The MPC Key 61 Masterclass

[Music] hi there i'm andy mack and welcome to the npc academy in this exciting brand new master class we're going to be walking you through the process of how to produce a track inside the brand new mpc keys 61. we're going to be utilizing some of the brand new plug-in synth engines along with our iconic mpc workflow we're going to be playing chords and melodies adding modern effects mixing and automation techniques to arranging our beat into a finished track and all of this is going to be covered over 12 exciting episodes using the brand new npc key 61. so make sure you download the project assets in the description below so you can follow along with the course and you'll have all of the same presets samples and track layouts i'm using so let's start by listening to the track we're going to create [Music] hey [Music] hey [Music] bye [Music] so there you have the track so as you can hear our track is filled with so many key elements in the production process such as our drums our key melodic melodies bass lines chords to top lead melodies and effects to our song arrangement which means there's some incredible content for us to cover inside npc key 61. so before we begin make sure you download the project assets so you can follow along with the whole master class and you'll have all of the same assets that i've got now for our next lesson we're going to start building up the melodics using our brand new plugin instruments see [Music] hi there and welcome to episode 2 of our mpc keys master class now in this lesson we're going to start building our track from the ground upwards but before we get started i'm going to walk you through the process of how you can load up the project assets now once you've downloaded the project assets put them onto a usb stick and then press the browser then we want to go to places and now select the usb stick that you've put into the back of npc key 61. now the file will be called master class simply press this and press load now once the project has finished loading you can now press play and start and you can hear the entire project [Music] so as you can hear this is the full track i played at the beginning now so what we're going to do we're going to build this from scratch so we're going to need to go to a new sequence so we'll go to our data wheel and we're going to turn this to the right and we're going to go to sequence unused which is sequence number two now if you're familiar with the npc workflow you'll know your way around npc keys in seconds but if you're new to the platform let's take a quick glance over the basics so an npc sequence is technically the name of your track or the song or the beat name so this is where i'm going to be recording all of my different tracks or my parts to my song so for this we need to give the sequence a name so press the a icon and let's name this master class just like you'd give a song a name now once you've done that press do it and now we need to set a tempo for our song so press the bpm tab and now you can use a data wheel or you can use the dedicated tempo button to enter in your tempo so we set a three three then if you press the bars button here we can give our sequence a length so we're going to just use four bars for the time being and then we can extend the length of our sequence later in the master class then next to that we have our loop length what we're going to keep that on so we're looping around four bars then below this we have our track information and track types now npc can record up to 128 midi tracks and each track can have its own unique track type so the first track type is drums this means that we can access the iconic npc drum pads by using expansion packs drum samples one shots giving you the full mpc capabilities now each drum program has up to eight banks available across the 16 pads so this means that you can assign up to 128 samples in one single drum kit to the pads now each track can also have its own independent drum program which means that the possibilities are endless you simply select the track and then select the drum program that you want to assign to the track then next to drums we have plugin instruments this is where you access the incredible soundscape of mpc keys now once you select the plugin icon you can now press the sounds button to access all of the plugged instruments for your production here you can see a whole list of all of the plugins available such as the brand new fabric xl we have hype opx 4 stage piano stage ep and so much more now when you select a plugin automatically you now go into categories of all of the preset sounds available so to select a sound you might want for example let's select warm pads so now i'm inside all of the presets available under the warm pads category [Music] let's add the touch strip to add some effects now if i want to edit my patch i can just press the edit instrument and now i see the graphic interface and here i can just use my q links which are automatically mapped so we can tweak our sound instantly this makes it really easy to navigate through sounds now let's press the main menu next to this we have key groups now key groups are sample based instruments that have been assigned across the keybed this means that you can play them as instruments and we can use our octave shift [Music] then below this we have clips this allows us to trigger audio loops directly from the pads then next to this is midi this allows us to connect external midi sound modules via usb or midi din which can be sequenced from mpc sequencer then we have cv gate this allows us to use any of the cv gate outputs on npc keys to trigger modular racks with our sequencer now to start a track we're going to stay on the plugins track type to lay down our first melody idea so let's