My 17 Year Leap Forward // Upgrading from MPC 1000 to Live 2

hello my name is jorb i love gear picture for me if you would a magical time it was 2004 when musicians look like this synthesizers look like this and i looked like this akai wants to keep the mpc line as the prime choice for sample-based music building on the popularity of the 2000 the 2000xl and the 4000 and they do that with the npc 500 the 2500 and one of our main characters today the mpc-1000 if you've been around the channel for a while or have at least seen my video where i talk about all the gear that i own you will know that i use this npc 1000 running jj os as my drum sequencer and midi sequencer for a bunch of external gear and it's been the tool i used to fill that job for the past four years for this mid-market machine that came out 16 17 years ago marketed heavily towards hip-hop producers still in my opinion one of the best options for sequencing hardware standalone hardware that's incredible even if the mpc line has always been mostly associated with hip-hop you can find mpc users across every genre i even remember you know reverb does the band stores i remember the two-door cinema club i think reverb store they were selling 1 000. i really wanted to buy it i was in a hard case i wonder what they used it for i had it before i had most of my synthesizer set up because i wanted to play with samples i wanted to play with drum samples because i was getting into hip hop and i wanted a way to write drum patterns that i could play guitar over but at this point my workflow is almost completely based around the 1000 and hardware synthesizers i work totally without a daw most of my most if not all of my sounds come from sequencing external synthesizers and so when i work out a jam or a sketch i'll set up one or two drum programs and then midi tracks for the rest of the synthesizers that i plan to use those will go into one mixer i play the parts in live normally controlled by one keyboard and maybe i'll use the pads for drums i have had this in my hands multiple times a week since i first got it in 2017 i believe and very very comfortable with its workflow it's really enabled a lot of my creativity but if you're anything like me the back of your music making mind is always always asking could i be setting up these projects faster could i be writing drum programs that are more expressive could i be could i be developing these sketches more efficiently all of it everything i do i wonder could this process be better and this pondering led me to a few other samplers and sequencers over the years most notably a few months writing jams with the synths from deluge and then a brief stint with an electron digit act both of which i have since sold and i am more than happy to discuss my incompatibility uh with either in the comments i'm ready for you bo but i've decided it's finally time for me to upgrade to something a lot newer a little sleeker but somehow still very very familiar this is my recently acquired npc live 2 and it's way it's a little bigger i just realized that i have to do a thumbnail holding these things up don't i i got it used just a few weeks ago luckily right before this 2.10 update which i'm sure is going to cause a slight rise in used prices i am going to share with you what it felt like to change over my experience finally upgrading something that was in a lot of ways probably outdated uh and if you are subscribed i really appreciate you being here if you aren't i encourage you to look around the channel a little bit see if something else might interest you maybe you have a deep mind and you want to download some of my patchbacks or maybe the idea of me looking like a dummy blindfolding myself trying to identify the moog sound for a bunch of mono synths sounds fun there's a video for that too if you look around a little bit you like what you see and you want to learn about new gear and be introduced to new concepts and ideas that you wouldn't have otherwise i encourage you to describe i encourage you to subscribe that's such a stupid pitch uh i paid a total of about eleven hundred dollars making it the single most expensive gear purchase i've ever made i have some things with repairs that come close but for a single click for a single swipe of the credit card nothing beats this and i am a little uncomfortable by that fact but i do my best to share real perspective about money i think that's super important i think everybody should be talking about how much gear costs that's the most important thing and i hope it matters to you guys too and i really wish it was more of a conversation always i can hear you shouting right now if i'm worried about price why would i pay a thousand dollars for something that does a job i already have covered well after spending so much time with the 1000 i realize that my sequencer is the most important piece of gear i i own i interact with it constantly it defines my workflow it defines my process more than anything else in this room and that helps me a little bit be comfortable with it being the most expensive thing that i have bought and i totally recognize that everybody's budget is different and for most people i would not recommend alive to unless you positively need speakers because this workflow these features are available at much much lower price points i would say look for a used mpc one a used live one or a used akai force those vary in price from about 500 to 800 used which is pretty close to what you might expect to pay for ableton which i consider to be a functional alternative uh and close to a lot of mid-market hardware sense to compare to something else you might buy if you're trying to decide between modern mpc models i won't go super into detail but i will share why i went with the live 2. i like its form factor more than the other npc options