Mpc Sequences, Tracks and Programs Explained

this video is a complete beginners guide to the interrelationship between sequences tracks and programs on the Akai MPC live and MPC X also if you've gone out and bought a legacy MPC this will also be of use to you if you've just started out and you're a bit confused as to what sequences tracks and programs do and how they work together I [Music] just want to say a massive thanks that everyone who subscribed I hit a big milestone today 1000 subscribers I think about 2:30 this morning so I'm really happy about that guys can't believe that I've got up to that many subscribers in pretty much 4 months since I've been doing this on YouTube so I really appreciate the support guys show so the project is the very top level and then within that project you've got access to these 128 sequences they're made up of tracks ok so within a sequence you have access to loads of tracks okay so let's just tap on there and there you go you've got 128 available tracks let's just go back to track 1 now this is the bit that I find that a lot of beginners of the MPC format in general get confused with let's just say I'm on track 1 and we're using this drum program which is program 0:01 this is the default program that is created automatically for you when you first boot up your MPC live now if I press this plus symbol I can automatically create additional programs so these are all independent from one another and we can just use the data wheel to scroll through those programs that we've now Korea and this is just one program type in the track area here you can see that we've got these five icons and they relate to the different program types but they also tell the track what program it should be running okay so let's say we had a drum program and we call this drums if we now click on this second icon on track one we're not changing the track we're just going to stay in track one that's now called a key group program and as you can see it automatically creates a new program which is programmed ten so it's still in the same order numerical order if we go back to drums that's our first program and then we should have programmed 2 all the way up to program 9 but we can't go beyond that to program 10 because that's a key group program this is the type of program the drum program and these are the different modes we've got drum programs which you would load single samples or answer different pads ok or you could just load the same sample onto all the pads and then make different changes to the pitch and the volume there's so many things you can do there's so many variables involved and ways of working key group programs are chromatic programs that's to say if you load a sample into a key group program it will now play up the scale on the pads or if you've got a MIDI keyboard connected it will do the same thing then you've got clip programs so you'd have ideally things like drum brakes that were either 2 bars or 4 bars or even 1 bar or 8 bars and you can launch them from the pads but you can also have other drum breaks or other musical loops or anything else and you can launch those samples and they're synchronized [Music] MIDI tracks is if you want to trigger an external midi synth or another MIDI drum machine or indeed another sampler okay so it's now created a MIDI program for us and as you can see with the MIDI program it's actually given us the 0 0 1 for this MIDI 0 0 1 it doesn't create a program 11 so let's go back there we've got a total of 9 drum programs we've got one key group program but we can't see that we've just got that one unless we turn the data wheel and as you can see it's either none or program 10 clip programs and MIDI programs aren't added to that list they're in a separate list okay so we can only scroll through those in the same way MIDI 0 0 1 and clip 0 0 1 unless we press the plus symbol again create additional clip programs ok the last one is CV which means control voltage and this relates to modular systems so on the Akai MPC X if you've got one of those you'll know that it has eight additional cv outputs on the back of it and this is for triggering external modular devices okay for modular synthesis it's showing up in the MPC live because the software or the firmware are both identical in these machines and it's only the hardware where they are different we've got a little warning here to say this hardware has no CV ports that's what the different program types are which are selectable from the track field the edit tool here the pencil gives you all the options for the programs I claim this is the program edit menu I'll go into detail about that in a little while and it's the same for tracks and sequences the pencil does the same thing and it just gives you their respective edit menus the a and the little cursor symbol here is just so you can rename so another thing where I think people get confused is the relationship between one track to another so let's just move up to track two now and it's still showing us that we're using our drum program which is fine we can use the same program on multiple tracks we can trigger the same notes but if the drum program is set to monophonic mode you will get some problems because if you're triggering the same pads on track 1 and track 2 and they're both using that same program they will cut each other off because it's the same program and the NPC's going well you're trying to play these pads on one track and you're trying to play the same pads on another track and they will start to cut each other off if they're set to polyphonic then you will be able to play them and layer them on top of one another now we're in track 2 we can switch our program type from the track field so let's say we wanted track 2 to trigger an external midi synthesizer if we now go back to track 1 it just jumps back to the last program that you've