press the sounds button and now i'm going to select fabric excel go under previews we're going to select flutter sign lead now we can also put this sound into our favorites so anytime you find a sound you really like press the favorites tab and then just hold one of the empty containers hold it down and now you'll see the sound there you want to remove the sound simply hold your finger on it and then you can clear and overwrite so now let's navigate back to our main sequence window and now we've selected our sound i want to start laying down the first part of my melody idea so now we have our sequence named but let's give our tracker name so let's call this melody lead once you've done that let's press do it and now let's arm our track for record and now we can play our keyboard until we find an idea so let's record that hit record play and start [Music] now npc keys has a really powerful piano role suppress grid and we can now look at all of the notes that we've played and we can edit these by using our tool selector at the top of the screen here we can use the magnifying glass to zoom in and out of our screen we can use a select tool to move notes transpose them we can move them back off the grid we can extend them shorten them then use the eraser tool for deleting notes and then undo to restore them and then the pencil icon to draw notes in this provides a lot of hands-on control so now let's hit our main menu now that we've recorded that melody we're going to navigate to track 2 and add the next element to our melodic so let's name this track it says press r tab we're going to call this piano lo-fi so as before once we finish naming press do it and now we're going to change our track type to plugins and now you'll see it says plugin002 so this is our second instance and i'm using a piano called urban piano now if you press sounds fabric xl pianos and then you'll see urban piano so we press main menu [Music] so this is the counter melody that i'm going to be playing over the top of our previous melody now if we press the edit button i now go into the interface of the plugin and what i want to do is add some lo-fi to this sound now we have an effects section called flavor that allows us to add noise flutter and distortion to our sound so this really puts it into the pocket where we want to be with this type of sound so here's the melody now let's hit record playing star and lock this down [Music] so now that recorded the first elements of our melody i want to start adding some insert effects so we can really start giving our instruments that low-fi modern sound that you hear on a lot of records so on my inserts i've already got an instance of half speed already inserted but if we want to add another effect go to one of the empty slots and then we can simply select any of these available effects we've got everything from dynamics reverbs compression eqs to vocal plugins that you can add to your tracks that you technically would only find in a daw so let's close this window down and to open our plugin press the pencil icon and now we can actually see the plugin now to control the plugin we can use our q links which are automatically mapped via the q link banks to the plugin so now listen to what half speed does so this now really puts us in the modern world of lo-fi now let's blend this with the original now already our tracks just got a great feel so let's go to track two insert and turn on half speed on our piano [Music] so as you can hear you can get some incredible results using the onboard effects inside npc now we can even use the touch strip so if you hold down touch effects you've got a whole list of presets that we can choose from to add even more dynamic and fill to our melodic [Music] now to save your work throughout this masterclass we want to press menu then we want to press save and now we can save project as where we can name the project and give it our own name or we can save project which will overwrite any name that you've given your project now we can also press preferences and set up an auto save under project load and save then enable and then you can set a time for when mpc keys auto saves your projects so on our next lesson we're going to start using the mpc workflow to build out our beat around our melodic melodies so see you on the next lesson [Music] hi there and welcome to episode 3 in our mpc keys production masterclass in our previous episode we created the foundation of our track by laying down our melodic melodies using fabric xl this was across two tracks and then we added some lo-fi effects so let's take a quick listen to what we've done [Music] so the next stage is to lay down the beats and the drums on our track over our melodics using the mpc workflow so press the main window that takes us to our home page and then we're going to navigate to track three and here we want to make sure that we change our track type so we're going to change our track type from plugins to drums and then you'll see the pads change into rgb colors this means that you've got a program selected now the kit that you should have selected is called master class kit under the drum program tab but feel free to load any drum kits from any expansions from the factory library just hold shift and browser go to the expansions tab and here you can select any packs that you have so now let's navigate back to our main menu and the first thing we're going to do is name our track so let's just go to our pencil icon press track 3 and let's just call this drums and then press do it and then now we'll press main and then we'll go over to our time correction which is our quantize and we'll just make sure that we've got that activated so just press the button and you'll see it says on and that means anything that we play is going to be corrected