Help needed with MPC to Ableton workflow

Hi everyone,

I've been lurking for about 18 months and have been grateful for being able to learn a lot of stuff from here, but I don't think I've seen a thread about the exact situation I find myself in.

Basically I was a long term Ableton user but gave up music making about 6 years ago. However, I got back into it by buying an MPC Live about 18 months ago. Broadly speaking, I love it, but I've found myself longing for the flexibility and greater feature list that a DAW brings, and decided to fire up Ableton again.

Now, I was pretty much ready to just say goodbye to the MPC and go completely back to Ableton, but it turns out I've just become too fond of the MPC and its ability to get ideas up and running really quickly and intuitively, and I especially love programming drums on it, as well as using pad perform mode, particularly with the latest update.

Here's what I'd really like to achieve: program drums on the MPC and get them to 90% of where I want them to be, all in one track, and just muting parts on and off to give me an idea of how the final arrangement will be. I'd also like to get a basic chord progression down on the MPC as I rely on pad perform quite a bit for this.

At that point, I want to move over to Ableton, where I can embellish on those building blocks with the various instrument plugins I have at my disposal (apart from drums I rely very little on samples, so having a good range of synths to work with is desirable, and a big reason for feeling I've reached the limits of Tubesynth etc), and arrange the track much more easily and quickly than the MPC allows.

But this is where I hit a bit of a wall. I've tried it a couple ways so far: ALS export from the MPC, and opening the MPC software as a plugin within Ableton. Neither works in quite the way I'd like though.

If I do an ALS export and open that in Ableton, I haven't found a good way of replicating the 16 MPC pads using either Native Instruments Battery of Ableton's Drum Rack. In other words, I feel I should be able to drop the relevant samples onto the corresponding virtual pads in drum rack or battery, but the MPC and Ableton pads don't line up, if that makes sense? If I was dealing with a melodic MIDI part I'd just drop a synth plugin onto the track with the MIDI note info and it would play it, but for some reason that doesn't seem to work with drums.

If, on the other hand, I simply open up the MPC software as a plugin and press play, it plays the drum pattern perfectly and I don't have to drag and drop any samples across to the pads etc, but I don't then see how I'm supposed to arrange my drums across different scenes in Ableton, because it just plays the whole 2 bar (or however many I've programmed) loop on a cycle, and I'm not sure how to get tracks in the MPC software to match up with Scenes in Ableton.

I'm sorry if that's a long-winded explanation and I hope it makes sense? Please let me know if anything's unclear.

Thanks!

I think you should question yourself; what's the added benefit for you of using the MPC live over just using Ableton only?

To me, it really reads like you should just be full on Ableton and make good pre-created drumracks with your drumlibrary in it. In addition you could get a good midi controller so you have some knobs to twist, pads to hit and sliders to move.

I can see your point, and I'm probably a unique case, but my laptop doubles as my work computer, which I don't want to have to bring home every night just in case I want to make music (and I don't really want to buy another one) . This way I can get the MPC out here and there when inspiration strikes, and then flesh out those ideas at the weekend etc. I've got a Maschine Mikro I could use alongside Ableton, but the truth is I really just love making beats in the MPC, but am frustrated by the things I either can't do with it, or which take too much time.

I think I might have found a solution. Will report back when I've given it a go.

Wardner wrote:but the truth is I really just love making beats in the MPC, but am frustrated by the things I either can't do with it, or which take too much time.

As a long-time Reason (DAW proper) user, I can totally relate. This is the prime reason I bought an MPC Live (and now, Live 2), and I feel it was probably the best hardware purchase I've made in the past 10 years. Nothing beats having a single self-contained production machine to keep your focus.

Wardner wrote:I think I might have found a solution. Will report back when I've given it a go.

Do share!

So the solution I had in mind didn't work out but the workaround I've settled on for the time being is to explode my drum track and then export everything as an als (ableton) file, but do so as audio rather than midi. The drums take a bit of re-mixing once in Ableton, but they're going to need that doing when doing a mixdown anyway, and it's very easy to then arrange the drums across a whole song, and I can always add more drums from ableton if needed. The most I'll do musically before exporting is a chord progression and bassline, which I can pretty easy recreate in Ableton, and hopefully I can use the extract harmony/melody function in Ableton to achieve that, although it's a bit hit and miss for chords.

Wardner wrote:So the solution I had in mind didn't work out but the workaround I've settled on for the time being is to explode my drum track and then export everything as an als (ableton) file, but do so as audio rather than midi. The drums take a bit of re-mixing once in Ableton, but they're going to need that doing when doing a mixdown anyway, and it's very easy to then arrange the drums across a whole song, and I can always add more drums from ableton if needed. The most I'll do musically before exporting is a chord progression and bassline, which I can pretty easy recreate in Ableton, and hopefully I can use the extract harmony/melody function in Ableton to achieve that, although it's a bit hit and miss for chords.

That's generally my workflow as well; Ableton's my main creating/recording DAW. I have the Live and a handful of hardware synths so I don't have to use the computer if I don't want to make music. But when I want to record, I program the bulk of my drums on one track with the Live/MPC software plugin, explode and export the audio and bring the individual stems into Ableton for further editing/arranging/mixing.