Thoughts on the MPC Live II // Better than I thought! and Listening To Some Music I've Made With It.

[Music] this video is sponsored by skillshare yo i just caught this in action look at this your mpc recovered from an internal error i wanted to start this off by showing you this awesome program i made let me plug in my headphones real quick so i can figure out what's going on so i wanted to start this off by loading this program but i don't know what the heck just happened check this out browser places mpc live i'll go to my samples sample packs vinyl live two oh easy there [Music] so that's the sample and i want to load the program but check this out oh damn it see look the npc live now knows i'm recording so with that being said it just freaked out on me there are still some weird things about this and i kind of wanted to talk today about how i've been getting along with the mpc live too i finally saw the light or pulled the trigger or bit the bullet whatever you want to call it and got alive too and quick summary i like it a lot but there's a few things that it does that are that's really weird and this is coming from an old school npc user you know for example this npc here came out and uh just kidding this never came out i wish this this is like pocket operator size uh thank you my friend for uh getting me this is one of my favorite things ever next to this little guy and yeah just to some weird stuff but check out how beautiful this sound is real quick that i made off of this record i sampled earlier because i kind of been having this in this little setup by itself with the turntable and it's been amazing but check this out and what's crazy is when i sample this you can hear all those little crackles i actually was saying okay cool actually loaded okay see i'm still in the discovery phase of this npc live 2. it does a lot of really cool things so i kind of posted up on the youtube stories and asked what do you want to know about it some questions i wrote those down here first one being is the workflow slow it's not um but it can be this kind of ties in with another one where it's wondering where uh someone was wondering how this compares to the mpc one controls one thing i didn't know when i was first looking at this is that you can just hold down menu and select anything that pops up here so you don't have to say menu and then select this you get really used to it like i know menu here is my program my program edit right and what's even uh more fun is that all these little shift options down here like sampler is just a double tap so you get really really used to this and this kind of reminds me a lot of my mpc 1000 where i would just hold down i think it was shift or window and you would just select whatever you want to go to and it was super easy and then you go back to main and you're set so the workflow is pretty quick the touch screen is at times kind of weird like if i wanted to rename this um oh hit this guy here let's just say like if i say if i wanted to type country the way i would on like an iphone or a smartphone or an uh tablet or something i would say see country but see it misses letters once in a while so that kind of forces you to be like okay c o u n t r y it's like it kind of feels like you're um doing some touch screen thing setting up for like a credit card at macy's or something like that the screen is is better than the live if you haven't seen those videos man they i had a hard time with the live but the touch screen here is all right the workflow is pretty fast pretty quick again coming from an old school perspective i was able to pick this up and learn it really fast and i am still able to use this the way i use my classic npcs but there's just so much about this thing that just it makes me laugh and it surprises me constantly with how easy things are to do like for example chopping samples i just found today you can go into pad tap so when you're sampling something in you could just start tapping where you want the slices to be in a non-destructive manner you don't have to export them or you don't have to save them in a program this might not make any sense to you if you're not an npc user you don't have to say them in a program as separate samples it's still just one long sample with different slice points kind of eps style but it's it's amazing there's so many things about this that are amazing another thing somebody asked i don't know if this was a joke but they said have you tried using this to sequence any external gear how is it um i've only sequenced one thing and it's an npc yo it's incredible it used to be called the midi production center until what was it late 90s then eventually became the music production center it's it's still just as good what's cool is you have your midi tracks as well as your audio tracks so if i were to hide this here i can go to another track here and what is it going to be doing i can be doing some program stuff i could be doing midi stuff i could load plugins it's really fast really simple and really easy to understand i know that one of my absolute favorite youtubers marlo diggs or mpc head he talked about this new arming feature that has to happen i didn't even notice it because i got into this at the 2.10 update but he was saying in the older updates there was no arming button i have a link to that video down below it's really good if you want to go check it out he's uses npc's basically the exact same way i do because he comes from the 2000 and possibly even later npcs marlo if you're watching shout out to you homie i appreciate you a lot but he talked about how this kind of breaks up the