Reviews and questions about the entry-level MPC500
User avatar
By Oliver Johns Tue Jun 09, 2015 11:08 pm
Hello, dearest human beings!

I am as wet behind the ears as a MPC-user can be, just so you know! Anyways, I bought this second-hand MPC500 and some other dude/lady had already filled it up with samples, sequences, programs, you name it. Anyhow I wiped the memory, but there's one thing the person before me did which I am uncertain how to do. That is to take a synth sample (maybe a C note?) and then assign it to adjacent pads to create the tone series (C, C#, D, D#...B#..C2). I thought this was really cool and would like to do that myself using different samples.

My question is: How do I go about doing so? I'm thinking he used programs... Did he pitch the samples one by one and then save the pitches into a program? If that's the case, is there any way of knowing exactly how much to pitch, for example a C, a half-step up to a C#?

I hope I wasn't speaking gibberish, anyhow thank you for reading! Sorry for the bad title. (If I keep on apologizing you might start to think I'm Canadian, but my english is far from "Canadian" good!)

Your humble beatprentice,
olibot2000
User avatar
By motosega Wed Jun 10, 2015 11:43 am
there are two ways to do this,

either you can use the 12 levels button and choose pitch. then you sample gets scaled over an octave, its dead simple to use and you can use the q-link fader on the filter at the same time. your samples original pitch is the starting pitch at the bottom of the octave.

or

you can do exactly what you said and map the same sample over all the pads and save that program for whenever you want to use it. this has the advantage that you can map different samples to different keys for multisampling or you can mix and match different sounds for each note, but it's much slower to set up than 12levels and since q-link is one pad at a time, adding e.g. a filter sweep is a pain.
User avatar
By damien907 Sat Jun 13, 2015 8:00 pm
if you do it the manual way, (what i alawys do) just get one of those pictures of a keyboard with the notes on it and the spaces between notes, whole tone, whole tone, half tone ect.
you can even pitch it to diff scales. so say your beat is in f#minor, you just use the w,w,h thing that applies to a minor scale, and you start your first note at f# and your there before you know it. then there wont be any notes out of the scale either.