One Sequence Workflow for MPC

[Music] what's up youtube this is tube digger in this video i'm going to share with you one of my favorite workflows which i call the one sequence workflow this workflow involves literally one sequence which will eventually end up as your entire song there's no need to use additional sequences but additional tracks and programs can be used the reason that i like this workflow is obviously you don't have multiple sequences to manage or organize in the song mode i do really like the song mode and i use it quite a lot but over the years and months i've grown to really love the one sequence workflow which is my main workflow that i use it also solves the problem of getting bored of just a simple loop and you don't know how to flesh out your track so basically the idea is that you create an amount of bars that are manageable and you can also double the length of that to 32 bars if you just need a bit more space for some additional variation and changes so the initial 16 bars have got a bit of expansiveness and don't get too boring but the idea is that you carry on duplicating using the double length feature of the npc now i like to make jungle and drum and bass most of the time so 256 bars is pretty much around six minutes worth of a song at 170 beats per minute but for this demo i'm going to create a simple boom bap hip-hop beat and that's probably the easiest way for me to show you how the one sequence workflow works so before i get into the video i just want to thank all my current subscribers anyone that's liked and shared my videos anyone that follows and supports me on social media and of course anyone that's been kind enough to donate to this channel if you'd like to do that yourselves to help me out there's a paypal link in the description i also offer private one-to-one lessons over skype google hangouts or zoom whatever you prefer if you're interested in finding out more information about those please contact me at tubedigger gmail.com for more details there's my email address in the description also you can visit my website www.tubedigger.com forward slash lessons and that will show you all my current prices for private lessons so the one sequence workflow as said this avoids having to use multiple sequences and is somewhat similar to how a traditional daw works in the sense that you've just got one sequence multiple tracks with multiple sounds on those tracks you don't have to manage additional sequences or stitch them together to make a whole song some people prefer to use separate sequences because it's the traditional way to use an npc but i prefer to use this one sequence workflow simply because we've got the grid editor here and although we don't get a multiple track view it's only per track or the track that you're actually focused on but we can actually zoom around and look around all the note data now i can't move this at the moment because i've only got two bars i can just simply change that up the top here so the idea with the one sequence workflow is as i said before you don't have multiple sequences to manage and you basically create your first 16 maybe 32 bars you copy those over so you flesh out the track so it's in its full length or as long as you would like it and then you reverse engineer it by stripping sections away from the start so it slowly builds up over time and then you can do the same as the song slowly tapers off to an end so first of all i'm going to go to the browser and i'm just going to load in some simple sounds and make a really simple kit so this kick drum is fine i'm going to press my first pad here so i'm going to choose this kick that's already selected here got a kick go to drums and get a snare that's fine and a hi-hat now obviously you can make your kit more elaborate [Music] that's fine so back to the main page now we've got a simple drum kit in program zero zero one i'm gonna lay that beat down i'm going to change my bars back to two bars so this is how you would start an npc project you're always given a default bar amount of two and that allows you to put a simple beat down to get the actual idea going so i'm going to put that down i'm going to first of all change my bpm so just using my data wheel i'm going to go back down to 85 beats per minute before i put the beat down i'm just going to go to the track mix whenever you load in any expansion sounds i find that you have to bring your program volume or at least individual pad volumes down to about -9 minus 10 db and it just gives you a lot more headroom to play with and it's still going to be really loud the mpc x the mpc one the mpc live and live 2 and the akai force they all kick out quite a good hot signal so you don't really need these to stay at db and before you start making music i always recommend to bring these down to give you this headroom and this space [Music] okay so it was a bit off but the time correction sorted out so we've now got a simple two bar beat in this one sequence that we're going to use for the entire song obviously you want an additional sound now or sounds i'm just going to lay a simple melody down using the built-in electric plug-in so i'm going to go to track two switch the program type with the six icons here in the middle to plug in now i've got my mpc in controller mode at the moment so i could use a vst but i'm going to use something that everyone's going to have on their npc if you're in standalone mode on the mpc one you can quickly press 16 levels twice and access pad performance mode or you can just simply press pad perform here i might use progressions okay that's fine so i'm just going to put this in over the two bars that sounds okay i'm just going to add a bit of movement to this using the tremolo [Music] we've got drums or we've got our melody and drums now i'm just going to put a simple bass line in so we're on track three now i'm going to switch back to drum programs it's still viewing our one and only drum program now i could use this for the bass but i want to keep it separate so i'm going to press the plus symbol and now we've got program zero 003 which is a completely blank drum program i'm going to go to browse and i'm going to go to my expansions and i'm just going to type in base and just find a base note that i can make a simple baseline out of [Music] okay i'm