Forum to discuss all matters relating to the MPC1000 and MPC2500 operating systems created by 'JJ' (all versions).
By dtaa pla muk Fri Aug 01, 2008 6:02 pm
i want to make a list of great companion pieces to the jjos. most of mine are going to be midi related. i want these to be somewhat "lesser known" additions - remember, everyone knows about reason!

let's start with frohmage, something i posted already:

http://www.kvraudio.com/get/572.html
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frohmage is a REALLY, REALLY GOOD lowpass filter. it's real intuitive, CC controllable, and it sounds wonderful. it sounds leagues better than the MPC's filter, which i never disliked to begin with. the nice thing about frohmage is the width of its capacity. it can be a subtle effect to act as eq, or it can warm up your sound considerably with the distortion. here is more info, my favorite stuff bolded:

Frohmage is a multi-band resonant filter. It can offer some unique sounds, from slow and deep filter sweeps to the most savage tones with high resonance setting and heavy distortion.

* Highly resonant low-pass filter.
* Cutoff frequency unit selection : Hz or musical note.
* Up to 15 additional bands, harmonically distributed.
* Delay on each band for unique phaser effects.
* Distortion stage, with two routing schemes.

* Very fine MIDI control (PRN and NPRN sent or recorded by Frohmage are 14-bit accurate).
* Low CPU load.

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piz MIDI plugins (for in DAW midi track modification)

if you use ANY external midi equipment (including VSTs or Reason), you may be missing out on an enormous part of MIDI's capability. using VST midi plugins, you can edit and modify your performed midi data before it is recorded. ya'll understand Time Correct/Quantization -- that is a form of what i'm talking about, effecting pre-recorded midi data. there are thousands of excellent midi plugins floating around the web, the vastest majority of them are free and very, very easy to learn and implement. here are some examples, my favorites are again bolded:

midi16CCRouter - Changes up to 16 CCs to 16 other CCs
midiAudioToCC - Converts audio amplitude to CC messages
midiConverter2 - Change and convert between CC, Channel Pressure (THIS IS SO USEFUL because the MPC1000jjos2 SENDS CHANNEL PRESSURE ALL THE TIME), Poly Aftertouch, Program Change, Pitch Bend, NRPN/RPN, and Note On/Off messages in various ways
midiForceToKey - Enforces a scale, and transposes within the scale (optionally based on midi notes on a selected channel)
midiForceToRange - Transposes by octave into the selected range
midiInvertNotes - "Mirrors" notes centered around the selected note
midiNotchFilter - Isolate, remove, or channelize specific midi messages (HIGHLY USEFUL IF YOU HAVE A GHOST IN YOUR PITCHBEND WHEEL LIKE I DO)
midiNotesToCC - Converts note number and velocity to CC messages (THIS ALLOWS FOR VELOCITY CONTROL OF MIDI CC - AN INCREDIBLY POWERFUL TOOL, MORE SO THAN JJOS1's velocity control that OS2 has removed)
midiNoteToggle - Notes (optionally within a selected range and/or channel) are toggled: play a note once to turn it on, play it again to turn it off.
(LIKE LOOPED ITEMS ON THE SPX0X series)
midiSimpleLFO - One CC LFO with some "simple" options (TRUE FREERUNNING LFOS for CC 74!)
midiSostenuto - Like a piano sostenuto pedal, but for midi notes instead of piano dampers
midiVelocityScaler - Scale/reverse/offset velocity of input notes (YES, YES YES)

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continuing in that trend: EnergyXT combined with the NicFit midi plugins.

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EnergyXT is a finicky, cool little VST host, midi sequencer, and lightweight DAW app. it's way lesser known. i wouldn't use it as my main daw, but it's nice because it's so resource light AND because as a VST host, it is absolutely killer - particularly because of these VST plugins:

http://asseca.com/nicfit/

nicfit is a man with a plan. he's coded a bunch of really really nice Energy XT plugins that make me really really happy. examples: NDC channeldrive allows you to use monophonic synthesizers POLYPHONICALLY by sending each successive note to a different channel.

here's another of my favorites:

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this one is so dope. it lets you assign a different curve to single instances of incoming midi ccs. some potentiometers are logarithmic, others are linear. now, it doesn't matter - using software you can recalibrate ANY of these to be in whatever shape you want. it's brilliant.

also, NF NOTEONRELEASE: trigger a sample when you hit the pad, trigger another sample when you release the pad. play a simple kick/snare pattern with 1 finger! do all kinds of interesting stuff with this one.

NOTE: some of these crash my REAPER instance. i weeded through them to see which worked flawlessly and which caused a crash. most of my favorites work fine.

