Yamaha Montage and MPC One the Perfect Pair?

[Music] hello and welcome to the channel my name is derek and today i'm going to be showing you guys how i use my mpc one and my hardware keyboards together and the reason why i'm making this video is because i think a lot of times when people think about the npc one they simply think about it for beat makers you know someone making a beat and in reality if you go online and you look at how the npc is being used the overwhelming majority of the videos are showing somebody actually just making some sort of a beat or you know sampling something from a record or music or something like that and then they're chopping those samples up they're applying them to the pads and they're making a beat that way and of course the mpc excels at that kind of thing it's a great sampler and so on and so forth but one of the things that i think is often overlooked is the actual sequencer inside of this unit if you are looking to maybe get away from your laptop and using a daw and stuff like that i think the mpc one could be a great option for you or any of the npcs really because they all have the same operating system the sequencer inside the mpc is very very powerful and i just want to show you guys um how you can use it in some ways that a lot of people aren't necessarily using it that way now of course there are some people of course i've seen it but this is the way i use the mpc one i just want to show you guys because the the sequencer in my mpc i feel is more powerful and more intuitive than the sequencers that are in my hardware keyboards so there's a lot of limitations on the hardware sequencer in the um the montage there are a lot of limitations or um i wish i should say the core kronos is not as intuitive uh as far as using the sequencer it's very powerful um but i still like the mpc sequencer better and i'll explain a little bit more as we get further into it i've got a korig m50 the mpc is better than the korg m50 i have a what else i have laying around here i have a modi x uh the sequencer is the same as the montage the the mpc one blows that out of the water um i've got a mc707 the mpc1 blows that out of the water so i just want to just show you guys um how i use it now when i say blows out of the water i'm talking about specifically for my workflow and what i'm going to be doing today so let's go ahead and let's start using the npc let's record something here i'm going to um first thing i need to select is my bpm on my mpc i've got an empty project here set up and a project is made up of us of sequences tracks and programs so every single project can have up to 128 sequences uh per project and you can have 128 midi tracks per project as well so um let's go ahead and let's get something cool i'm just going to type in my bpm here i'm just going to tap this button and we're going to make it a 90 uh bpm and just say do it now that's set up for 90 and i'm going to set up uh this is the beginning it's just going to be a four bar loop now you can record linear in a linear fashion if you want to in the npc because some people think well it's just a pattern based situation but you can actually record in a linear fashion so for instance uh if i click on the bars here and just tap this button i can go all the way up to 990 bars uh if i wanted to so um and i could just turn the loop this by hitting this you turn the loop off so it won't actually loop so i could have a sequence that literally goes for 999 measures uh if i wanted to you know at 120 bpm that's uh what a 33 minute song so um yes you can definitely record in a linear fashion if you want to but for now we're just going to do we're going to be doing four because i do want it to actually loop but you don't have to if i was just you know recording a jazz piece or something like that and i just wanted to play straight through i could actually do that if i wanted to and i saw a complaint about the the new phantom by roland uh that come out i saw it on the on a forum or a facebook online group and somebody was complaining about the sequencer because the sequencer is a pattern sequencer and it limits you to 32 bar loops you can't do anything longer than that and you can't record in a linear fashion and somebody said on the forum or on the group you know i'm tired of this npc style of workflow i would just want a regular linear sequencer well in the mpc you actually can record in a linear fashion um so it doesn't limit you to 32 bars or 64 bars or 100 bars the montage limits you to i think it's 256 bars before it loops and then you have a then it's going to loop automatically um but again you get 256 bars you can get a whole song in as long as it's not longer than 256 measures and it never loops so you can record in a linear fashion in both of these boards but i mean in both of these units but this specifically you know you you're just shy of a thousand measures so you can certainly record linearly but we're going to do just uh four bars right now and i'm going to come over here and i'm going to hit midi because i wanted to set up a midi track because i'm going to be using this to trigger the the montage and so i'm just going to set up for number one and right now i have a i have a guitar set up on the montage uh but i'm actually going to use the arpeggiator for the first track so let me come over here and select the guitar track i'm going to hit edit and then i'm going to come down to where it says arpeggio and i'm going to go into individual and i'm going to select in our pages pager here category search i'm going through this kind of fast i know it it's not really a tutorial i'm just kind of showing you guys my workflow and we're just going to pick a modern and let's um let's look at let's listen to some of these here okay [Music] perfect that'll work hit enter escape now that's what we're going to record so i'm going to go