Drum Track Explode Tracks in MPC3

Hi new member here having an issue with MPC3.

I'm very much a novice with the platform and may be doing something dumb but has the drum program explode tracks function changed in MPC3?

How I understood it in v2:

I could create multiple sequences with different drum variations in each sequence and when I used the explode tracks feature it would create a new track for each of the pads I had used, each populated with the midi information for that pad. It would mute the original track with the drum program. This would apply to all sequences.

v3:

If I follow the same process, the new drum tracks are created across all sequences. However the midi data is only copied on the sequence that is active, and the original track is also only muted on this track. For the other sequences there is no midi data.

I had a search on google and can't find anything about it. Is this a bug? An intended change?

I'm still using v2 and whenever I explode tracks, it does it only on the sequence I'm exploding the tracks. Other sequences are untouched. That's why I first use the song mode to combine all the sequences I want to explode the tracks on into one song sequence. I don't think the explode tracks function applies to every sequence, just the one you have active when you do it.

Sorry I can't help you with v3, I just wanted to make clear how it works on v2.

In MPC3 when you explode a track it creates a new track dedicated to each 'used' pad in the original track.

For example, if your kit had kick, snare, hat and crash but didn't have any crash events in the original track, exploding will create a kick track, a snare track and a hat track. The kick track will only contain the kick pad (all other pads empty) and will copy the relevant kick pad MIDI events to this new kick track And so on for each exploded track. Original track is muted.

As tracks run through all sequences in mpc3 (individual sequences cannot have a unique track structure), the exploded tracks will be there no matter which sequence you select.

I guess what you are asking for is a feature request that when a track is exploded in one sequence, the MIDI data in all other sequences is also exploded. I don't think this was intended, so it's not a bug but it's a reasonable feature request IMO (but probably more difficult to implement that you'd imagine...)

The workaround is to ensure you explode the initial 'theme' sequence before duplicating it to create additional sequences, or convert all your sequences to a single long sequence via song mode and then do your track exploding on that one long sequence. It depends why you are exploding - is it to help with creating separate tracks during audio mixdown, or is it to help with the compositional stage?

Also note that if you use track insert FX on the original unexploded track then exploding will duplicate all those FX on each exploded track. So 4 FX on a track exploded to 4 x new track equals 20 instances of those FX plugins. Best practice now would be to use a submix on the original track and put the FX on that instead so when you explode the exploded tracks automatically route to that submix. It also ensures the FX continue to function as intended (e.g. compressing an entire drum kit is different to 4 compressors individually compressing individual drum sounds).

Thanks for the replies. It's for composition purposes. I like to use track mutes and want to have drums and instrument content available on the same 16 pads if possible. It helps keep things tidy, particularly if I have a drum program with multiple banks of 16 samples. Explode obviously ignores the samples that don't have midi information.

I was sure MPC 2 behaved the way I explained and I even convinced myself last night that was how the vst behaved. I've checked again and it's not.

It looks like song mode is a decent workaround though. Thanks.

MPC-Tutor wrote:Also note that if you use track insert FX on the original unexploded track then exploding will duplicate all those FX on each exploded track. So 4 FX on a track exploded to 4 x new track equals 20 instances of those FX plugins. Best practice now would be to use a submix on the original track and put the FX on that instead so when you explode the exploded tracks automatically route to that submix. It also ensures the FX continue to function as intended (e.g. compressing an entire drum kit is different to 4 compressors individually compressing individual drum sounds).

Wow, this is one of the reasons why I don't really like the new version with no programs. In v2 there's no reason to duplicate all the FX plugins to exploded tracks since they use the same program on the background. And using a submix exports silent stems when saving as ableton live set so it's out of the question unless that's fixed in v3.