way he's used to working so far i haven't noticed it messed me up at all but um yeah it's really good you just arm your track and externally sequence any kind of midi stuff with the five pin midi out and another thing people are asking how portable is this thing i started falling in love with push 2 and it was really really good but i just wanted portability so bad so i would say that this is way more portable than a push 2 because you don't need the laptop it's a bit more of a normal size because the push is just like a giant block weight wise i would say this one's a little heavier i wouldn't mind putting this in the backpack i wouldn't mind carrying it or getting like one of the analog cases or something like that and just kind of have this with itself the the speaker and the battery is why i got this and then i also realized that this one has wi-fi for splice versus the mpc one which doesn't have wi-fi but you can still connect to spice with the ethernet cable but i mean i'm not going to plug an ethernet cable into my you know you know what i'm not even going to say that because maybe i will but yeah i just knew i just wanted portability i wanted to chill on the couch make something there bring it over here and then start finishing it in live in in ableton live and that's exactly what this has been doing one of my favorite things about this is just a very similar way i was using my pc 4000 and push 2 is that i can just save programs so i'll just sit here and chop vinyl so like if i go and let's just say a new track program i'm gonna just load up a new sound these are okay so this is also something weird these samples got sampled and saved onto my sd card i'm not using an internal ssd where everyone's upgrading their things because if using the old npcs taught me anything you don't need a lot of space i was working with floppies i'm fine with 32 gigs 16 gigs that's more than enough but i know if you're doing crazy long sets sure you might want to get a bigger hard drive but listen to this or listen to this what the hell is that right that's not what the sample is if i were to load this and let's just say load it to here what the hell is that [Music] no clue but that's besides the point this thing does some funky stuff so if i go to sample edit this right i'm going to just take the end point down and i'm going to process this and just discard that so i don't need this so of course this has lazy chopping i can say manual and i can say right and then i can go back and edit these [Music] there's also zero point which is really nice so this will find the zero phase point in the wave that way there's no popping sound so say i like this chop right maybe i'll go to the program edit and pitch it all down um oh see this is something i also forget we'll go back to sample edit this is how i was doing things on the 4k not sure if there's an easier way to do this but i eventually just say shift i want to convert these slices into a new drum program using slices in non-destructive slice which is perfect do it now back in our main for our program i'll just select bell vinyl one ch so now it's now i'll go menu program edit and turn the pitch down [Music] right cool let's say i like this but i'm i got a dinner i got to go to or i'm late or i'm just not inspired but i like where this can go i can easily just say folder save at oh god folder and i want to uh save no no no no no see i'm still learning give me a second main pencil tool save current program and i can say bell vinyl uh no idea how that even got like that bell vinyl chop do it and we're going to want to save this i'm going to save this under my samples sample packs vinyl live 2 and i'll just save it here so boom i can return to this later i was doing this a lot on the push 2 just in case like later on i come up with some dope drums on here but i'm i'm not around any samples i can just pull up some samples that i've already chopped to save me some time it's very similar to kind of how andrew huang had that really good video where he talks about doing sound design separate from the making of music and that happens to me a lot on those synthesizers where i'll be jamming doing something cool and then i'm like all right let's get some cool stabs i'll go through some of the patches then i'm like oh let me design my own an hour passes by next thing you know i completely forgot what i was working on so being able to slice ahead of time and save those easily it's a big plus for me this is totally something you can do on basically all npcs even before this one but it's just so easy to do it on here a few more things someone asked if it's clunky it kinda is there are times where it is clunky like but here's the thing the clunkiness and the workflow will start to dissipate the more and more you learn to use this that is like anything when i first got the octatrack that was the clunkiest mess i have ever messed with two years into the octatrack i knew it better than i knew anything else and i was beyond fast on it and everything made perfect sense so the same goes with this the touchscreen again isn't the worst but it could i don't know if it could be better at this point i do wish i had like haptic feedback or something or was just a little more responsive or i don't know had swipe to text or something but at that point it's just like to just go buy an ipad especially for the price of this thing because it's pretty expensive i want to say it's like 1100 to 1200 bucks if you're not two down with the speaker or the or the um or you don't need the battery the mpc live no npc one great option especially used on reverb or the even