Exchange tips and tricks for the Akai MPC4000
By renegadebliss Wed Dec 22, 2004 8:27 pm
phunk wrote:hey guys it sounds great all those experimentation but could someone be so kind to write a quick tutorial on that ?, because honestly i don't quite understand how to do it !


Hi, Rob's steps are pretty much the tutorial, but if you want a more detailed one, after Christamas, I'll be going back into the Studio, so will jot down the steps that I use and post the Multi/Prog/Samples that I use, so you can see it in living color. But wont' be for a few days.

I've used basically the same steps that Rob's posted to do 4 Zone crossfades between
different Kick Drums , and different Snares and such to get either more analog like
effect (depending on your samples) or more crazy effect of using 4 different types of
bd , 4 different types of snare and do the same for the rest of the kit and having it
switch the drum samples synced to midi, which gives a nice varied sound depending on your samples again, but I haven't actually tried it with drum loops as Rob's posted about. Quite excited to hear the effect myself, don't know why I didn't think about doing it with drum loops.


Looking forward to banging out several tracks during my winter vacation, so hopefully
you won't be seeing me here too much :)


Dave

By fasterbeats Thu Dec 23, 2004 10:39 am
Check this out, use 2, 8 bar, 8th or 16th beats and 1, 8thT beat with velocity settings at 0-56, 57-118, and 119-127, Midi sync to 2
to add rockin little triplet fills!
Man I wish we could automate the midi sync value.....or can we? :mrgreen:



Rob wrote:
glide wrote:why I thought you where the man!, or Renegade or is Alto?? I know Rob is the runner up & is makeing us all sweat :D


Heh heh 8)

Here is a contribution from the Akai mail list, from a thread that I started last friday with David Davis, the guy that learned me the Zone Select trick for emulating analogs:

----------------
Thanks Jeremy, that was one of problems indeed. The other
one was that I hadn't assigned each of the zones its own
velocity range. Stupid me.

But works great now. As David originally suggested, using
and LFO with random waveform gives you a nice mechanism to
have the mpc select one of up to four samples to play at
note on, to simulate analog variation (using closely
matching, but not identical samples).

If you don't want the zones to be changed *during* the
playback, simply set the LFO rate to 0. The LFO output
level is also an important factor to get a good balance
between the various zones, as David already found out.

I also toyed with syncing the LFO to tempo. That's fun! You
can mix the zones in and out at a given rate, synced to
tempo. Very nice stuff. :)))
---------------

I did some more experiments later on and it works great! Try this:

- Get two drum loops with identical BPM.
- Set the MPC's main tempo to the tempo of the drum loops.
- Puts each of the loops in a zone of the same voice.
- Give each of the samples their own velocity range,
like 0-64 for zone 1 and 65-128 for zone 2.
- Set the Zone Select field to realtime.
- Set LFO1 to random waveform.
- Set the LFO's Midi Sync field to ON.
- Set the LFO Beat Field to 1 or 2 (change as you like).
- Set the LFO Depth to 50 or so.
- And finally, make a Program Modulation setting in the modulation
matrix with LFO1 -> Zone Select

This will do a real-time and random fade between the two drum loops, but synced to tempo! If the two drum loops are similar, like variations of the same beat, you get a great live feal, because the drum pattern is never the same. Very, very, very cool! 8) 8)