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ByYa Man Bo$$ Sun Apr 17, 2005 5:23 pm
I've been making beats soley on my MPC2000 for the past year or so now, but I came into a wealth of programs and now I want to start sequencing my beats using Ableton Live as the master but I'm having a hard time figuring out how to slave my mpc to it. Any help will be appreciated, thanks.


P.S. Is live recommended for putting beats together or should I go with something like Cubase?

By CedricMeister Mon Apr 18, 2005 7:24 pm
go to preferences midi/sync output and then choose the MPC that way the Mpc will slave to live


I like live its ease of use and real time capabilities are great esp for live performance or jamin aroung and the cool thing about it i think is that you can jam with tons of samples, soft synths, your mpc etc rec. it all and then start aranging it properly reedit parts add midi or fx or what ever the F*** you want I am not sure if it sounds as good as say logic but it def. is good at what it does.
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By DFENS Mon Apr 18, 2005 9:37 pm
also, check out the ableton forums - there a few tutition videos on their to.

By bigman Mon Apr 18, 2005 9:54 pm
You can also record the beat into Ableton Live and remix it from there. There is no sync needed for this, you can get perfect results without it.

Here's how:

1. Make the beat and whatever else in your sequence on the MPC.
2. Mute all except for track 1 on the MPC.
3. In Ableton set the tempo to the same as the sequence on the MPC.
4. Turn on the metronome in Ableton
5. Record enable an audio track in Ableton.
6. Start Ableton recording a sequence by pressing a section above the record enabled track.
7. At about the second or third measure, start the beat from the MPC until it repeats.
8. Stop recording in ableton and switch to the Audio View (Shift+Tab)
9. In Ableton move the marker that says 1 to the start of your beat (you can zoom to get more detailed with the start point)
10.Move the end marker to the loop point (be exact, or play around for strange results)
11.Repeat with the next tracks, mute the earlier tracks.

It seems lengthy at first but after doing it once or twice you can fly on it. You can also do this for tracks sequenced with the mpc generating from another synth. I like this method because I don't have to remember all of the info in my MPC and synths as well as recall it every time I want to work on that track, it's already there.

Another cool thing is that you can add realtime tracks to live and make them sync right up to the tempo. I do it with bass, guitar, vox and even vinyl loops. For performing live, you don't have to bring all your gear and try to sync it up, its laid out for you already. Plus you can use realtime Vst, Au and Live plugins with the tracks to give it more life.

I know this is a long message, but it is one of the few things I know about pretty well. There is a hell of a lot more you can do with this combo as well as using other programs and synths with the MPC&Live.

Have fun!