it seems like it would fit on on a table and with other gear better than the force and in some cases better than the one i like that it's so big i like that the screen and pads are left and right so my hands will be left and right and not vertically on top of each other that's such a minor little thing but that's how i'm used to interacting with my npc how i'm used to laying my hands left and right and that sounds super silly when i hold this thing up and tell you that i like this because it's left and right and that might be a nitpick and it feels silly to say it out loud another big thing is the portability the built-in battery and the built-in speakers not necessarily because i want to be making beats in my garden or sitting in the back of a car but more that i think of it the way you use a laptop right you'll sit down you'll sit down on a couch and start a project and you'll move to your desktop and keep working on your project and i'll come down here with my other instruments and work on a project or maybe i'll go work on something with a buddy and i just need to bring this and this is the only thing i need to bring that really really appeals to me and i thought it was i thought it wouldn't be a big deal because i'm used to sequencing hardware since i have these giant things plugged into the wall all the time they can't move anywhere but the more i think about it the more things like my drum programs i would love to be able to just sit on a couch and work out just the drum part and just have that idea and then bring it down here and plug it into everything else one of the questions i did get because i asked you guys what you wanted to hear is why i went with this over the other modern mpc options i really prefer the inputs and outputs over what's available to you on the mpc one i like the extra set of assignable stereo outs i really like the second set of full size hardware midi din i like the extra usb port i wish i had some of the physical buttons that are on the npc one i noticed that they have a program edit hotkey and that's something that already is i don't like that that's two button presses away for me and over the one uh expandable storage i bought in solid state drive i haven't put it in yet for what i do which is a lot of midi uh and not as much not so much audio very convenient to me that if i get a 500 gig solid-state drive i can put it in here and then really never worry about running in space uh over the force i think the force is just pretty big i have a friend who has one i think he quite likes it it seems really big i hate the three and a half millimeter jacks to midi i think that's just a huge pain in the ass that's totally a nitpick and that's really not a big deal i could have gotten over that i feel like akai already sees the force as sort of separate to the npc line and if they're going to keep supporting anything it's going to be the mpc stuff and i have that in the back of my head i'm a little worried about it and seeing how the resale is already tanked i expect that to keep going down and i wasn't sure that i was going to keep this or want to stay with it and so to me like at least in the intermediate it's like okay i want to know that i can get my money back and that's another reason why i'm comfortable with getting the retro colorway and if they actually keep it limited like they've said i expect this to either keep its price or go up in price relative to a standard live or a live two so kind of my justification for all that in the process of recording footage and setting all the stuff up i sat down with to pull the samples off the 1000 and put them onto my live two and instead of plugging in my laptop i realized i could probably just plug usb straight from the 1000 into the live uh and it was kind of a thrilling moment i wasn't sure that it would work and to my surprise it really did i could load things up like it was a flash drive every sample i still had on my 1000 every kick every snare every record shop every vocal cut i could load it right from the flash card to the 1000 into the live [Music] samplers allow musicians to capture acoustic sounds from the world around them and then modify them for playback not surprisingly these sounds are called samples and at first it sort of felt like i was sucking the life out of it right like i was leeching the soul out of the old uh you know stuffing into the shiny bright touch screen future and like bringing an end to this object that i am legitimately attached to but i kind of quickly got over that and it ended up feeling more like passing the music on right the tools that i had used for so long to be creative could still be part of this new era this new generation there were some projects of mine from three or four years ago which i had not opened or listened to since i first made them the first few record samples i ever tried to do to learn how to do it there they were even some samples that were on the npc from the previous owner because i bought it used of course including the samples of a boys choir that i had put into a drum program on the 1000 and i would play with a midi keyboard polyphonically and the original program even loaded up albeit without any of my filter envelope settings and things like that and so after that in what became honestly a very time costly tangent uh i wanted to see how hard it would be to package them into a key group on the live so i could do what i had done before uh and it was a little slower than i expected it took me a couple hours but i got them all plugged in to a key group and this is the result there's one key group where they're just assigned to the notes they're playing there's one where they're all pitched in octave down [Music] [Laughter] there's one where i pitched down the samples five keys and then shifted the key groups to line up with