over here 90 bpm uh just hit my tempo here i'm not sure why it's not synced but i want to make this 90 as well done exit [Music] perfect and now we're just going to hit record and go now i'm just going to turn it on down here so i can hear it all right so the reason why it sounds like that because i have the actual i have the time correction on on the npc so i've got to turn the time correction off so it doesn't so it doesn't do that um so i'm just going to hit undo and so now that um there's no longer in there i'm going to come to my time correction and just turn it off all right and then we're going to do it again um [Music] all right perfect but the thing i want to explain one thing i want to talk about here is just the undo you get multiple levels of undo and i know for you know legacy npc users that's probably not a big deal but for um you know people coming from a hardware you know keyboard the montage has one level of undo and that's it uh so you can't undo multiple levels back and for a workflow that becomes really important uh if you can't uh if you can only do undo one time and it's the same with the core chronos the core chronos you can only undo it one time it's the same with the core again 50. you can only do it one time it's the same with the it was the same with the triton extreme you can only do one level of undo this has multiple levels undo so that's to you know that's kind of a big deal it really helps your workflow and the mc707 made by roland doesn't even have an undo button so there's a reason why i like using nbc all right so i got the time correction turned off let's start let's do it again all right now let's turn this on so we can hear it [Music] all right perfect that's what i wanted so now i'm gonna um just come over here on my montage i'm going to pick a different sound um i think we're going to go with drums next so i'm just going to select the drum kit here and hit enter i'm going to turn off the keyboards on both of them excellent and we're going to go to track number two and i'm going to select uh midi channel number two and with me so bd channel number two is my drums here let me just turn that keyboard off perfect and now i'm ready to record some drones but what what i can also do just to stay organized i can come over here and i can i can actually name the track so we're going to call this drums do it perfect i'm going to come over here and just stay organized and i'm going to call this guitar alright so that's guitar and i've got drums track number two let's get the drones [Music] recorded [Music] perfect good enough for what we're doing here um now we're just going to select another track uh huh we're just gonna stick another track there and let's go to uh two what are we gonna record now uh we'll do a base um so i come over here and i'll select an electric base um perfect hit enter turn off the arp and i'm going to turn this to track number or midi channel number three i could name it here and we're going to call this base do it so now we got the base perfect let's record let's go one two three four [Music] messed up so we can just record again two three [Music] four all right let's listen to it let's listen to it shall we [Music] all right so we have that recorded um now but one of the things i really like about uh using the npc is i can go over here to the grid view just double click there and i can see all of my on the piano roll i can see all of my notes and everything that i've recorded and i can make some edits and changes and stuff like that so this is really cool now this is something that you do not get on the montage there is no piano roll on the korg uh chronos there is no piano roll on the cork m50 uh there is no piano roll on the um on the roland mc707 there is a piano roll on the uh the phantom the roland phantom now that's out however the role of phantom does limit you to a 32 track loop so a 32 bar loop so anyway let's take a look at here [Music] so right in here i have an extra note right there that i don't actually want so i just come in i'm just going to select this note i'm going to select it like this and then i can just oops don't need to select it let's just get rid of it hit delete now that node's gone [Music] all right good enough for what we're doing so love this piano roll um i absolutely love it love the pinch to zoom functionality so on and so forth um just makes it easy to do a lot of edits um there is no like i said there's no piano roll in the um in the uh chronos uh you can uh you know change your events and stuff like that you can edit your events but it's in a list so it makes it really hard to do certain things so anyway let's go back to my control here uh [Music] perfect we're gonna do track number four now and i'm gonna make that a brass i'm gonna come over here to my montage and i'm gonna select a brass which brass do i want [Music] we just hit okay turn that off let's turn that off turn that off [Applause] and we can go select the brass that we want i can come over here click on ensemble ah that'll work for what we're doing now just pick that one turn the arp off turn the keyboard off we got four ready to go and let's do it one two three four ah kind of messed up we're gonna undo it do it again two three four [Music] now let's turn this on so we can hear it [Music] so all right that part is sloppy so we're just going to erase it go to the grid grid view and there it is those little triplets there and we're just gonna pitch to zoom make it bigger this is so nice and boom all right then we're gonna just erase all of those perfect now we go back here all right now we need to go ahead do a little bit more racing boom come over here i'm just going to finish this little go down there i think that's uh yep that's it there so we're just gonna select these three hit the eraser tool select one boom now they should be gone [Music] now we're