I’m receiving an MPC Live II in the mail today. Any tips or resources on getting started?
EDIT: Just made a first attempt at a tune: https://soundcloud.com/thomasbiesaart/learning-wav/s-QW3gkTQgRJM
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The MPC Bible is one of the most helpful ones. It’s well worth the cost and he keeps it updated with the newest firmware features. On it’s 18th revision.
+1 for the bible. This helped me immensly to wrap my head around the whole MPC workflow and possibilities. Very well structured learning ressource with all the project examples.
Thanks for the tip! I will take a look
don’t get too caught up adding FX and polish until you have a pretty sufficient song written. It is easy to write a dope 4 bar loop and start messing with FX and whatnot, lose track of what you were doing and ultimately lose interest. The plague of this machine is how easy it is to churn out 4 bar loops and how hard it is to finish a track. Sketch the ENTIRE track first, THEN polish and you will be a lot better off. Look into song mode tutorials.
Sounds like good advice, thanks.
How’s it going so far? It definitely takes some time to get the ground under your feet when you are new but I’m sure you are getting the hang of it.
I feel like I came off scary when I talked about song mode stuff, obviously there is nothing wrong with banging out a bunch of loops while you get the workflow figured out.
I haven’t used an MPC in a few years but I’m sure I can answer some questions if you have any
Nah you’re good. A little kick in the ass (a Dutch saying) to get going is good.
My first impressions are mixed. I feel like the synth plugins are a little lacking compared to ableton world, but the ui is much better. I’m not that much into the sample chopping thing.
I like the idea of arranging in multiple sequences and then exporting to a single sequence before finishing a track by adding transitions and mixing. But the downside is that I get bored when I have to do all the nitty gritty in the end. I am more used to mixing and adding earcandy as I go in Ableton. But that’s hard in MCP due to the lack of a loop brace on the sequence. (I kept having to tap a tiny spot on the timeline to go back to the start of the section).
So it’s all just a matter of getting used to it.
In the end, it’s probably going to be an MPC vs Push decision because they are too expensive to keep both of them.
Its totally valid to basically build all thr building blocks on the MPC, export stems and finish up in a DAW.
I print and bind the manual for any hardware I buy. Whilst undoubtedly I can discover a lot of the functionality just from experience, there’s usually some stuff that you discover from the manual that just isn’t the sort of thing you find out by chance 😊
Never tried the MPC stuff though (beyond a day with the Force before it had disk streaming), so can’t give any specific recommendations…
My first evening with MPC has been promising. I’ve been able to create a nice loop and get to know the workflow. Still unsure about finishing entire tracks but I think that’ll just be a matter of practice.
I was worried that I had to get into the whole sample chopping thing but even with just the built in synths I think I’ll be able to build something awesome.
Resampling is easy, so building sfx using the synths and sample layers has been a breeze.
I don’t get the point of separating programs from tracks yet but maybe I’ll figure it out. So far I’ve just been manually mapping them one to one.
One reason I make a lot of programs per track is for mixing purposes later.
When you do an export of your song as stems it’s uses programs as the grouping for each stereo track rendered.
So if you load an entire pre-made kit then when you export each drum sound ends up in the same 2-channel file. I prefer each being in separate tracks so as I build my drum kits I make a new program for each drum (kick, snare, hat, etc). Hats usually have 3-4 different samples so those all go I to the same project. Kicks might have 2 or 3 as well.
This also makes it more fun to jam out on using program muting. You can build you drum part up on the fly, process the groups differently, replace them with less effort.
Wait, then I think I misunderstood programs and tracks. As far as I can see I can only have 1 program in a track right?
Oh man…my bad. I don’t know why I was thinking you were talking about something else. Now I see what you’re saying. You probably do understand it and I’m over here just making it more confusing.
1 program in a track right?
Yep, one active program at a time per track. It does come in handy like when you can’t decide which instrument you want playing a certain part. Just set up some options and then switch through them for comparison. Also, it’s a nice ability for when you want to send the MIDI data of a track to an external device. For the most part though I’m keeping it 1:1.
Go rip some old disco and go crazy? At least that was a successful way to onboard my MPC. Kept bumping into roadblocks, watched some youtube tutorial, continue, etc. Rince and repeat.
Fair enough, in other words “Just do it and figure it out” :)
Will do.
I didn’t see anyone recommend TubeDigga yet.
The videos on chopping samples might be the ones to start with. Once you learn how to do it and get good results it becomes addicting.
