How I produced an album on the MPC 500

@ Riggs. Yo dope stuff homie. I'm feeling track 5 and the last track. Love your energy to do everything in that lil 500. Much props and respect..peace

Riggs wrote:

Nice! How do you line up programs with sequences? Do you do one program per seq or one program for each instrument or something else?

edit: Now you make me want to set the sequence loop to off and turn off the metronome and time correct and just play whatever... like a multitrack... man, you know, I've never tried that on the mp... oh, it's gonna happen! Thnx!

Mostly one Program for a sequence but I use up all the banks to keep things on the fly.

I'm uploading your project to my 2nd MPC500

So here are the highlights of my approach on this album.

Pitched all samples +12 and resampled them for that extra grimy sound

Used a different program for each song so I could use the same samples differently each time.

Used a different effect set for each song. Used the master eq and compressor to master each song individually. Placed an effect set change at the beginning of each finished sequence to queue up the right set.

Used Velocity>Sample Start on a lot of the sounds. This allowed me to reuse the sounds differently in each sequence. Try out 12 level velocity on a lot of the pads in the project. With a little tweaking, I was able to use the kick, snare and hat separately in a sequence even though they were still in a single loop sample.

Used the Q-Link a lot for filtering and pitching. For instance, one tune has an arpeggiated pattern that repeats but I use the Q-Link to change the pitch for variation. This seems to work ok if you leave out the 3rd of the scale (no major or minor tonality). I used the Q-Link to pitch sounds that were using 12 level velocity so I could trigger the sample start and change the pitch all at the same time (freaky vocals).

Sequencing went like this...
-Create a new empty sequence called A (for section A)
-Create a new empty program called A
-Load some samples into the program and start trying to make a good loop
-Once things are rolling, copy Sequence A and make a variation. The auto numbering of the sequence name helps here.
-If I start a new section, I'll call that sequence B
-Once I feel like I have a section together, I'll put the parts together in song mode and write that out to a new sequence
-Once all the sections are done, I'll put those parts together in song mode and write out to a new sequence
-Once I think I have a completed tune in one sequence, I'll delete all the little sequences I used to make the song and copy the completed song sequence into the lowest sequence slot I have. I'll name the sequence and name the program the same.

Working in a single project, it was much easier to create an album with a cohesive sound. It really kinda happens on its own. I even had one song go into another song really nice almost on accident.

This is all stuff that has been well discussed in the forums.

::: MAJOR TIPS :::
SAVE YOUR WORK OFTEN... like every time you change something and you like the results, SAVE IT before you start anything new. Save the entire project to a folder. If you are going to do anything you aren't sure about, save your work in another folder so you can always go back if you need to. When you complete a song, save your project to another folder (maybe even on another CF card if you're extra paranoid) so you have a good snapshot from that point in time. If things go poo poo, at least you can come back here. All this becomes so much more important when you are 8 songs into your album. The more songs you have in the project, the more it feels like you're walking on a tight rope.

DO NOT USE AUTOLOAD TO SAVE YOUR WORK every now and then, the 500 will delete the AutoLoad folder during save and then lock up before it saves your work... Then it won't let you save the project... work gone... BAD NEWS This only happened to me once, l've never used autoload again.

actually that is quite interesting...

Your project is very nice. Took a while to figure what you did but these ideas are fresh. You showed me the express lane I work more or less like you but I do it all manually like the qlink, I never used qlink. Why, I don't know Yeah, I'm seeing things in a new light.

Autoload is the most useless feature on the 500. It sure would be nice to power off and on and have your work saved where you were last instead of loading and saving every session.