those so you're playing the same note that you're hearing but it's shifted from the original sample and you get a little bit of that flavor from being pitched down like a lot of choir sounds i also tried them stacked and i really thought it was quite a nice sound and after all this work i realized that i could share these so i'm going to put that i'm going to put those key groups up on my gum road pay what you want minimum of zero dollars it's not super polished or anything but i think the sounds are cool and definitely fun to play with i want to see if people will download key groups i put together or samples i put together uh let me know if this is original good idea let me know if there's a different format let me let me know if there's things you want me to change about the key groups but having the option to be free is just a way for me to say thank you for watching thank you for subscribing and the option to pay is there for people who have asked for a way to support me there's no pressure you can download these for free and use them for free i will not feel bad i'll in fact i'll be quite proud that people are using them at all so if you have an mpc any of the modern ones you should be able to load up the key groups no problem uh and if you don't you can download it and take the samples out and plug them into whatever you like okay i did the same jam with the same same hardware on the 1000 and later just swapped it in the live two and if i'm editing this the way i plan to then maybe to the side right now you'll see me doing the exact same thing on the live two and that was very intentional i wanted to see okay i'm going to do all my steps i normally take other 1000 and then try and do those verbatim on the live and see what feels different and so far i've run into one thing that i do constantly on the 1000 that i can't do on the live 2. i will mute a track that i have pre-recorded and either play my drum fill live or i'll mute the synth part and play a solo live and on the live when you mute a midi track you cannot perform with the pads you cannot perform with an external midi keyboard that to me is baffling i looked around on the internet a little bit people seem to think that it's a bug and it's functionality that used to be different so i'm pretty sour about that because on the 1000 i do that constantly the projects are broken down in the same parts a program means the same thing a sequence means the same thing a track means the same thing things are labeled do it i have a button for note repeat all those things even even as base level as to record what you're about to play hold record and press play i didn't even think i didn't even have a chance to think oh does this work a different way because my muscle memory got me to where i wanted to go and that is a huge huge part of why i went to the modern npcs and not an octatrack or a machine or anything like that because so much of that dna so much that language so much of that mpc-ness is still here and i have tons of experience with that language and that way of working that i don't have to throw away i can continue to use that and so after working these things out and sort of thinking backwards over my entire experience with the one thousand what was i always sort of let down by one on the one thousand did i try to do or want to sit down and do that gave me some grief or that didn't work the way i wanted it to i paired it down to four things that i can really remember being halted by being i want to try something or i want to do something different and i couldn't get it to happen fast enough that it still sticks with me as this is something that was hard for me to do and the first thing is manipulating existing midi is pretty difficult if you're doing just drums or single shots it's okay but if i want to move chords around or delete a few notes in a melody that i played that's not super easy jj os does give you mode 15 and you're probably watching an example of that right now but more often than not i would erase the whole track and just perform it live again which did make me overall probably better at performing these things live and so now that's kind of part of my workflow but to compare it to the live and how easy it is to manipulate existing midi it's a touch screen piano roll that's pretty spectacularly intuitive to just be able to drag over all the midi you want to change and change the length all at once change the start point all at once transpose all at once all those things are really quick to get to i think now with the live i'll be able to refine takes a little more and instead of doing my whole 45 seconds again i can sit down and tweak the three notes i want to tweak uh the second one it's sort of paired to the first one there isn't a great method for step sequencing and this desire comes from using the digit act and using the deluge where on your digit act you just run your finger over both rows where you want your kick where you want your snare where you want your hi-hats and in seconds you can have a drum program i loved that i loved how fast that was on the deluge it's even better because you have that super high resolution 16 by 16 spectacularly fast to use as a drum machine really love that and i know you can get some of that on the force on the 1000 you can sort of get something close with note repeat but you end up doing multiple passes in a lot of cases uh and you can sort of cheese it with the arpeggiator if you set it to say 16th notes and you hit your different velocity hi-hats you can get it to go that way but there wasn't a good method for just plugging in my hi-hats plugging in my kick drum and of course now on the live there's a step sequencer for everything and even if there's that much resolution on the pads you can do it on the screen and plug it up and then copy it to the next