in time so let's hit record play and start [Music] so now that's laid down we're looping around and i'm going to press no repeat but i'm going to trigger this with my touch strip so let's add some triplet rolls to our hi-hats [Music] so let's turn our overdub off and then i'm going to go to bank b and i'm going to select pad 9 which is a percussive loop now if i press sample edit this will bring up the wav file on screen which means i can now edit this so i can use our q links to affect the start and end points and i can use my pads to trigger the sample now once you've set your start and end point press process discard and that will now cut the sample so we've got a much smaller version of the loop so let's hit overdub and drop this in now let's add some vocal textures press over dub now if we press our grid we can actually see all of our notes and i want to move the vocal shell so i'm going to take my select tool highlight the note and then i'm going to use my nudge and i'm going to nudge it back now you can use this process on any of the drum samples so now i'm going to navigate to track 4 i'm going to add some more drums over our track so again we're going to change our track type to drums and i'm using the add drum kit and i'm actually on bank a and i'm going to add another snare over the top of this and some percussive sounds so let's hit overdub [Music] now i'm going to add an ambient sample [Music] then an open hat [Music] out of overdub go to our grid zoom out so that's the first foundation of our drums done over the top of our melodics so on our next lesson we're going to start adding a drone base using fabric xl over our beats so see you on the next episode [Music] hi there and welcome to episode 4 in our mpc keys production masterclass so on this episode we're going to start laying down a drone base across our beats and our melodics using fabric xl and this is really going to give a lot more low end to our track and we're going to be doing some glides and movements with that so first thing i'm going to do is let's recap and play back what we've got so far [Music] so right now all of the different elements are really starting to come together but i want to extend the length of my loop to eight bars so if we press the edit tab here i'm going to use the double length so if we just press that that's going to take a four bar now to an eight bar loop and this means that we can just add a little bit more movement and rhythm to our base when we lay it down so i'm going to jump to track five for our base and i've already got our track type selected under plug-in and then our plug-in instance number is plug-in number three so we'd already use number one and two for our melodic and i'm using a sound called mode drone so if we press sounds let's go into fabric excel and it really does have some amazing bass sounds which are all categorized so we have synth bass sub so let's play some of these just select the patch [Music] bring the touch strip [Music] let's go to heavy diver you'll really feel these bases on your tracks let's go to a different category let's go to our synth drones now see straight away we're in that pocket with today's current hip-hop sound [Music] bringing the touch strip [Music] now if we press edit instrument we can use our q links to control some of our key parameters [Music] so the patch i'm going to use is called mode drone so let's just select that and this has a really nice texture for our base [Music] that's our baseline but what i want to do i want to give the sound a bit of glide so to do this we can select different tabs from our main button and we want to select the tab that shows legato and glide times and here there's a whole bunch of different types of settings that we can adjust so we're going to keep it on legato and we're going to increase our glide time [Music] and once you've adjusted your glide time we're going to go back to our main page and i'm just going to increase the cutoff just so our drone is a bit brighter so now that we've got our bass sound set let's play along with our track until we get the right melody [Music] hey so now we got the right sound melody let's lay this down so first i'm going to name our track so let's use our pencil icon and we're going to call this drone base and press do it and then record play and start now on our next lesson we're going to add some chord progressions using our pads over our track so see you on the next lesson [Music] hi there and welcome to episode 5 in our mpc keys production master class so in this tutorial we're going to start laying down some chord progressions using some pad sounds from fabric adding some depth and texture to our beat so let's have a quick glance where we are so far and to do this i'm going to be using track view on npc keys so if we press our track mute button at the top here this means that i can now turn on and off the individual tracks that we've recorded so far directly from the pads so i'm going to turn off the melodics because i just want to focus on my drums and my drone base just to see how things are sounding [Music] so now let's unmute our melodics on pad one and two [Music] so you can really hear the track starting to come together so i'm going to keep tracks one and two muted whilst we lay down our pads now to do this we're going to navigate to track six and now let's name our track so let's press our pencil icon and we're going to call this pads number one then we press do it then go to our main home page and then we're going to change our track plug-in number to number four now this is using fabric xl and i'm using the patch called chocolate so if you hit sounds fabric xl then under pads warm this is where you can find that particular patch and this is definitely one of my favorite patches under the warm