gonna just do an overdub and record again and just record that part perfect we're gonna do it again another overdub [Music] now we got that overdub let's roll it up [Music] all right [Music] all right let's go back into my grid view here and there's just some notes [Music] so these notes here are a little bit too quiet for me so i didn't do it quite right let's see so we're gonna all right so i'm just going to zoom in here and we're just going to make these a little louder and um these notes here and i can just go over here and i can just you know select them like so did i get them selected now let's try again here we'll just select those and then i can hit velocity and i'm going to turn those up and see when they turn red i know they're you know much higher velocity there and select these as well we'll turn these up just these just turn that one up velocity and uh turn that one up as well now let's go take a look alright [Music] just one more of these notes more of these things here let's actually just get bigger because i really want to do this one that's yellow the one that's yellow is the one i really want to adjust and some velocity and then we just turn it up [Music] all right now we're gonna do another one here just come over to my main i'm gonna go over to track number five and i'm going to turn track number five to midi channel number five gonna come over here for five and we are going to select some sort of a uh hmm some sort of a piano or something hmm what'll it be that's a lot of delay there [Music] now that'll work all right let's go uh let's go ahead and select that one you're just gonna hit enter make sure the keyboard is off [Music] and i'm just going to label it um name it yeah we'll just call it keys k e y s do it [Music] and let's record here we go [Music] oh i'll do that over again boom such perfectionist turn this on so we can hear it [Music] [Music] all right good [Music] so that will suffice as my uh intro there it will suffice as an intro and i can just come over here to my sequence come over here and we could actually call it intro and do it so now that's my intro that's in there and now i can come to my sequence number two uh we're going to just turn this here we're just going to do this to 90. i could have set a master so i didn't have to do this do it so now it's 90 and my next sequence i'm going to make it a 12 bar loop and we're going to record track number five and i'm going to name it keys k e y s just to be organized and now let's record this [Music] don't like it try it again it's not going to pick up that pick-up note let's try it again [Music] okay now let's just listen to it here got it on the wrong midi channel we'll just change it to five perfect um now let's go grab some drums drums is gonna be number two once again i'm gonna name it just to stay organized of course you could do all this later pick your own workflow drums pick drums [Music] all right now uh and we're gonna do midi channel number two and let's get to [Music] recording [Music] all right let's listen to a little bit [Music] oh that'll work for now um didn't really like that feel and stuff at the end but uh we're just doing something really quick here so what i'm going to do now is i actually want to come over here and i'm going to go to i'm going to choose number 17 track number 17 but i'm actually going to set it to midi channel number two so i'm going to use the same midi channel the same drum channel and we're going to call this here um we're going to call this percussion all right so we're going to call this percussion and we're still going to record number three but now i can actually i mean we're still going to record track number two midi channel number two so we're still gonna be on the same drum channel but we actually have a different track for it so let's go let's record some percussion here one two three four [Music] all right so now we got now we have the percussion on triggering midi track number two or midi channel number two but if i come in here into the grid right and look at it the only thing that it has let's let's come back here and let's just solo it and come to my grid so i literally have a separate track playing midi channel number two so everything can be split up that way so if i wanted to just turn up just the tambourine um i can do that using this specific track because this is going to be track number 17. i can get 128 tracks in per sequence 128 tracks and i can do it using you know the 16 midi channels 16 mini channels on the um on the montage so the reason why that's such a big deal is because like if if i was recording just using if i was recording just using um the montage using the sequencer in the monster in the montage um i really couldn't do that i would have to use up another track you only get 16 tracks you get 16 tracks 16 midi channels this gives you 128 tracks so that makes a big you know a big difference so if i wanted to just just modify this or change this that's great um one of the things um the advantage of this is has 128 tracks that you can use versus just 16 even though i would have to use the same 16 sounds if that makes sense so anyway but it gives me versatility because i can literally split up the drum track if i wanted to i could have uh one track be the bass drum one track be the snare one track be the you know and i could you know do all my editing and stuff of just the snare of just the bass drum of just in the npc if i wanted to do it that way didn't do it that way this time but i did want to just show that let's go back to my main turn the solo wall [Music] all right so let's continue now let me add some strings or something so i'm going to come over here to number six and uh i'm going to choose a string oh ballot strings yeah let's do ballast strings perfect i'm going to turn this keyboard off here and i'm going to come over here and we're going