selected in the program field here ok likewise if we go out to track 3 let's choose track 3 to be our clip program track all one of them and as we scroll back down strap to it's which is the MIDI and track 1 it's which is the drums so we're just setting up the tracks basically so I hope that gives you a good understanding of how the tracks work with the types of programs that you've got loaded onto them so let's press the edit tool for the sequences we've got a number of options in here now we can arrays the sequel which were just arrays all notes and automation data from the sequence depending on what you select so let's press that pressing that is no different from pressing the button that's just up here that a raised button does exactly the same thing as pressing this so I'm going to go back to the main page and I'm going to press that arrays button now without going to the edit menu so it's just a shortcut to get two arrays you can arrays a particular sequence or any given track in any given sequence and then you can select the range so you've got bars beats and ticks and you can select an exact range from where you want to delete no data from and you can also choose whether that's all events in that sequence which is all notes and all automation or any mutes that you've recorded you can just isolate the automation and it raised that and it will retain your notes that's the most handy one that I use quite regularly because automation could be tricky sometimes if you're doing some sort of fancy movements with the cue link knobs here and you mess up but you don't want to erase the notes this will just retain the notes and just clear the automation or you can just do the opposite of that and erase all the notes and retain the automation if you were happy with it and then you can erase everything except the notes so we've covered arrays clearing a sequence will clear all data from that sequence and it will also reset the tracks back to a default state it will still keep the programs that you've created but it's just erasing all the data that's been recorded into that sequence or registered within that sequence okay transpose likewise with the arrays function will allow you to transpose a particular sequence in a particular track and a range and also the notes or the pads that are being triggered within that sequence you can bounce the sample so it all balanced that entire sequence through an audio file that you can then further edit and chop and rearrange in the MPC live the leak bars will delete a particular range of bars within a sequence so you can choose your sequence and then you can choose the first bar up to the last bar that it will delete insert bars will allow you to insert bars in the same kind of way that delete bars works half-length that doesn't give you a menu or an additional submenu it will just execute that function so the default length for bars in any sequence when you first start your MPC live or NPC X is two bars because I've pressed that you can now see it says there's just one bar so let's increase the bars with our beta will now we've got eight bars to play with and let's do that again half length and now we've got four bars likewise we can double the length so let's press that three times and we should have 32 bars there you go so these two functions particularly the double length function is really good and it is a really quick way to increase the length of your sequences without having to re-record additional notes and at the bottom here you can copy a sequence to another sequence so we can copy Cygnus five for example to sequence seven we can copy bars so we can choose the sequence again okay this doesn't allow you to choose a track it will copy all bars of all tracks okay so this is handy if you want to set a specific amount rather than using the double length function you can also choose to merge the data or replace it completely events is a little bit more advanced now so we can select particular events from a particular sequence a particular track again we've got the range so we copy it from sequence five track one and we can copy that to another sequence or the same sequence and say to another track so this would be handy if you had a drum program that you liked that was on this track track 1 let's say you had another drum program and you wanted to just see how that would play back on the same track but in a different sequence you could execute that function and that would do that for you and you can choose where to copy those events from the amount of copies and whether it's all events or selected events and this is pretty much done when you're in the grid editor which is over here so let's say we had a load of notes in our grid editor we just select them like that we go back to the sequence edit menu choose events and then if we chose selected events it would choose those events that I've just selected in the grid editor and it would copy those to wherever I wanted those copy to and you can replace or merge those events and the last one is save current sequence if we press save current sequence we can save that sequence or rename it and save it to a location in our directory and that's quite handy if you've created a nice sequence and you would like to use it maybe in another project you can also obviously once you save this entire project it compiles everything anyway and you can then go and access sequence number 5 if you really wanted to but that's all the options there in the sequence edit menu now let's talk about the other options that you've got here so we've got the BPM now this is where our bars loop so if we want our bar to loop from bar one to bar 4 and just edit that it's an easy way to have things looping around so we don't go all the way up to bar 32 and have the weight likewise you can change the start time of that ok and we could just choose to