going to use that because there's quite a lot of variation in that and i can chop that up over several pads so i'm going to press the pad pad lights up it's ready for me to load the sample the sample is now there go to program edit samples page [Music] if i press the copy button then press on the grid press additional pads they light up red and now i can copy those or this pad to the other pads and because it's a bass sound and i've got multiple copies that i want to kind of chop between i'm not going to put them in a mute group instead it's a lot quicker to just change the program politically to mono now they won't overlap go to the samples page and i'm going to choose my end anchor for this first pad bring that back so we've isolated that now there's a click that means i've just got to move it away from a point where it's clicking should i say next pad if you can't find a point that doesn't click which is quite often the case with bass sounds i recommend that you flatten the pad so you use this arrow up the top here flatten the pad and just press do it then we can go to the sample editor that's our new bass sound that we've just made move the start point all the way to the end press process and choose fade out and now we've got a smoother sound that doesn't have a click so just move the start point back to the start the sample perfect let's go back to program edit now there's still a little click on there so i'm going to do the same for this pad a01 and there's no audio tail needed press do it let's go to sample edit again grab the start point move it across process fade out do it move that back to the start still a little bit of a click there but that's okay we could probably get rid of that with a low pass filter [Music] it's got quite a nice little pitch kind of bend in there let's flatten that and back to sample edit just fade out the end again that's done you're using the start and end points to select your portion of the sample [Music] so we've got two notes there we could of course re-pitch these afterwards if they don't work with the chords that i've already put in with the electric plug-in that sounds okay let's see what happens if we flatten it it's a tiny click and it's also a little bit quieter than the others so let's go to sample edit process and i'm going to normalize this to give it a bit of volume scroll to the end go to fade out do it now as you can see it's going to be quite loud now in comparison to the others so we can go to pad pad mix so it's chat mix if we double tap the track mix twice we're in the pad mixer so you can hear that's a lot louder so i can just simply bring that down so it's in context with the other pads and you can hear that this pad pad 3 the sound on there let's go to program edit a bit of a click at the start and we can simply fix that by just going to the filter envelope page amplitude envelope which is this bottom envelope and just move that across or move the attack to a higher value and that's gone now now our first pad's got a little click on the end of it still so again back to sample edit this is our first pad let's just fade that out see if that fixes that so i think the problem is here okay let's now discard so that gets rid of everything that was outside the selection that's fine now i'm just going to jam these around with what we've got with the drums and the chords that i put in with the electric plug-in um i can't remember whether they'll work at the moment let's just see perfect they work sound great to me so i'm going to put those in that's fine now that's going to get quite repetitive over and over again but we can add other stuff over the top to make it more elaborate so it's at this point where i go okay i don't want this loop to go on and on and on so to easily start fleshing this track out we go up to the pencil icon in the sequence area and we can double the length of this so i'm going to double length once now we've got four bars twice eight bars three times 16 bars and you can see that up the top there 16 bars this means now that we probably need some additional sounds just initially so i don't have to start making additional chords and get too complex for the sake of this video if i was doing this on my own for myself i would be going in quite deep on the bass and changing up little notes within the bass within the bass line that i've created and i would be changing some of the chords i might do that quickly now i just don't want this to become a separate kind of tutorial i want the sequencing to be the main idea so i'll probably just do a couple of little change-ups on the chords and see if that gives us some variation and then i'll leave it at that and then i'll just show you the main idea of how to stay within the one sequence workflow so let's go back to the grid and let's take a look at the chords and we can just zoom out a little bit so we can grab the whole chord that's here from bar four to five and we can just simply choose transpose and transpose that using the data wheel now now i'm not too sure if this is going to work because it might shift some of the notes into the wrong kind of key but let's just bring it down too and see how that sounds [Music] that sounded a bit off so you can just grab a whole chord and then just transpose it down an amount of notes or transpose it up and find the one that works and stays harmonic so that's quite nice and i can continue to do that so let's go from bar five no that's too high let's just bring it back again to bar five now we don't have to keep changing that same chord so we can grab another chord let's grab these uh ones that are just in the short notes here and we're nearly at the end of the 16 bar so we can simply just grab maybe this chord here let's see how that sounds [Music] so i'm just going to grab one note now out of this chord so let's just shift it right up to there and bring this back perfect so that all sounds nice and harmonic now we've got some variation over the 16 bars so whether you do what i've just shown you by adjusting some cores or make some little change-ups in the base and you can of course easily do some additional rhythms with your drums as long as those 16 bars are interesting and it's not just a containing a repeat of those initial two bars then you formed what can be the main basis of the song which will