to come to number six i'm going to change it to midi track number six and we're just going to name this strings s t r i n g s that's how you spell strings [Music] now what i want to do [Music] okay maybe not strings let's choose a different instrument no big deal hit category search and let's come in over to hmm pads let me see analog pad perfect i'm gonna turn it down though and turn down this pad let's see what's inside [Music] that'll work something simple let's go one two three four [Music] all right perfect [Music] just a little something underneath there that'll work for what we're doing and uh i gotta add my base uh so we're gonna do go to number three here and i'm gonna hit base bass again do it and we're going to uh select my base on my montage and we're going to make it channel number three here [Music] and let's record the base one two three four [Music] all right [Music] all right so i can just name this sequence here and we'll just name this verse v-e-r-s-e boom so now that's gonna be verse you know just for now that's cool so now i have my sequence number one [Music] and sequence number two [Music] all right all right perfect so now i'm just going to go to another sequence here we'll do sequence number three and i'm going to start with um track number five which is going to be my keyboard mini channel number five and we're just gonna come over here i'm gonna hit 90 boom boom boom for that and we're going to make this 12 bars as well [Music] all right let's go score one two three four [Music] [Applause] do all right that'll be good enough for now and uh okay cool so that's recorded um let's go to my drums real quick i'm just gonna select uh track number two we're going to make this i probably should name that piano or keys key ey that's just showing you the real deal workflow here and uh we're going to do drums so we're going to number two and i am going to name that as well 3 um s do it and we're gonna train it to track number two [Music] now let's record the drums oh messed up try it again [Music] all right cool that's good enough [Music] [Music] all right excellent let's go to number three let's record my base gonna name it base once again and let's record the base one two three four [Music] can't believe i messed up on that uh let's try that again let's actually turn this to track number three let's go one two three four i don't know what uh what the problem is one two here we go got messed up here one two three four [Music] [Music] [Music] all right [Music] all right give me some horns let's go brass we're gonna put the brass on number four again and we're just gonna name it brass r-a-s-s boom [Music] and this is number four midi track number four [Music] all right let's go one two three four [Music] didn't like it too much sustained pedal [Music] let's see what see what it sounds like [Music] all right so um honestly i don't really like it but um but we're just doing kind of a demo here to show it so we're just going to call this a bridge right b r i d g e boom do it now what i can do is then come into what's called next sequence and i have all of my sequences uh right here so this is my first sequence my intro my verse and my bridge or my intro verse and bridge and i can trigger them by hitting these pads so this is what i actually do for live performance so here's intro [Music] and if i just leave it just like ableton live it's just going to loop over and over again but as soon as i hit the next pad it will go to the next pad well it will go to the next pad when that sequence is over [Music] i can hit early [Music] all right perfect so now let me come over here and let me just grab let me just um i'm just going to bring this all the way over to hmm didn't matter number 20. that's good all right now and i'm going to just pick a something here [Music] and i really don't like that delay on that one let's see acoustic piano pop gram i could always take the delay off i know how so i'll select something i want to play and um we'll do seven [Music] try to keep it on all right and we're just gonna turn it down a little bit [Music] and we're just gonna go to my next sequence here and this is how i do my live play here we go [Music] i can let the intro play a little bit mother there's too many of you crying brother brother there's far too many of you dying you know we've got to find a way to bring some love in here [Music] [Music] you see war is not the answer for only love can conquer hate you know we've got to find a way [Music] don't punish me with brutality talk to me so you can see what's going on what's going on what's going on what's going on [Music] so that's how i do my life playing and i can just switch to my songs as uh the way i want to um i could always uh when a song is playing i can hit next bar i can hit the next sequence if i want to it hit next bar and it'll go over faster see watch here we go [Music] [Music] that goes to the bridge hit next bar [Music] so if i needed to skip ahead faster i could i don't have to wait for the sequences to go all the way through but when i'm performing and singing whatnot when i put in my sequences i do them with that in mind i know that um you know i do it with the phrases in mind knowing so i can just hit the pads and don't really have to hit uh next bar very often [Music] so those horns and stuff are too loud to me is you know nothing is mixed and you know i would actually go in if i was really doing it i would go into the grid uh go into my grid view and i would be correcting a bunch of stuff and changing stuff and re-recording some stuff but i just wanted to make a quick demo of how i how i work it now here's the deal let's go back to that next sequence so i could have you know this here right so i have three three different things set up here on the pads literally you could have 128 sequences um you could have 128 of them in here if you want