By NearTao
Fri Dec 12, 2008 2:30 am
Firstly, this isn't really representative of what OS2 can do, and I certainly wouldn't drop this on an album. I was just playing around and figured I needed to finish a track for once. If you decide to check it out just realize it is more of a personal exercise than an attempt to complete a track soup to nuts.
I've posted the track ScratcHeaven and project files at http://www.neartao.com/Near_Tao/Misc_MPC.html. The bass is recorded entirely off of my Moog Voyager so if you want to use the samples that's cool. I think the drums are off of some future music or computer music discs (don't know which ones) and the scratches are chopped up off of some sony loop library or another, designer dance tools or some ish. My bro wants to do some real scratching over the track, and I probably would've but recently sold off my mixer and need to get some chops using my Korg KP2.
At any rate, anybody that wants to take the project and poke around, remix, demolish, destroy or whatever with the track and project parts is more than welcome to. I was inspired by a video of a minimal beat with somebody scratching on the MPC over the top. It looked fun. The scratching on this track is quite minimal, no q-link controls or anything... just straight up samples. If I try another track in this vein I'll definitely do something a bit more technical.
Lessons learned for me...
1 ) Organizing your tracks and naming them is key, and makes it much easier to play live. Be organized up front and you'll save yourself a ton of time having to copy everything around later to organize it. At this point I'd like to say it'd be awesome for JJOS to include a track move/swap feature in addition to the copy/delete that we already have.
2 ) I started off making plenty of variations of each track. This was important because once I had a feel for the song I could delete any variations that either didn't fit or just didn't have the magic feel that other tracks had.
3 ) You can pretty quickly copy a sequence, go to track mute and erase all recorded track mute data. In this way you can pretty quickly setup a few key build ups and break downs using your existing sequence.
4 ) I didn't do this, but could have greatly helped myself by actually naming my sequences. If you go into the song mode it's not easy to see what is going on here. Shame on me.
5 ) Instrument mode is pretty dang great, I give it a big thumbs up. As noted in previous posts I just wish that you could use the numeric entry method to enter the root note instead of having to data wheel all of them.
6 ) Keep multiple different directories of each revision of your track. I found this is an excellent way to keep track of what you've done and where you've been.
7 ) Using the record option in Song mode doesn't create a .wav file that is nearly as loud as the original piece. I probably had db -6 set for self sampling (or something similar) and when I used the normalize feature under trim I had a spike or two in the waveform that prevented it from being really loud. I through on the master eq/compressor which helped a little bit, but this is still a bit of an area I'll need to experiment in.
8 ) Song mode convert doesn't dump out a track like I had expected. I was hoping to make a brand new track with all the automated track mutes in tank and then play a bit more on top of that real time to the beat. Would've been fantastic fun, but I couldn't figure it out. I was likely doing something wrong and I just got bored of multiple bad attempts to do something that should be pretty simple.
Over all I'd say that it was a pretty big success. I've mostly been a software composer using hardware in the past. The last two years I've been trying to get my head more around the MPC. For an experiment to do absolutely everything on the MPC it was quite successful for me. It has made it even more clear to me that I'd rather have something I can put my hands on, the concise and simplified work flow is great and having limits really helps creatively. I'll still be keeping my computer software around, but at the moment I think moving away from it will be a good way to keep me focused on finishing tracks and not being distracted quite so much. I'm seriously considering moving a few of the tracks I had been working on from Ableton Live onto the MPC and see if maybe I can finally finish another album.
I'm really looking forward to JJOS2XL. Certainly nothing is there I need to produce tracks, but there are a few really nice additions that will make it that much more refreshing to work with.
I've posted the track ScratcHeaven and project files at http://www.neartao.com/Near_Tao/Misc_MPC.html. The bass is recorded entirely off of my Moog Voyager so if you want to use the samples that's cool. I think the drums are off of some future music or computer music discs (don't know which ones) and the scratches are chopped up off of some sony loop library or another, designer dance tools or some ish. My bro wants to do some real scratching over the track, and I probably would've but recently sold off my mixer and need to get some chops using my Korg KP2.
At any rate, anybody that wants to take the project and poke around, remix, demolish, destroy or whatever with the track and project parts is more than welcome to. I was inspired by a video of a minimal beat with somebody scratching on the MPC over the top. It looked fun. The scratching on this track is quite minimal, no q-link controls or anything... just straight up samples. If I try another track in this vein I'll definitely do something a bit more technical.
Lessons learned for me...
1 ) Organizing your tracks and naming them is key, and makes it much easier to play live. Be organized up front and you'll save yourself a ton of time having to copy everything around later to organize it. At this point I'd like to say it'd be awesome for JJOS to include a track move/swap feature in addition to the copy/delete that we already have.
2 ) I started off making plenty of variations of each track. This was important because once I had a feel for the song I could delete any variations that either didn't fit or just didn't have the magic feel that other tracks had.
3 ) You can pretty quickly copy a sequence, go to track mute and erase all recorded track mute data. In this way you can pretty quickly setup a few key build ups and break downs using your existing sequence.
4 ) I didn't do this, but could have greatly helped myself by actually naming my sequences. If you go into the song mode it's not easy to see what is going on here. Shame on me.
5 ) Instrument mode is pretty dang great, I give it a big thumbs up. As noted in previous posts I just wish that you could use the numeric entry method to enter the root note instead of having to data wheel all of them.
6 ) Keep multiple different directories of each revision of your track. I found this is an excellent way to keep track of what you've done and where you've been.
7 ) Using the record option in Song mode doesn't create a .wav file that is nearly as loud as the original piece. I probably had db -6 set for self sampling (or something similar) and when I used the normalize feature under trim I had a spike or two in the waveform that prevented it from being really loud. I through on the master eq/compressor which helped a little bit, but this is still a bit of an area I'll need to experiment in.
8 ) Song mode convert doesn't dump out a track like I had expected. I was hoping to make a brand new track with all the automated track mutes in tank and then play a bit more on top of that real time to the beat. Would've been fantastic fun, but I couldn't figure it out. I was likely doing something wrong and I just got bored of multiple bad attempts to do something that should be pretty simple.
Over all I'd say that it was a pretty big success. I've mostly been a software composer using hardware in the past. The last two years I've been trying to get my head more around the MPC. For an experiment to do absolutely everything on the MPC it was quite successful for me. It has made it even more clear to me that I'd rather have something I can put my hands on, the concise and simplified work flow is great and having limits really helps creatively. I'll still be keeping my computer software around, but at the moment I think moving away from it will be a good way to keep me focused on finishing tracks and not being distracted quite so much. I'm seriously considering moving a few of the tracks I had been working on from Ableton Live onto the MPC and see if maybe I can finally finish another album.
I'm really looking forward to JJOS2XL. Certainly nothing is there I need to produce tracks, but there are a few really nice additions that will make it that much more refreshing to work with.
. I actually have a few programs I've put together I'll probably post as well in case anybody is interested.