allow you to copy your bars over a longer period of time or you know expand them to be somewhat in line with a full-length song now with hip-hop at 85 beats per minute i'm going to take a wild guess that maybe 128 bars will be about 3 minutes i might be wrong but i'm going to use that anyway so that means we need to copy or double the length of our sequence once 32 bars twice 64 bars three times again and we're at 128 bars so the idea is that now we're still in one sequence we've used multiple tracks so we've only got three tracks in this demonstration but of course you can have a fourth track with sound effects on it a fifth track there's some vocal samples uh you can use an audio track if you're an emcee or a vocalist then you can just sing over this but whatever you add to this main skeleton or main structure of the song is entirely up to you the idea is that you can now see a full overview of your song as you could in a daw i'm just going to do a bit of housekeeping and take my own advice i'm going to change the track name to base and the plugin that's on that track is a drum program where we've got our bass sounds so i'm going to change that to bass so track 3 is bass track two is uh well it's the electric but i'm just going to call it roads which is simple and i'm going to change the plug-in name to roads and the same again for track one drums so three kind of main elements and i don't want the bass to immediately come in i also don't want the drums to come in immediately and because we've mapped them out over 128 bars we can now start reverse engineering the track so the easiest way for me to do that is go to arrays or on the drums or on the drums track now we can see we've got a range here which covers the full amount of bars in this sequence so it's 1 to 129 or the start of bar 129. so all we need to do is change this to 9. now what i could do is change it to eight and then go to the beat so we've just got maybe the last snare coming so i'm going to change that to 8.2.0 so that will leave me a nice little lead-in for where the drums start if we go into the grid editor for where the drums were and let's just go back to the start you can see that i've literally just erased you know maybe a few notes out of that last bar where they originally were now it wasn't enough i should have uh chosen a different beat count i just want the drums to be led in by like the last snare of this last bar so i can simply press and hold shift with these notes selected and cut and that should just lead that into where the drums start i'm going to go up to base let's go to arrays from bar 1 up to bar 17. so i'm just going to erase that [Music] so you get the idea i've just erased a couple of things from the bass and the drums and we're starting to form the song and you can do that anywhere along the sequence obviously you can get to a point and just cut something out um so i could have left like i did with the drums a few of the last notes to lead the bass line in but that's generally the idea it's so simple you form your initial 16 bars you can also double those to 32 and again make that a bit more elaborate and then just keep duplicating from there but generally i like to get everything done in a smaller but not so small that it's really repetitive space or bar length or bar count should i say and then duplicate that so you've got the main basis of your track and it's a simple case of just stripping stuff away and there's no need to have additional sequences so obviously this is for people that prefer to work in a more linear song kind of way and they don't want to use the song mode of the npc like i said like i said before i really like using it it's handy if you prefer working in one sequence and getting that locked go to another sequence but i find that this is one of the most efficient workflows and it's the one that i use the most these days for my own productions there's other tools that we could use we could go up to the sequence edit menu and you've got events here so we can copy events so if there's a section of the track say maybe from bar 33 up to bar 40 or the start of bar 41 which would be eight bars and you can copy that and place that further on in the song and it's the same process really so you would just literally type here bar sorry bar 33 so that's the start of the portion you want to copy and we go to 41. sorry that didn't register 41 do it so that will just copy everything from bar 33 to bar 41 and then we would just place it wherever we want so we could place it at bar 65. so you'll notice that they're all odd numbers so that will copy these eight bars to there you can choose the amount of copies as well so this is copy events now um well before i actually go out there you can replace the events that are already at bar 65 with these events in this range or we can just merge them so there might be something on one of your tracks where you just want to merge those events with the vent the events that are already at bar 65 and onwards so you've got all the tools that you need in here with the sequence edit menu we can actually copy bars easily from here so that will copy the entire bars from a particular sequence and we can again replace and merge so i'll let you guys experiment with all those different facilities but this is the main idea i'll just give you a quick summary again you make your first 16 bars using three or four tracks just to make it somewhat elaborate make some change-ups within that 16 bars so you're not just repeating two bars i think for this tempo as well because it's a bit slower you can get away with 16 bars with something like jungle and drum and bass i do quite often work within 32 bars and then i use that as my main basis of the track which i duplicate so i hope you've enjoyed the video guys please like share subscribe and if you want private lessons please contact me at tubedigger gmail.com please stay tuned for more videos i will see you on the next one this is tube digger and i'm out

Channel: Tubedigga

Views: 21,532

Keywords: One Sequence Workflow for MPC, mpc workflow, mpc sequencing, mpc tutorial, mpc tutorial videos, mpc tutor, mpc one, mpcx, mpc x, mpc live, mpc live mk2, mpc workflow tutorial, akai mpc

Id: M7Uet3zSUq8

Length: 26min 57sec (1617 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 27 2020