category what i love about playing npc keys and these kinds of patches is that it's just you and the keyboard and you're really connected to the music you know you have all of the power at your fingertips you have the luxury of having compelling instruments vast soundscape and then you've got the power of the mpc sampling capabilities all in one powerful production workstation so you can just sit down and really embrace the music and come up with the most creative ideas so i'm going to lay down this pad this is going to add a really nice texture to our beat so let's go to record play and start and lay this down [Music] so if we hit our grid edit we can go into our piano roll so we can view all of the notes that we played to make up our chords [Music] and then if we press edit we can now go straight into fabric we'll go to our main page let's add some textures to our sound now let's go to track new and bring in our melodics now let's go to our touch strip hold down touch effects and let's press turn table let's add some tape stops now on our next episode i'm going to start adding some top lead line melodies over our beat that's really going to take it to the next level see you on the next lesson [Music] hi there and welcome to episode 6 in our mpc keys production masterclass so in this lesson we're going to start adding some top synth melody lines over our track which is going to add drive and variation so let's have a listen to where we are so far [Music] so we have our drums our melodics with low-fi effects drone bass and pad textures so our lead lines are really going to add some texture over the top so now let's navigate to track seven and then make sure our track type is plug-in and then we're gonna select plug-in number zero zero five and for this we're going to be using the opx-4 which is our four operator fm synth engine now to navigate to the patch if we press the sounds button and then select your opx-4 and you'll see that all of the sounds are categorized so you can select your leads and pads etc so let's go into previews and then page three where our preset is but let's have a listen to some of these sounds [Music] so much richness and depth to that patch so let's dive straight into the acid lead [Music] now you can have so much fun with those patches now let's go to our main page and now i want to turn off our quantize and the reason is is that when i'm playing these melodies i'm going to be bending into notes and i don't really want to quantize that kind of playing so we're going to be playing this unquantized so let's record this down hit record play and start [Music] now let's go to our grid we can also access this on the left hand side of the touch ui and use our cue link to expand our view now if you press the settings cog in the top right we can actually set this to follow so our grid will follow the notes in real time so now that we've recorded our top melody line let's press main we're going to name this so i'm just going to call this lead 1 and then i'm going to go to track 8 and again make sure we're on a plug-in instance and we're going to go to plug-in number six and for this patch i'm using an instance of fabric excel and it's called square detuned so if we press sounds go to fabric excel and then go to page two to leads classic and you'll find some of the most amazing lead synth sounds in the presets so let's have a listen to some of these [Music] oh [Music] so you can have loads of fun with those so let's select our square detune sound and we're going to keep quantize off because we're playing the same kind of bended melodies [Music] and this is more of a counter melody working in conjunction with the top line lead melody so now that we've laid that part down we're going to navigate now to track 9 and we're going to use an instance of opx4 so we're going to go to plug-in instance 7. so here's the patch [Music] so we're going to be playing more of a staccato style line that adds some drive over our track so press sounds opx 4 and you'll find this patch under the pads category on page 4. velocity sweeps [Music] so we're all set up to record this part [Music] let's hit record play and start [Music] hey now in our next episode we're gonna be using some arpeggiation with opx4 and some sample-based pads see you next time [Music] hi there and welcome to episode 7 of our mpc keys master class so in this lesson we're going to be using npc keys arpeggiator drive in a patch from opx 4 and add some additional key group sample based pads to finish off our music so what i'm going to do now is we're going to navigate to our next track which is going to be track 10 and we're going to make sure on a plug-in instance and this time we're going to press the plus sign and that's going to instantiate another instance of a plugin so npc keys can actually instantiate up to eight plugins in any project at one time so we'll go to our sounds button and here what i want to do now is select an instance of opx4 and then we're going to go to our category and then we're going to select our preset sound that we're going to use with our arpeggiator so i'm going to use dubsynth and this is a really rich deep synth preset that real fm texture so let's turn on arpeggiator [Music] so if we go into our edit instrument we can now use our q links to actually control some of these parameters now on cue link page one you'll see a box that represents the controls that are mapped to the q links [Music] this is a real fast way for you to add some creativity to any of the patches inside npc keys so let's record this down now i'm going to go to our piano roll so press the grid button and now let's hit record playing start and lay down our part [Music] so now that we've recorded that part let's go to our main menu and we're going to go to our channel strip