loop around bar 7 and bar 8 if we turn loop off that's quite handy if you just want a free throw in place and notes in on the pads or on a MIDI keyboard and not have the sequins stop and even if we've set 32 bars if we've not got loop set on that we'll start to add additional bars for us depending on how long we actually physically record for and only until we press stop it will stop adding any additional bars and here we've also got the transpose function but this is just for the entire sequence it will transpose all notes in that sequence it will only transpose MIDI programs or key group programs so that sequence is tracks I've taken you through this the sequence length at the moment is adhering to the sequence which is 32 bars we can also set an independent length for every single track so on track 1 we could have it just playing back one beat track 2 we could have it set to sequence length check for we can choose 4 beats or odd numbers 5 6 7 8 and that way you can start creating some interesting polyrhythmic music on your MPC live or MPC X if you want to go and check out another video that I made on poly rhythms please check that out and that will show you how you can create poly rhythms in the MPC live we can set the overall velocity for that track and then we've got transpose for that track we've got transposing the entire sequence or we've got transposing for just that particular track in that sequence so that's all the options you get there for track let's go and look at the Edit menu so we can clear that track that does the same thing as clearing the sequence it will get rid of all the notes but just in that particular track we can explode this track now what explode does will split out all the different notes so let's say you had a drum sound on one pad hi-hat on another pad a voice sample one another pad a chord sound or sample on another pad so on and so forth it would then create additional tracks so let's say we had those or samples that I just mentioned it would now create four extra tracks with just those samples being played on the track it doesn't actually separate the program the program is retained but it will split out any notes okay on two additional tracks and that's quite handy if you want to use all the features within the track mixer to separately mix all those different sounds and retain the settings within the program there's loads of different ways you could use that and loads of reasons why you would use that but that's what Xplode does next options are double speed the events or half speed the events so for example let's say we had a drum and bass track and it was 176 beats per minute and on this particular track we had the drums if we press half speed events those drums would then be spread out over a lot longer range within that sequence likewise double speed would just double the speed of those events in the same way we can copy the track so we can copy one track to another let's say you had a key group program with a piano sound and then on track 5 you had a rhodes keyboard or something like that or electric piano or an organ and you wanted the notes to be copied but triggered a different program that was loaded onto track 5 that's how you would use copy track or one example of using it we can also bounce to sample from the track so it'll balance a sample of just what's being played on this particular track and it will exclude everything else so it's similar to doing it from the sequence menu but the sequence as I said will be bounced in its entirety to the sample bounce the sample from the track menu would bounce just that track which is good for creating stems if you want to then further take those into the aw and you can also bounce the tracks to an audio track so that will put that straight on to one of the audio tracks and that's a track type that I haven't covered because it's not shown up in the track menu it doesn't show up in here you actually switch it from the bottom here okay it's split off from these midi programs so even though this is a dedicated midi program here on track for all these program types work using midi data audio is just dealing with samples okay but I'll get to that in a little while let's go back to the edit menu of tracks so that's what bounce the audio track will do it will put that entire track in its entirety onto one of the audio tracks and you'll see that way for basic show up in the same way that you would in a computer sequencer okay and we can do a similar thing to exporting the sequence we can export this track as a pattern so any note data it will export that just as a pattern okay let's cancel that now so that's all the options that you've got with track so now we're on to programs as I said this is where you select the different programs not the program type you select the actual programs from this field either by double tapping and then they would show up in this menu we've only got one or you would just use your data will to scroll between we've got our edit menu for our programs so we can delete a program we can duplicate a program so this is really handy so what I'm going to do is clear this entire project now and start from a fresh and show you how using duplicate programs is a really handy tool so let's go up to the folder icon up here where we can choose to save so we can save save as or we can export our project again it will just let us do an audio mix down but I'm just gonna press new and that will completely clear this entire program and it won't save so I'm going to press don't save I'm going to press shift a menu go to places I'm going to go to my SD card MPC live programs breaks let's just choose this bebop deluxe break here okay that's loaded that in okay so I'm just going to record a simple pattern into the first sequence on the first track that is loaded our bebop deluxe drum program into you okay so let's