Discuss the various methods you use in music production, from compressor settings to equipment type.
By Tristan Roger Fri Jan 08, 2016 3:57 pm
Hello every one, happy new year ! I am a small producer from France.

I work for a year with Ableton, i try different production techniques and finally i bought an MPC 2500 three weeks ago. I read the manual and I learn every day a little more on the MPC. My goal is to make house and techno music.

For those who do not know let me introduce the producer who gave me desire to produce an MPC with MR ... G!
He comes from England and the particularity of its tracks is very energetic, very danceable and very "simple"! The guy that focuses on the groove!

Here are some tracks:




Live:


Most of his tracks are similar:
- Kicks
- Hi Hats (many)
- Big open ride
- Claps
- 1 bass
- 1 loop

That's all ! So I want to open the discution on how to approach his production workflow with the mpc ?

This is my actual stuff :
- 1 mpc 2500
- 1 Roland Jupiter-50
- 1 Mackie 1402VLZ4, 14-channel
- 1 Stanton SMX-501
- 1 Platine d'écoute Akaï AP-B20

I have read several articles about it, he used an MPC 200XL, a midi keyboard, and some compressors.
http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?1888

Sorry for my english, i hope you understand me :)
By terry towelling Tue Jan 12, 2016 12:14 am
hah, i haven't thought about mr g for years...i have a pile of advent records and the first few g-flame/mr g records....he's made some really banging stuff.

i read that resident advisor interview....he mentions that he uses only eight tracks and resamples a lot. his tracks are pretty much just drums and bass, with very little or no melody. so i think you need to really work on gettng those drum sounds and bass sounds really good and making them sound unique. lots of layering of samples and resampling with eq, effects etc. maybe use a tape deck to get tape saturation/compression rather than buying a dedicated compressor.
get some 808 909 and classic drum machine samples and also sample from vinyl and layer those up.
makes bass patches on your roland and sample and layer them as scales.


as for making a track...the drums and bass carry the whole track. so start with a simple drum patern of say 2 or 4 bars, and put your effort into getting a really good bass bassline going. once it's a real head nodder, then start introuducing variations into the drums, adding and dropping claps, snares hi-hats, and other percussion etc.. after that is done add a simple melody loop.

as for setting up the mixing desk....plug your eight mpc puts into the first eight ins on the mackie desk. then put your roland keyboard into one of the stereo ins, and your dj mixer on another stereo in. run the alt 3/4 outs to your record in on the mpc.
then use the alt 3/4 button to send sound for sampling to the mpc. this set up makes it easy to eq, add effects and sample/resample
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By Living Bate Thu Jan 14, 2016 12:06 pm
been experimenting with a bit of deep house style stuff myself since I got the Ren.

I'm not sure about the MPC2500, but with the Ren I think its key to build a solid template......load the banks with drums that fit this style of music....apply a general compression to the drums that you can tweak for each tune.......apply a reverb that you can tweak......envelope and tune each drum sound to fit the house style tempo...

load up a deep heavy bass that you can tune to fit each tune.....compress it....reverb it......tweak it....

with this kind of music you dont need to keep coming with really fresh drum sounds or patterns......make the template your weapon and just come up with funky sh!t to floss with it.......

I think if you can make heavy hip hop beats its really not too difficult to turn your hand to house music.....
By JVC Thu Jan 14, 2016 4:37 pm
What amazed me about the Mr. G’s Boiler Room performance was that, he is only using MPC-2000XL and a mixer for hours, and he did the whole performance without loading a new program or sequence, not even once. Basically, he’s rocking the place with less than 32MB of data for more than a hour.
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By Living Bate Thu Jan 14, 2016 4:59 pm
JVC wrote:What amazed me about the Mr. G’s Boiler Room performance was that, he is only using MPC-2000XL and a mixer for hours, and he did the whole performance without loading a new program or sequence, not even once. Basically, he’s rocking the place with less than 32MB of data for more than a hour.



yeh i did find that aspect of it pretty impressive.......

i'm guessing he had a load of songs loaded into single sequences and worked through them......
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By tapedeck Thu Jan 14, 2016 10:12 pm
Living Bate wrote:
JVC wrote:What amazed me about the Mr. G’s Boiler Room performance was that, he is only using MPC-2000XL and a mixer for hours, and he did the whole performance without loading a new program or sequence, not even once. Basically, he’s rocking the place with less than 32MB of data for more than a hour.



yeh i did find that aspect of it pretty impressive.......

i'm guessing he had a load of songs loaded into single sequences and worked through them......

this is the only way i've ever worked. i rework programs so that they all fit into memory so i dont have to reload. setting up a program change in each sequence really helps.
By Tristan Roger Mon Jan 18, 2016 9:30 am
Wo ! My "subscription" for my topic are disabled.. So i just saw all your awsers , so thank you for taking the time !

I'm working on several things, as soon as I can I connect all my material you post my essays on soundcloud! Thank you again for your analysis!
By Tristan Roger Fri Jan 29, 2016 2:01 pm
hey ! listen to this, it is far from the mr g but I'm a lot of fun to do !

https://vid.me/47dN

i just buy this thing to connect each track on a line out of my mixer :
https://www.thomann.de/pics/bdb/128541/605732_800.jpg

I can't connect for the moment and I have not found the answer on the internet or in the manual ... I think it comes from my plug into the mixer,

is what I have to configure anything on the MPC?
By fayekhelmi Tue Feb 25, 2020 6:54 pm
Asi29 wrote:For those that are interested:

https://djmag.com/content/mr-g-how-i-play-live



that article title is totally misleading. the entire article talks about his history of DJing and the future of live performances. nothing about how he actually plays live (apart from 1 line where he sais he uses a 2kxl and a mackie mixer)

having said that it's a nice article, ive been binge reading everything i can find since i discovered him.

i too have switched to a MPC 2500 and am discovering the world of house/techno built on MPCs... while i would absolutely love to get a glimpse of how he uses the MPC in his production, a big part of me really wants to shut out the world outside and really put in the time and learn it all by myself through work and experimentation in order to familiarize myself with it and naturally stumble upon what i can do and can't do.

compared to another similar machine like OT, tutorials for MPC workflow for the production of house/techno music is few and far between and this is the perfect excuse to learn it the old fashioned way.

i coughed up the 123$ for JJOS-XL on my MPC coz i figured i'd rather have everything at my disposal and choose what features to use based on what feels natural to me rather than limit myself to some features and always wonder if i could have it better if i just pay money.

the MPC is such a deep machine and yet limited in so many ways. and the thing i've learned so far about it is that there's no 1 way of doing things. especially with jjos, you can take multitude of completely different paths to reach the same end goal.