and here we can just balance out our level with the rest of the track so let's stop the track and let's name our track now we're just going to call this up press do it and now navigate to our home page so now we're going to actually add some sample based instruments so we're going to go to a new track track 11 and change our track type to key group which is next to our plugins so this means that we can now play sample based instruments that have been assigned across the key bed and there's a whole bunch of expansions and you can even auto sample all of your own synthesizers and bring them into npc keys now i'm using the patch taken from the labyrinth expansion called barbell pads [Music] and you can hear that this pad adds a lot of mood and darkness [Music] so we're going to lay this down so we're going to hit record play and start [Music] so let's go to track mute and break down the track pull out our drums and melody [Music] so you can hear now that we've pretty much got all of our components together so if we go to our main page we're going to name this track so we're just going to call this dark pads press do it and now we've got all of our different tracks together so let's go back to track one so we've got track one our melodic and track two drums on three and four etcetera etcetera so our track is really now coming together now on our next lesson we're just going to add the final touch which is some vocal elements over our beat before we get into mixing automation and arranging so see you on the next lesson [Music] hi there and welcome to episode 8 in our mpc keys production masterclass so in this episode we're going to be adding the final elements which are some vocal chops and some ambient textures over our beat before we start mixing all of our elements together so let's dive straight in so we're going to navigate to an empty track which will be track 12 and we're going to change our track type back to drums and then we're going to select our drum kit which is going to be the master class kit and then we're going to go to bank c where i've got a number of samples that we're going to be adding over our track so the first one is on pad 16 which is like a drone ambient sound and this rap vocal on pad three so let's go to padmeu and here i've turned off a number of tracks so i can just focus on hearing the drums and a couple of the key melodic lines so let's go to main and then hit record and play and start let's lay this down [Music] so you can hear the ambient droning in the back now [Music] now add the vocal texture [Music] [Music] then i'm gonna add some sound effects [Music] hey [Music] and i'm probably going to add a symbol now i've got a symbol on the top pad here on the left so let's hit over dub and drop the symbol in as we do the turnaround [Music] so now that we've added those elements let's name our track so let's go to our pencil icon and we're just going to call this vocal effects one we press do it so let's navigate to track 13 and make sure that our track type is drums and let's name our track and we'll call this low vocal effects now press do it and we'll go to our main home page and now we're going to navigate to bank b and use pad 15. so we're going to add this over our beat now so let's hit record play and start and lay this down [Music] let's come out of overdub [Music] and now let's go to our pad and let's bring in all of our other parts [Music] so as you can hear we built up our track from the ground upwards it now has excitement energy so our next step now we finished all of our tracks is we want to start looking at mixing all of our levels to maximize the track so on our next lesson we're going to be looking at mixing and taking it to the next level [Music] hi there and welcome to episode 9 in our mpc keys production masterclass so in this lesson what we're going to be doing is we're going to use some mixing techniques to mix our beat and utilize some of mpc's on board effects plugins which really do deliver studio quality effects directly inside the hardware and this covers everything from compressors limiters reverb delays to lo-fi effects so let's go to pad mute and what i'm going to do i'm going to start mixing by turning off all my tracks and i'm just going to start with my drums [Music] so now what i want to do i want to treat my drums as one track because at the moment they're on track three and track four so if we open up our channel strip we can actually see the outputs of where our drum tracks are going so these are going to outputs one and two but i'm going to change them to sub group one go to track four and i'm going to do the same we're going to set this up to sub 1. so now both those drum tracks are going to that sub group so we go to mixer change it from program to submixes and now all of our drums are coming out of this one channel and now i've also got a compressor that's now compressing both those drum tracks all on the one track [Music] now as soon as we engage our compressor you can hear that it tightens up our mix and it gives our drums a little bit more extra punch so let's close down our channel strip and then we're going to go to our padmiu and i'm going to bring back in tracks 1 and 2 which are melodies and see how these now feel together with our drums [Music] so what i want to do now is balance the levels of our melodics so we'll start off with track one and navigate to there open our channel strip and let's bring down this level and if we go to our effects can bring in our half speed [Music] let's bring our volume down just a little bit more and now let's go to track two our low five piano again you can hear it's too loud let's bring this down let's hear it with the half speed now the half speed is set at 50 so it's balancing between a half speed sound and the original melody