row and really easily modulate your velocity or things like that i love that i really do love that i'm excited to have that option this is something that over time became a bigger deal to me the internal effects are pretty limited on the 1000 you can only do two at a time plus if you count the master compressor um jjos does allow for really flexible audio routing so you can have certain things to go to the effects and certain things not but only having two effects means you're either doing a lot of flattening you're either resampling something with a delay or resampling something with a reverb or resampling something with a chorus i don't like to do that i like to keep that's why i work in midi and not audio most of the time i like to be able to manipulate things without doing a whole new record uh and only having two effects is pretty limiting as far as finishing a track as far as getting to polish to me having individual control over delay or reverb or individual tracks is super super handy of course working in hardware i'm used to running pedals but now with the live 2 you can have effects on pads tracks programs buses the master you can put effects everywhere and there's dozens and dozens and dozens of them that to me gives me the option to finish and do more complete tracks um on here along with experimenting with things i can say i wonder what this would sound like with a delay and instead of running that sound to an individual out on the 1000 and grabbing a pedal and powering that and wiring that up and wiring that up and everything i can just click up air delay air to tap delay and sort of try out audition these ideas faster i think i think that's a massive massive advantage and this is another thing that a few times came up and it just broke my heart for working on a project was something i wanted to try and i was even looking at other options to do it and this is the fourth one audio tracks don't loop seamlessly with your recorded midi if you use an audio track you can record to it live in time with your um with the rest of your sequence everything else you've already programmed but at the end of your loop at the end of your sequence it stops saves it as a sample and then you can start it again you can't have it loop through and i wanted to be able to do that with guitar or with my electric pianos with the roads and not being able to is kind of a downer for the way i like to work stuff out but of course here we are on the live two yeah audio tracks let you do that seamlessly again you should see an example of it both inside i just use a micro anything freak but that's exactly what i want to be able to do this should be able to cover most of my audio looping needs especially knowing everything else that it can handle i'm very excited to do jams or to do sketches where i can play the roads in to an audio track um right next to sequence based lines that i've already done et cetera et cetera i think that'll be i think that'll be very very exciting for me so in general my workflow is essentially the same and that's in a lot of ways what i wanted but i wanted it to feel newer i wanted to know i had more options i wanted to know i could get more polish i wasn't sure where else to bring this up but this simplifies actually kind of a lot of setups for me so now instead of having for example the do5 plugged into power and its audio out and then midi into the mpc i can i can get rid of that midi cable the power can come straight from the back of the mpc and i just need to worry about audio and the one usb cable that's kind of awesome streamline with the new odyssey synth plugin what used to take my 1000 and an odyssey and its power supply in a midi cable and an audio jack now comes down to just the live uh i'm not saying they're going to be exactly the same and i i've only spent a little bit of time with the internal synths but i think they sound great and for a lot of use cases i will be more than happy to use the internal effects and again that just streams streamlines things uh but there's sort of my first impression sort of a summary what it feels like sort of the same sort of different but i want to end with an anecdote i'm still not totally sure about spending so much money and i've been wondering if i needed the upgrade at all did i spend this money for nothing and while i was setting this up for this video i needed to change the midi channel on the mpc1000 and i totally out of instinct naturally felt right moved my finger onto that lcd and tried to select the midi channel that way and i i laughed at myself realizing that hundreds maybe thousands of times i've changed midi channels on the npc 1000 and this time i just [Music] so as much as i feel totally defined by my workflow of the last four years only working with the mpc 1000 being sort of worried that my brain would only ever work the mpc 1000 way even in a few weeks with the live 2 and really not that much screen time it's already changing the way i work i'm already developing new habits and i think that's very very promising so i know i still have a lot to learn but uh in a lot of ways it already feels like home so there you go that's it i hope this was of interest to you i appreciate you sticking around especially the whole video i sure do talk a lot my name is majorab i really love gear that includes the live 2 that includes that includes that which i will never sell the mpc 1000 i really appreciate you watching hope to see in the next one cheers you

Channel: Jorb

Views: 13,684

Keywords: MPC, MPC live, MPC live 2, live, live 2, akai, force, mpc one, mpc 2.10, mpc 1000, user, review, experience, impressions, synth, synthesizer, hardware, dawless, gear, good gear, bad gear, jorb loves gear, jorb

Id: EDCynZmlUlw

Length: 23min 23sec (1403 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 30 2021