Technical questions for the MPC2000xl and the MPC2000
By Dust Bunny Sun Mar 14, 2004 6:15 am
I have a sample of a piano riff and I want to assign it to two differant pads then go into program and pitch one down to about -30 and the other down to -20 then lay them out in a 8 bar sequence but how do I get them to fit since they are at 2 differant speeds. The original samples tempo is 170.3 I have 2kXL,eb16,8 outs and sound forge. Any aid & assist would be appreciated :lol: Gimme some details I'm kinda slow wit this stuff. PEACE
Last edited by Dust Bunny on Sun Mar 14, 2004 3:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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By aoism Sun Mar 14, 2004 8:42 am
If you have a comp (which you prob do since you posting) I'd suggest just popping your sample into soundforge and strectching it there. By default when you chance the pitch of any sample on the MPC, the duration changes with it. You can use the timestretch on the MPC but you'd have to know the percentage difference in the source duration and target duration, which could take some time to tweak. There is also the BPM function, in the time stretch window .. it lets you stretch a sample using tempos and not percentages. In the end its probably quicker to just use soundforge :)

ps, a quick little math formula to determine duration percent differences is:
percent of difference = target duration / source duration

so if your original sample is 170.3 and you're goin for 180
180 / 170.3 = 1.0569
which would be 105.69%

From what I remember, the trouble with the time stretch on the MPC is that you can only get 2 decimal places out of the adjustment percentage. So your end result will not be completely accurate.

170.3 * 1.0569 = 179.99007

You're losing .01 in the duration. It may seem like a small amount, but its nearly guaranteed to give you looping problems on medium length samples (like anything more than 4 or 5 seconds). If this formula is applied to a 5 minute, 15 second track, you lose nearly 4 seconds of the track! Jeesh.

Hope this helps :)

bk