MPC 3 live: Numetal beats

Hi there MPC friends!

I am a beginner on this MPC3 Live groovebox and I am going to use this box for Live performance with an guitarist.

We are playing Nu/rapmetal and we want to make MIDI tracks from some audio drums.
We also want to add instrumental sounds and samples like intros, breaks and scratching sounds. We want to remake those audio drumtracks into MIDI tracks with a bigger numetal drumsounds, add bass and instrumental sounds.

Is anyone out there that could help me with:

- the fastest way to redo audio drumtracks to MIDI.
- finding the best Nu metal drum sounds that we can use

Big thank you if you have any suggestions.

Are you wanting to convert the audio to MIDI entirely within the MPC? Personally I would look at using computer software for this, for example it's baked into Ableton Live and does a pretty quick and decent job. This will give you a MIDI file already set up for playback with a GM layout kit. Load into your MPC and edit accordingly (it will need lots of editing if it's from a live drum performance). Alternatively use something like addictive trigger or Steven Slate trigger which will just replace the drums in the audio - I would also consider steven slate drums for the sounds as his drums lean more to metal and rock. And they have their ever-so-regular sale on at the moment. https://stevenslatedrums.com/

To do it in an MPC you'll need to go to SAMPLE EDIT > CHOP > THRESHOLD and slice down to individual transients, convert to a chopped drum track with 'create events' enabled. You'll then need to go to GRID and organise your MIDI events from being just a chromatic run into your primary drum articulations (kick, snare, crash, closed hat etc) and pair it all up with your kit so the MIDI tallies with your kit's drum pads.

As I say, much easier with dedicated software.

Okay thank you for that reaction.

First of all I have 10 audio drumtracks recorded by a drummer, I want to tweak some fills, but keep the structure.
I have ableton Standard so I can create MIDI of those, but it isn't really good. As you said, it needs a lot of editing afterwards. Slicing isn't good enough.
In fact I just need the separate kick, snare, cymbals, toms, hihats sounds so I can make those drums with my MPC3.

Thanks you for the stevenslate reference.

After all it is still not possible to give the audio drumtrack different, more aggressive sounds heh?
I guess the first step is to get the sounds of each drumcomponent separately.

I have purchased SSD 5 for this now!
Hopefully I can get everything i want with this!

Kind regards

https://www.meldaproduction.com/MDrumReplacer is another tool like the one by Steven Slate. Comes with a big drum sample library (in WAV form IIRC so you can use them with SSD5 as well) and is of course cheaper these days.

Groovebox13_NL wrote:After all it is still not possible to give the audio drumtrack different, more aggressive sounds heh?
I guess the first step is to get the sounds of each drumcomponent separately.

A good audio engineer can work on everything

The standard advice is to get it right at the source, ie make the multi-track recording as good as you can (good sounding room, quality mics).

If that isn't possible drum replacement will be your way to get a good recorded drum kit. But still you have to mix the tracks to get the sound you want.
There are plenty of free and paid resources available on (drum) mixing. Naturally you still need lots of practice.

Maybe one of those AI powered EQ/compressor combo plugins might help you.

What I do is get a drummer on an electronic kit and record the midi out so I can swap sample hits around later. Doesn't help you right now, but worth thinking about next time if you're eager for a real drummer instead of loops.