just the mpc live the regular one not the two same thing it's still just as good force seems pretty cool but i haven't messed with that one another question or concern that i actually had that also came up as a question is the cpu usage so right now i have two programs loaded and i have no effects on this one two effects on this one both the programs are pitched down and i'm not even pressing play and i'm chilling at like ten to eleven percent why don't we press play it's broken oh okay so i have nothing actually playing so let's just say i have something going [Music] so where are we at 14 bro come on so 15. so this is what gets me a little worried about this thing uh an incredible artist and great friend of mine wajeed i'm not sure if you're familiar with his dirt tech rec uh record label actually damn i just took it into the kitchen i have this really dope tote bag from them i've linked to his stuff down below he played moogfest with an npc live the original one and he had to use two to crossfade between because he couldn't fit everything all the samples and stuff on one project and cpu usage actually became a concern but again this was like 2018 2019 and this was on the npc live not the live two might be different with here i'm not exactly sure if you can stream samples directly from the hard drive and if that would be better or worse for the cpu but i mean look a second ago we were just we started spiking up to you know 14 and i have one track going so my concern with the cpu usage on this thing was doing a live set like an hour long live set maybe i'll try and set this up to do a live set throw some programs in here and see what i can do that's something you should you're interested in let me know but um yeah the cpus seems to get kind of scary like if we were to go and say track three let's do a plug-in of um i don't know tube synth [Music] oh god that's so awesome [Music] okay ignore this let's see where our cpu is now 28 oh man that is scary i wonder what it would actually take to ruin this thing memories at one percent cpu is really high that's the one thing that concerns me have you had any issues with your mpc doing cpu issues because by default with even nothing loaded it still kind of does random things here and there um but yeah i mean are you dealing with any of these issues i know marlo talking to you acura beats back at it again with me pointing at the camera asking you a question or any of the other awesome npc live um av av i hope i'm saying that right but i have them all linked in a comment down below go tell them i said what's up go check out their videos but i'm actually asking you y'all doing all right with the cpu usage is that actually becoming an issue on your end um but i guess this kind of comes down to the final question which is do i like it am i going to sell this is there a reason why i bought the retro version and this is coming from an old school um point of view but i guess really quick before i get into that i want to give a quick shout out to today's video sponsor who helped make this channel keep on going and let me continue to do what i love to do and that's going to be skillshare so in case you're not familiar skillshare is an online learning community for creatives whether you're a beginner a pro a dabbler or a master there will be a class for you for example a class i recently came across that i'm stoked to check out is music production for songwriters in ableton live for beginners by eve horn have you been wondering how to get into music production but you have no idea where to start i've been in the industry now for over 20 years i've toured internationally and collaborated now you're probably wondering why the hell am i taking a beginner class and this is because one of my favorite things about working with others in live or on an npc or in anything is that you always learn something new and taking this class with eve is exactly that it's subtle tips here and there little tricks here and there that kind of help out my experienced mind so in case you're new to ableton live or used to it and want to be inspired i'd suggest checking out eve's class luckily since skillshare is sponsoring this video the first 1 000 of my subscribers to click the link in the description below we'll get a free trial of the premium membership so you can explore your creativity all right let's get back into it so um yeah i like this a lot i like this a whole lot i don't think i'm gonna be selling it i love its portability i love the ease of use it's very convoluted at times but you can just stay focused and use it the way that you want to use your old school npcs even with something like this if i were to go and mute track three right so we've got this crazy thing going i'd be like okay cool let me go to track four and like load up some drums or something we'll get out of uh this mode here menu browser i'll go back uh i'll go back again i'll just go to uh pearl drum x samples processed kicks sure and i'll load that here right so these actually these uh q link buttons here are really good so you can actually use these to change a lot of the settings so you don't have to really rely on the touch screen 100 i mean it does it does help a lot for example right now i'm trying to change the bars and i don't even know where to go there it is four bars i'll just set it to two you know we'll just play this in and [Music] right time control double tap to turn it off double tap to turn it on kind of let you know where you're at you got your note repeats i mean it's it's everything you want in an npc and way too much more there's a million different ways to