The "Tips and Tricks" thread

J.Daniels wrote:on a side note, ive always wanted to create a band where theres just a bumch of guys with MPC's that replicate a real band. ie: someone does drums, someone does the bass etc... but real vocals. Also using guitar wah wah pedals and other effects while banging on em pads...

sounds cool! and pretty geeky. but, why not?

this might be useless and new 'newbie'-ish but

I bang out something all in one track.. hats, snare, kick in 'real time' with the loop off and a small amount of reverb (so small that you wouldn't notice unless you were the who put it there). I port it back into my PC and chop it up again in recycle.

you can get some really cool shit from that i find.. Subtleties.. the spice of life

also i love creating a bunch of different rolls with the snares i have chosen to use in a program.. **** with the attack and decay so they are lighter/less sounding and save them as a sample then bang away

now thats a band i would join!

Otayo20 wrote:I do my shakers on 16 levels. First take I use the loudest level on a four count. Then I do the next take on one a lil softer filling in. than I do one take one on of the lowest levels fillin in. Or anywhere in between. You can quantize it or not but it sounds like a real shaker.

I have been lying to myself trying to think noone else did this....

Antonym wrote:

if you usually bang out your drums with your right hand, try your left, it will feel like someone else is banging out the drums for ya...

sometimes i sit on my hand for like 20 minutes til it falls asleep and then play drums

i call it the stranger

LMAO

dequalsrxt wrote:If you haven't got any ideas - just mess with things, make crazy sounds and don't even try to get anything done. This is good with whatever, the mpc, synth, etc. I find myself learning more techniques and tricks with my gear if I'm not worried about finishing material, and am just making noise. You try things you might not try if you're actually working on a track. Plus it's fun.

i find myself doing that alot to get a groove going. i don't know how to play the keys proficiently but i get by, so i just play around with sounds until i find one that motivates me... although i am getting bored of my synth.

(If im listening to records, and i find not a whole beat sample, but just say a crazy stab of out of it vocal, i put them onto a disk full of other weird sounds. When iv got a beat made that sounds like it needs something else, maybe something that only happens once in the whole beat to give it some spice, i go back to this disk and see what fits. Some times it works, sometimes it dont.)

i'm gonna get in the habit of doing that. sometimes i finds something funky in a record but just can't find the right groove to fit it in... so, i'll sample it and keep in the the bin for later. i heard that what NO I.D. does alot.

es-k wrote:sometimes, when i am using a chopped drum break (and layer one shots over top of it) , i'll make the chop longer than what i want it to be.. so like if i just want the snare, i'll include the hats and kicks that follow for 1 or 2 beats.. then i'll make the program mono or do my mute groups and play out my pattern. this way, you have no space in between hits that doesnt have the vinyl hiss or "air" from the sample.. then i layer my one shots over it to make it really smack (with simult, or just using another pgm)

you can take this technique a step further by creating patched phrases of your short chops. if you know the bpm of the loop then the patched phrase will play it back correctly no matter how short the loop is. this is a slept on feature. say you have a chop with a kick - hat - snare pattern. if you convert this into a patched phrase you can adjust these chops to bpm.

i know all of you are thinking 'big deal, i knew that' but heres the thing we all over looked. when you trigger a patched phrase, every chop gets the current pads settings. so if you have a kick - hat - snare patched phrase.. you can play with the decay and attack and have it affect all the slices without having to deal with the tedious programming! your project will now fit to any tempo just like you were using single shots in the sequencer. you can sequence some chops over some single shots and change the swing setting and the patched phrase hits will be affected too! i completely slept on this feature but i find myself using it all the time now to do live jams i can actually record in one take.

heres some insight...although i can't necessarily call this a 'tip' due to the too tedious to be worthwhile nature however...

in programs like recycle you can silence certain chops and then export the complete break w/ the silenced chops. say you took your break, silenced everything except the kick, exported, then silenced everything except the snares, exported, did the same for the hats & exported.. then converted to patched phrase.. THEN used the simult function to assign all of your separate slices to be triggered from one pad. this way you could have the power of using the chops & the ability to affect each element of the break separately. not to mention send the kicks to their own output, snare to its own, etc. i've never actually bothered with it because patched phrase is a pretty tedious process, but i tested it on a small slice and it works.

^Nice. Now i'll be spending more time working with patch phrase.

Tip: This is pretty simple, but extremely important. REMEMBER TO SAVE AND BACK UP YOUR WORK! Constantly my PC will crap out on me at just the wrong momment, so recently I've become a save-aholic, pressing the damn save button like twice a minute.

This post was basically to keep the thread from dying...keep the tips up yall, it's mad helpful.

fun little thing to try.. record a 15 second or so sample.. and try and take only 3 small chops from it.. then grab another record, do the same..

till you have a bunch of little chops. then, see what you can make

fun shit!

Here is a no-brainer that I thought I would throw out there.

Fake delay:

Record your samples as usual.

To accent one of the samples you laid down with fake delay,

Turn on the 16 levels (velocity)for the appropriate pad

after the pad plays that you want to delay , tap ramdom decending pads to create a fake delay

something like: pad 11, pad9, pad 5,pad 3 etc.....

This is pretty basic , still nice to know though.

weird stuff to try ..

filter pans..

If you have a sample (and it really works with everything, as long as your using the same sample or drum hit with each filter)..

Filter and pan..

Meaning...

You filter the sample with a highband, and pan to the the Right.. Same Sample (on a different track/channel) you filter with a lowband and pan to the left...

Then have one dead set center un filtered.. And mess with the mix.. It will break up the boring, and you will get some interesting pans... (Ie not the normal pan left to right, but a weird filter pan from that left to right, that goes from low to high, or what have you)...

If left alone, it adds weirdness to the stereo dynamics... or may add fullness, its all about how you mix it...

cluster wrote:weird stuff to try ..

filter pans..

If you have a sample (and it really works with everything, as long as your using the same sample or drum hit with each filter)..

Filter and pan..

Meaning...

You filter the sample with a highband, and pan to the the Right.. Same Sample (on a different track/channel) you filter with a lowband and pan to the left...

Then have one dead set center un filtered.. And mess with the mix.. It will break up the boring, and you will get some interesting pans... (Ie not the normal pan left to right, but a weird filter pan from that left to right, that goes from low to high, or what have you)...

If left alone, it adds weirdness to the stereo dynamics... or may add fullness, its all about how you mix it...

excuse my ignorance.....

Wouldn't you have to make three copys of the sample to do this or am I missing something??? The mixer section on the 2500 lets you pan pads not tracks, so yeah I guess you would need to make three copies of the sample to do this ,right?? ........anyway overall I think I get what your saying. If I am wrong please correct me here. Thanks

yes three copies (2 in the least, for the filtered versions, minus the unfiltered)...

then resample if thats an issue... I do things weird..

My thinking just says its an extra way to go about it, other the just layering, and it helps in the mixing process, in a way, in terms of freeing up frequencies.

Say I have a high hat panned slightly right. And I want the hats to shine alittle bit, but my sample has takes up some of those freqs. Well I then take two versions of that sample. The low band pass version will go near the hats on the right. And maybe a Original version of the sample panned to the left..

Since the low band version doesnt have the highs, the hats have alittle more space (figuratively speaking) to shine, while the original low frequencies of the sample still are in that area.. Then on the other side, theres the sample in full glory, no need to worry about the hats (cuz they're panned on the opposite channel)...

Just another way to use the Tip I suppose...

cluster wrote:yes three copies...

then resample if thats an issue... I do things weird..

Nice!!!1