to so it's 128 different sequences i can do so this would actually be named you know uh what's going on intro uh what's going on verse what's going on bridge and i would you know put them all in there then i put my next songs in you know what i mean and i would just go through my performance this way now let's say each song had you know eight different um eight different uh sequences in it you know what is that uh 16 different songs in one set that you could have loaded all at one time and one of the limitations of the mpc is only has two gigabytes worth of um the nbc only has two gigabytes worth of ram and so if you use all the sounds in the mpc and you're loading a bunch of samples and stuff like that uh you start running out of ram it's hard to get in 16 songs for performance all loaded up at once but because i'm not you know i'm not actually loading up any samples but all the sound generation is coming from my keyboard i can use the midi the sequencer from here and i can use the tone generator from here and so i'm not then limited to that you know that two gigabytes and i could just set it i could just set it up by using this as a tone generator and i would name this you know what's going on as a performance and i would bring this performance up and when that when it came time to play and sing that's what i would do and i would just you know go through all of my different you know sequences all the way up to 128. um let's go back over here and let's go back to uh my sequence here i can come over here i can actually save uh my sequences and that's what i do see right here it says save current sequence so i can actually save you know so you save this bridge but it'd be a what's going on bridge and save this you know it'll be what's going on verse and what's going on intro and i could save these sequences and before a show i actually go in um and i load all of my sequences into a into a project uh in the order that i'm gonna do the songs and then i have them in my next sequence and all i have to do is trigger these pads and it goes where i want it to go and if i don't hit another pad it just loops around just like an ableton live that way i can you keep my laptop at home and use uh just my mpc now one other quick thing i want to show you you know because we've been just using the the keyboard here but if i want to you know track 10 is unused track 9 is unused uh we'll just go to track number 16 17 18. we'll just go to track number 18. now if i want to i don't have to use the midi track and come over here and i can actually then hit my browse button and i can search different things that i want to use in the npc [Music] so suppose i wanted to load that up so now that's loaded up to track 18. so if i wanted to let's let's go here and one two three four [Music] now of course i would never really do that musically but what i'm saying is is you can use the samples in here in conjunction with your hardware as well but i don't have to do all the heavy lifting in the mpc so i can just load a few samples and normally what i do is if i have some vocal background tracks or something like that that i want to do that you know come in at certain parts of the song or whatever i would just load a few small you know clips of you know some background vocals or something like that that doesn't take up a whole lot of ram and um and i will use that with the mpc in conjunction with this so i have my audio samples that i can use and audio that i can record plus all the midi stuff in my keyboards so i get the best of both worlds i get all the editing and all the you know complexity the grid the pinch to zoom and all that kind of stuff the multiple levels of undo and so on and so forth um you can do like note repeat and stuff um even with this let's see let's go to go to my drums here i can do this uh let's go here uh drums i can use [Music] you know the note repeat and stuff from the npc using um using my keyboard so i can take advantage of this and take advantage of this all the sounds and stuff in here i can take advantage of this so that i can literally load up an entire show an entire set and be ready to go and i can just hit the pads and the thing i love about these pads is they're big so uh you know when you're playing live and you need to hit them while you're singing it's really easy to do so i know this video was long but i just wanted to show you the workflow that i use when it comes to the npc when it comes to the montage or the chronos or whatever it is that i'm using and this is how i use my uh my mpc one in life performance i don't just use it to trigger some you know simple like drum tracks and stuff like that i actually use it for like all of my backing tracks and stuff like that it just trigger the midi in my in my hardware um keyboards and the cool thing about it is is um the cool thing about it is when i have a bunch of different sequences and stuff loaded up and i come in here and look at my usage i'm not using hardly any ram because there's no samples loaded and just you know triggering you know having midi data in here uses virtually no no space at all in the ram and so i can use that what's left over from my ram for like little small backing tracks and little small audio stuff like that and i never have to worry about running out of space so anyway i thank you so much for sticking with me this long if you have if you like in-depth videos like this and tutorials and reviews and stuff like that on gear i strongly suggest that you like this um that you like this video and subscribe to my channel because i am always uploading new stuff thank you guys once again and i will see you guys on the next video

Channel: Darrick Keels

Views: 13,863

Rating: 4.8662953 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: IvzTEkuOnVQ

Length: 59min 44sec (3584 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 30 2021