beats 2 and beats 4 so the way we're going to do that is we're going to arm it for overdub recording by pressing overdub instead of recording if we press record and play it will erase what we previously laid down in that track overdub will let us stack more samples on top so i'm gonna press play start it is going to count off one measure for us then i'm gonna play the snare drum on beats two and four two three four one two three four cool and you can hear that it uh added that snare drum in there for us so now let's do the same thing with our hi-hat which is pad three with the hi-hat i'm also gonna do quarter notes just like that so same thing over dub play start and then play in quarter notes one two three four [Music] cool nice and simple now let's load in a synthesizer track so we can have a baseline so under track we want to select track one and then scroll the wheel to track two it's gonna say unused because we haven't loaded anything in yet what we want to change the track type to here is plugin which is the second one it's the picture of the outlet the plugins are built in to the mpc1 and they allow us to access things like an analog synth emulator which is really cool so let's really quick name track two the same way we named track one i'm gonna name this bass synth okay now that we have that named let's go ahead and pick our plugin so to do that we come down here to the actual program itself we need to click plugin right there i'm going to click in the scroll wheel and now we can pick between baseline electric or tube synth you can also come down and select a drum plug-in if you have the latest firmware but we're not going to worry about that today so baseline electric and tube synth are our three different plug-ins so let's just select the baseline plug-in perfect now from this menu we could select our preset or if you'd like to get a little more in-depth with your sound editing you can come down here and press program edit which will actually take you to the synthesizer screen itself where you can change and mess with a lot of these controls but it shows up really poorly on camera so we're just going to go back to the main section for now so if we come down here to preset we can use the scroll wheel to scroll through the different presets and we can use the pads to see what they sound like [Music] i'm going to use the preset basic because i'd like this video to be fairly basic so now let's go ahead and set up our scale so we can play this on the pads and have it sound decent let's hold the shift button and press the 16 levels button holding shift will actually activate the notes feature instead so there we go now we are in the pad perform section this is going to allow us to set what notes are mapped to which pads you can see the colors correspond as well it's really handy so we can actually set it to just straight chromatic mode which is nice where the pads just play chromatically or we can set it to notes mode where then we can come down here and select a key and a scale so we can have d minor [Music] so if you do just want a chromatic keyboard you can have that or you can pick your key and scale kind of like on the circuit tracks which is nice and you can also come right here and select your octave so i'm gonna go down to octave one and i'll play something in d minor so i'm okay with this so to get out of this screen we can just press main again let's figure out what we're gonna play that sounds good and that's one measure long just like the rest of our sequence so to record this in we don't need to hit overdub because we're recording with a new track now which doesn't have any info laid down yet so let's press record play start is going to count us off with the metronome and then we can play our little pattern here we go two three four and just like that it recorded now you'll also see that the mpc automatically switched us to overdub mode so now any notes that i play will layer on top of what we just played also i should have mentioned this earlier but there is an undo button right here so if you do accidentally uh put some notes in somewhere you don't want them or just really make any mistakes you can press the undo button and it will undo your last action uh if you'd like to redo your last action simply hold shift and press undo and it will redo it so very handy button i use this all the time don't be ashamed it's a great feature so we now have our very first pattern and that's really as easy as it is to get going on the mpc one now if you would like to view uh your notes in sort of a daw style linear timeline fashion you can hold the shift button and press main to access the grid now up here on the top left you can select what track you're viewing so drums or bass synth those are our only two tracks of course right now you can see that if i press play there's our play head [Music] and there's our drum notes just like that and you can also edit from here although that gets a bit more complicated so i'm not going to touch on that in this video if we go to our second track and if you select the magnifying glass right here we can actually pinch to zoom and scroll around and we can see there are our bass notes on the piano roll and there's a lot of stuff you can do in this screen especially if your timeline gets long in terms of zooming in or out and moving all over the place with the knobs it's really really cool really really powerful and is one of my favorite features of the mpc really quick let's talk about effects let's press main to get back to our kind of main screen here if you tap this little i right up here it's a picture of an eyeball it'll bring in the i don't know what you want to call it the the audio screen um but anyway we can go and select what track we're looking at here drums or bass synth and this is how you can access your insert effect so let's put some reverb on the bass so if i go to the bass synth i click on inserts here we can have up to four different insert effects which is really cool so let's go and select some reverb which is under delay reverb i'm just going to go ahead and pick uh air reverb from here we can press the pencil and we can actually control all the aspects of that reverb or we can pick from some presets i'm going to use basic medium now if i press main that's already applied let's listen can definitely hear that reverb [Music] so there you have it there's the very basics that you need to know to get started with the mpc one from here it's a lot of experimentation obviously you can set more bars per your sequence so you can have some much longer and complex music you've got copy uh and like paste and delete functions all over the place um anywhere you see this pencil icon basically you've got tons of options to edit stuff and from here on out you get to explore and learn everything there is to learn about this wonderful box so i hope you guys found this video helpful i hope you enjoyed it if you did be sure to leave a like on it if not you can always leave a dislike that's okay too on these tutorial type videos please feel free to leave questions down in the comments and i will do my best to answer every single one don't forget to click that subscribe button and ring that notification bell i do post a new video every single day thank you so very much for being here thanks for watching we'll see you next time [Music] bye [Music] you

Channel: Free Beat

Views: 4,607

Keywords: MPC One How to, MPC One How to Start Jamming Tutorial, MPC One How to Start jamming, MPC One Tutorial, Free Beat

Id: 1WJcrg1JjyQ

Length: 14min 57sec (897 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 08 2021