let's give it about 80 70 percent that feels good now we'll go to our drone base we can bring this up in the mix so now that we've got those elements balanced out really nice i'm going to go to our master track so if you press the master icon this allows us now to add effects onto our master channel so i'm going to go to an empty slot we're going to go down to our dynamics and we're going to add the air limiter so let's pull this up and i'm going to use a preset called my input is too quiet take down our gain by about 3 db turn it off bring it back in so there you can hear a massive improvement with the overall sound of the whole mix so we're going to be working now with our limiter engaged throughout the whole mix so let's add our base back in [Music] so now that our base is feeling good we're gonna go to track six which is our pads now a little trick i'm gonna add so let's go to our inserts and on our pad you know some pads can actually really interfere with your low end so what we're going to do is go down to our filters and we're going to add an air filter and we're going to select a high pass filter which what it's going to do is going to allow us to block out some of the low end frequencies so we're going to cut our frequency off probably around about 150 so you know even though you might not hear it it will make a difference when you've got your bass and your kick drum to add some space in this part of the frequency so let's go to our piano track and we're just going to adjust the volume and we're going to give this a subtle pan just to the right now let's go to our lead [Music] and you can hear us way too loud feeling better [Music] let's bring it with our second lead [Music] adjust this right down [Music] now let's go to our sweeping pad this is our staccato synth let's bring this down [Music] and bring an arpeggiator [Music] so let's go to our inserts go down to modulation and add auto-pan sync let's bring in our dark pads [Music] to the right [Music] and then our vocals [Music] now you can hear that our vocals are getting a little bit lost in the mix so what we're going to do is go to our pad select which means that we can now control the individual levels of each of the pads so what i can do i'm going to pan actually some of our hi-hats and then what i'm going to do is go to bank c i'm going to bring this right up in the mix there's our ambient sample [Music] so now you can hear it coming through [Music] and then let's go to track 13 where we've got our low vocal let's solo that so let's hear how this feels in the track [Music] so we can bring that down just a bit [Music] let's go to pad news see how this all feels when we drop elements [Music] now the purpose of mixing is always to make sure that you can get all of your tracks working together so everything has its own space and you can hear the mix and the clarity and the low end and the punch so sometimes you might even want to take things out that are crowding your mix so i hope these techniques have been really useful because you can apply these to your own tracks so the next episode we're going to start arranging our beat into a full track [Music] hi there and welcome to the npc keys production master class so in this episode i'm going to walk you through the process of how we take our track and we turn this into a song structure now that we've got all of our music and our mix is done so to do this i want to extend the length now from 8 bars and we're going to press our edit tab and we're going to make this 64 bars so i'm going to double this to 16 to 32 to 64. and that will now give us enough bars to work with so if you look on our main window you'll see the bar length is now 64. and then we're going to navigate to our track mute where we can now turn tracks on and off for each of our parts using our pads this means that we can create intro verse chorus etc on our song arrangement and i also want to use track group which allows me to take different types of tracks and group them together for example i've got drums on both these tracks so i'm going to group these to number one so they turn off together then i'm going to take all of my pads and since and we're going to group these to number two and then i'm going to group my vocal effects to number three and once you've completed that hit track mute and now when we press our pads you can see all i need to do is hit one of the pads that has the group and it will turn off all of those pads so what we're going to do we're going to be using our pad mutes now to build out our song arrangement so we're going to start with the melodic now let's hit record play and start now let's bring our second part the melody our vocal and our drums and bass [Music] now we'll do a drop now that's brought in all of our synths let's bring an arpeggiator [Music] bringing our melody counteract the verse now we're back to our chorus bring the drums back in and then a final drop back to the chorus [Music] and then an outro [Music] so let's stop our track and now we have our arrangement which is that easy to do by using pad mutes so all we need to do is simply play this back and you'll see all of the automation in real time then you'll see our piano come in our vocal and then our drop another technique i'm going to use is pad view and this allows us to do the same thing but inside our drum kit so i'm going to press automation right and i'm going to drop out the hi-hats in our drum kit on the verses to really give it a much more low vibe [Music] and i'm going to bring him back in second half and then we come out of automation now on our next lesson we're going to add some effects and automation over our song arrangement to finish our track see you on the next episode [Music] hi there and welcome to the mpc keys production master class so in this