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POISE: awesome drumsamplerr.

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i'm betatesting POISE because i see great potential in it. i love using poise to bypass the 3 sound per pad limit of os2 (or the 4 sound per pad limit of 1). Poise is nice because it has none of the per pad limitations of the mpc. you can use individual adsr params per sound per layer. 8 layers per pad. sample offset (really really good). individual fx and distortion.

the programmer's a great guy, and poise is a swiss knife of a sampler. really handy. not incredibly powerful but man oh man, does it do its job nicely. sometimes you don't want to load a massive CPU intensive vst sampler just for a single tamborine sample.

highly recommended.

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this is my ultimate favorite bit crusher vst:
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http://www.kvraudio.com/get/1976.html

Multiband Bitcrusher I is a multiple bitcrush & downsample plug-in. It selects 4 frequency bands from the incoming signal - Low; Middle Low; Middle High; High - and then processes them through the bitcrusher and/or the grinder. Frequency cut-off point for each band is selectable in a variable range depending on the band; unselected frequencies are cut.

Features:

* 4 selectable frequency ranges:
1. Low band (250/500 Hz)
2. Middle-Low Band (500/2000 Hz)
3. Middle-High Band. (2000/8000 Hz)
4. High band (7000/16000 Hz)
* Selective Bitcrush & Downsample for each band.
* Additional "grind" for each band to squash more your signal.
* Additional gain for each band.
* Mute-solo-bypass for each band for better control of the bitcrushing process.
* Enabling/disabling post filter for each band.


that's it for now, i've got more but can't think of them immediately
Last edited by dtaa pla muk on Fri Aug 01, 2008 6:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
By dtaa pla muk Fri Aug 01, 2008 6:07 pm
i wanted to include a reason why these are in particular useful with jjos.

frohmage is great because of the new CC - 74/71 control of cutoff and resonance. you can either couple your MPC's filter with frohmage to create a lowpass2 kind of thing (this sounds great to have 2 filters working simultaneously, the mpc's to do the work and frohmage to add a gloss and warmth to it) or you can, if you're like me, work portably on the 1k usign the internal filter via ccs, and then just turn the filter OFF completely when you track out and use Frohmage to replace the 1k's built in filter altogether. this is really really nice.

all the midi plugins: when sending stuff to external midi hardware/software tools, these allow you so much more control than you previously had. this saves you hours of editing time afterwards. it lets you focus more on the performance and less on "well let's just get it down and edit it afterwards." the nicest thing is that you can set all these parameters (velocity min, velocity max, etc) to midi ccs and actually control the midi plugins from a specified midi controller. this puts the idea of quantization and pre-recording performance editing to a whole new level of hands-on controllability.

poise: layering. the idea of poise is that it's just a meta-layer of the mpc. i very rarely use it standalone, except in daw after iv'e tracked out but feel like i'm still missing something. poise is such a good supplement.

multiband bit crusher: the most option-laden bit crusher i've ever seen. useful, useful, useful - not much more to say than that.
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By mp3 Fri Aug 01, 2008 9:05 pm
I use Kontakt as a sound module with my JJOS2 1k. the plus for me is that it has built in MIDI processing (Kontakt Script Processing) like arpeggiators, chorders, strummers, and lots more...

An obvious one would be the ASR-X. Fills in the gaps as a complementary sampler very nicely.
Last edited by mp3 on Fri Aug 01, 2008 9:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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By mp3 Fri Aug 01, 2008 9:08 pm
Mpc_Monk wrote:Nym you seem like someone who would be in heaven with the ableton live mpc combo, especialy seein how you feel about reaper so what gives, what are your thoughts on Live/mpc combo


I got Live Lite. Dope with the 1k!!!

I don't use it much, but when I do, I use it as either a loop capturer (record MPC into Live, timestretch, mangle, rinse and repeat) or as a loop generator (make audio loops and phrases from softsynths for later chopping in the MPC)
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By mp3 Sun Aug 03, 2008 1:22 am
You should try the macprovideo.com Ableton Live tutorial. I was up n runnin in a day after watchin it. Its 3 hours long. My biggest hurdle coming from being a Logic/hardware sampler user for so many years was just coming to grips with a totally different paradigm than anything I was used to.

Live is the truth.
By master-ceo Sun Aug 03, 2008 5:01 pm
Dope thread Nym. I'm downloadind the filter and Bit Crusher now!

My hard/soft choices are:

Akai S950
Ensoniq ASR X or 10
Yahmaha Motif Rack
Roland Fantom Rack
Propellerhead Reason 4.01