say I'd edited that track and I really liked how it sounded but I wanted its playback in a slightly different way on sequence to okay so I would go to the Edit menu I could duplicate that program now and there you go it's automatically put that in as bebop deluxe - one so what I would do then is return it back to bebop deluxe okay then I would go to my sequence edit menu I would copy the sequence it's a sequence - and once you copy a sequence it then goes straight to that new sequence that you've copied okay let's go back to sequence one okay so they were both exactly the same now we're on track one we're using bebop deluxe as the drum program okay so sequence one a sequence - exactly the same they've got the same notes okay exactly the same now I'm going to go up to sequence two and I'm gonna switch the program to bebop deluxe one now it will still sound exactly the same because this is an exact duplicate of our initial bebop deluxe drum program but now I would go to program at it and I'm just going to do something simple for argument's sake I'm gonna pitch those down - five semitones if we now go down to sequence one press play now I'm going to switch sequences okay and it's doing that because we haven't changed the track okay so that's just a handy way or rather a good example of showing you why it's handy to have two different programs on the same track but in different sequences and that's a good use of duplicating programs so you are non destructively editing that original program basically it's just copying that program so let's just look at audio tracks again we've got the sequence edit menu that's no different okay other than the fact that transpose is now grayed out because because we can't transpose the audio track from this menu pressing the plus will increase the amount of audio tracks we can record directly into that track there you can see my voice so let's do that now to record you can't use overdub okay so let's take a look hello my name is cheap digger how's it going that's now going to edit audio which is down here and there you go we haven't recorded anything to get back out of that you would just press the home button here okay and that will take you back to the audio track field within the sequence menu so the reason that didn't record is because you have to press the main record button here it won't record if you press overdub okay you have to press this one here so I pressed it and it goes into standby mode and then you press play or play start hi my name is tube digger how are you I'm great thanks let's now go to edit audio and there you go hi my name is tube digger how are you I'm great thanks so that's what the record arm does you can also set the monitor on I'm not going to do that because I'll get some horrible nasty doubling up but if I was to set that on now I'd be able to hear my voice coming out of the speakers that I'm using in my studio okay just so you can hear what you're recording now we can rename that audio track and let's have a look at the Edit menu options so we can delete the all tract so or delete anything that's been recorded onto that audio track but it won't delete the actual recording that you made it will just delete the audio track itself okay so just to show you let's go to audio track eight and let's press delete yes and it's jumped back down seven and then if we try and go up to eight we can't because it's deleted the track but it will retain the audio that we've recorded onto that track we can clear regions so that will clear any regions that we've created on that audio track we can reset the audio tracks channel strip and we can copy this audio track and we can save the channel strip we've got an input configuration option here so if we press that we get that little side menu pop open you can also press the I up there and that will pop that out again and you can select which input we can choose from these different inputs so we can select stereo input one two or our additional inputs three and four or just input three or just input four and then we can choose what outputs that audio track is coming out of whether it's out one and two three and four or five and six seven and eight shows up again because that's just specific to the MPC X and then we can also choose them to come out of mono and then we can put any insert effects there onto that audio track set the volume we can solo it we can mute it we can arm the automation it's in Reed at the moment or we can write I am NOT going to go into every other single bit of detail in the MPC architecture this was pretty much a complete beginners guide to the interrelationship between sequences tracks and programs and the hierarchy of things and you know I hope you picked up a few little extra tips within there as well if you've got any comments or questions please put them down below or send me a private message if you want I also do Skype lessons for $45 per hour so that's pretty good deal you will get all my personal in-depth knowledge of music production and sound design and obviously MPC live and MPC X related questions and knowledge also it'd be great if any of you want to take me up on that I've also got a patreon so if you wanna head over to patreon support me on there that would be a massive help to me and that would help me continue to make these videos and improve them so I will see you on the next one guys big up yourselves this is cheap digger and I'm out [Music] [Music]

Channel: Tubedigga

Views: 145,648

Keywords: mpc live tutorial, mpc one, mpc one lesson, mpc one tricks, mpc one tutorial, mpc tricks, mpc tutorial, mpc x, akai force, akai force tutorial, akai mpc, akai mpc live, akai mpc one, akai mpcx, mpc, mpc 1, mpc lesson, mpc live, mpc live lesson, mpc live tricks, mpcx tutorial

Id: sSjsWS7Nj00

Length: 30min 49sec (1849 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 26 2018