episode i'm going to be walking you through the process of adding lo-fi plug-in effects and adding automation over our song arrangement using npc keys touch strip to control many of the parameters adding the final touches to our production so let's start by opening up our channel strip and we're going to be on track one which is our melody and this already has two insert effects added from our project files so if we want to add more effects over this sound simply touch the ui and an empty slot in our effects and now you can select from all of the different categories available so we'll go into harmonics dio clipper there you have it you can turn this off [Music] now if we step back we can just erase that plugin and now let's open up half speed [Music] now what i want to do with this sound is i want to automate it in our production so it comes on and off as certain parts of the song so what i'm going to do is we're going to hold down our q link button select project and then q link edit and here what we can do we can set up all of the map in to our touch strip so hold down the touch strip config button making sure cue link is selected and now if we hold shift and touch strip we can now use the pads to jump between any of the 16 assigned controls on our q links so we've got q link one selected now we go to program and we select the plugin and then underneath this we select the insert so on insert one i've got half speed so i want to turn half speed on and off from my touch strip so i select on then i go to my next q link and again i select the plugin which is number two which is going to be the piano insert number one half speed on and off and then on cue link number three i want to control the touch strip tape stop so we go to a plugin number one insert two and our touch strip effect enabled and then i'm gonna do the same on cue link number four and that's gonna be program plug-in number two the piano insert number two and the same parameter so now our touch strip can control all of these and on number five i'm going to go to our top lead melody and i'm also going to add an effect on this so what i need to do is go to my main menu i'm going to go to that track which is track 7 and i'm going to insert an effect so go to my inserts and we're going to go all the way down and we're going to find touch effects enter and we're going to select an effect which is tape stop and we're going to bring this down so we have a slow tape stop sound and now hold down q link q link edit and now we select the plugin the insert and touch enabled so now we've set up five parameters so now we do shift touch strip now i can jump between those five q links which will all be controlled from our touch strip [Music] so there's track number one and now we're going to record these so automation right and now let's add these effects [Music] half speeds engaged [Music] turn it off for when the beats filled in now we'll engage it again [Music] so this is creating even more mood to our beam bring it back out [Music] now let's bring it back in for the verse you can hear the darkness now across the verse bring it out brightens the track up so that's the principle of how we're recording automation with our touch strip so now i'm gonna go to cue link number two by hitting pad two and this is our piano track automation's right in and now we can engage half speed [Music] take it off [Music] so this is creating so much mood now to our track [Music] so let's stop that and now we're going to jump to q link number three and this is going to allow us to do tape stop there you go so all we need to do is press automation right [Music] and add these in number four do the same on the piano [Music] now we go to number five which is our lead [Music] [Music] so now that we've recorded all of our effects as automation we can turn automation to read and then we can simply play our track back and we have all of our automation [Music] now you can apply all of these techniques over your own tracks your own beats and add a whole new level of performance and production to your beats now on our final lesson i'm going to walk you through the process of how you can export your track or your stems out of npc keys to have it mastered or send it to a singer-songwriter see you on the next lesson [Music] hi there and welcome to the final episode in our mpc keys production master class so i'm going to show you how you can now export your finished track as an mp3 or a wav file or even bounce it out as stems for external mixing or mastering so we're going to press our main menu and we're going to go to save and here we're going to press audio mix down and here we can select all of our different file types so we're going to bounce this as a stereo out of outputs one and two as a wav file aif mp3 and then you can select your bit rate and then you just simply press export now if we want to create stems we can just select export programs we can select our file type so we could do wav file we can select our bit rate so maybe we do 32-bit float and now when we press export it's going to stem out all of our individual tracks so we can give the whole stem project a name so we could just call this master class stems press do it and then we can select a location like a usb stick or external drive and then it will export all of our files directly out of mpc key 61. now to learn more about mpc key 61 and the mpc workflow head over to the akaipro.com website to the npc academy thanks for watching this mpc production masterclass see you next time [Music] [Music] you

Channel: AkaiProVideo

Views: 106,857

Keywords: akai, akai pro, akai professional, akaipro.com, mpc key 61, music production, keyboard, synthesizer

Id: F4ziHAO8cIk

Length: 67min 2sec (4022 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 01 2022