do the same thing on this thing which can get confusing at times but at the same time it's one of those things where you're always wondering am i doing this right is there a better way that i could be doing this and then you start going down the rabbit hole of trying to learn how to use it as opposed to just doing it the way that you know how to do it i'd say for the first beginning part of this i'm just kind of focusing on the way i used to use my npcs and i haven't come across anything that i was able to do on my old npcs that i cannot do on here so yeah with that being said i really do like this thing a lot i love the speaker i love the battery lasts a long time workflows great and yeah it's awesome i i really like it a lot and it's constantly surprising me and constantly cracking me up so with how easy it is to do things but this thing's in a completely different league and the price is pretty expensive for what you're saving up for it's getting down to the point where do you buy um a used macbook with a copy of ableton live or do you buy an npc live mark ii right unless you start looking at the mpc lives which on the used market are great and they are just as good as this or you get a 1000 with a lot less features a little bit of a slower workflow but you can still do a lot of what this is doing especially if you're trying to keep it simple so um yeah you want to see some more stuff on this i'm down i'm done to bring it out i've been trying to produce a lot on here actually you know what i'm gonna leave it here i'm gonna i'm gonna load up a track that i was working on i hope it sounds okay it could be very embarrassing on my part but that's all right you know we're all friends here um yeah and oh i guess i should have said this at the very beginning no akai is not paying me or sent me this i bought this with my own hard-earned money that's how much i wanted to try this thing and it's not a sponsored video at all skillshare is a sponsor i appreciate them akai not sponsoring this and they will never sponsor one of my videos so um yeah with that out of the way i appreciate you love you hope to see you again next week and until then you already know the drill share the love share the knowledge knowledge is power peace all right let's see where we at i go back back back back back back back tracks 20 21 um what is this load okay i hope this is okay please be all right cool so this is actually a decent example so on on my old school way i used to do things my old school way that sounds so dumb um i have a low pass filter here right i still don't know how to assign this to q links in the main section i'm close i know if i hold down q link i can go to q link edit and select select these to do something right q links are fixed to controls pad parameter but then all that changes so it's just like uh how do i wait wait program insert parameter frequency was that it okay cool never mind i'm fine everything's great because on the 4k and like the x you have a ton of q knobs right on the 4k you have q knobs that don't do anything until you basically assign them and then you've got the slider on the 3k this little slider right there again until you assign it don't really do anything so i was trying to get these to do stuff but they were always tied to like where you are in the sequence and what's going on there's so much to talk about and learn about this thing what is this track let's see what this track does um i'm getting carried away at this point i just want to make some music [Music] okay see this one i did it my old school way where i go menu program edit and i select all pads and if i go to the filter i'm now editing the filter cut off for all pads i don't use the insert this to me allows me to go and add some depth right so i can do this for all pads at once i got the cue right here [Music] so this is kind of the way i prefer to work and i don't know if i can i'm pretty sure you can actually what's crazy about this is you can actually us uh automate the selection of everything so check this out we're recording right i can see i mean why would you ever do this actually there was one track i did where this was super tight [Music] and all that gets recorded so watch this what what dude i did this oh did i do it here is that where i did it okay here's the thing i swear i did this i'm not lying this thing's crazy it does too many things and you can easily get lost and not know how to get back and you're just going to be full adonis no way back and uh you'll be lost but you'll be having some fun so i guess one more track and we'll call it a day oh was it oh it was this track so this here i'll prove you wrong right now this is the track that i did that weird pitch thing [Music] please be this track pad mute [Music] there you hear that [Music] picture i recorded that as automation of me just moving the knob but i don't know how to do that again but it's doable anyway uh yeah i'm gonna leave it at this i've been talking too long i appreciate you again and yeah peace [Music] out [Music] you

Channel: Ricky Tinez

Views: 66,037

Keywords: ricky tinez, enrique martinez, ricky tines, sweetwater, akai mpc live 2 retro, akai mpc live 2 tutorial, akai mpc live 2 beat making, mpc live ii retro, mpc live ii review, mpc live ii tutorial, mpc live vs mpc one, mpc live vs mpc live 2, mpc live vs maschine mk3, mpc live 2 pros and cons, mpc live problems, mpc live buggy, mpc live 2xl, marlow digs, mpc head, mpc live 2 review reddit, akai mpc live 2 retro review, mpc live 2 retro review

Id: NQqFkEz9yTE

Length: 27min 38sec (1658 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 07 2021