Is this possible? (Audio track of partial sample)

I'm still learning the MPC One workflow, trying to figure out the "right" way to work with a long sample. Let's say the sample is a full rhythm of a whole song of 43 bars and I want to add drums.

Sequence 1 is 1 bar and I add some drum hits there. I set the audio track to use the rhythm sample and set it's start point at bar 1, and end point at bar 2.

Sequence 2 is 1 bar and has some different midi / drum / whatever. So for the audio track I use the same sample, but set it's start point at bar 2 and end point at bar 3.

So far so good. But this only seems to work if I leave the total number of bars on the sequences at 43. For example, if I tell sequence 2 it is only 1 bar, then I can't set the start or end points past bar 1 (in other words, if I say sequence 2 is 5 bars, I couldn't set the start point beyond bar 5).

Okay, so if I leave the sequences total bar parameter at 43, it seems okay. But when I go to build a song out of the sequences, it seems to fall apart. The playback of the sequences seems to just not work. So I'm wondering, am I doing this wrong? Is what I'm trying to do the wrong way to think about things? How should I record one long sample and have the audio tracks in different sequences refer to different regions of the sample so that when the sequences are played in order, the full sample plays back seamlessly?

Thanks.

You're making a good attempt here to think through it... but there are a ton of potential pitfalls... and as such, there isn't any one "correct" approach... it depends on how much work you are willing to put in, what the style of music is, how consistent the playing is, all kinds of factors are going to contribute here.

Let's say you have some electronic music though, you want to drop some drums under it. Personally, I'd figure out the BPM, and regardless of how long it is, see if you can get a click track to play in sync the entire time. Personally, I'd chop it up into sections like chorus, bridge, drop, main, whatever it is... and end up with various 2 bar, 4 bar, 8 bar chops that you can then play in each different sequence.

If on the other hand you've got some acoustic tracks, and they aren't played very well to a BPM, then you're going to have a bit of a harder time here. Why? Well within a 1 bar loop, human playing can miss the marks. It'll sound good, but playing hard notes may sound off. You may hear people refer to this as swing, and an excellent player can swing quite consistently, but a lot of acoustic content will be more or less out of time... which you'll need to decide how you want to manage this. In a DAW, you can move warp markers around and snap transients to beat markers, but on the MPC, you don't really have this luxury. Instead you need to think about how much chopping, and production for each section.

Personally... I'd take this kind of content and try and find good loops within it, play these loops as one shots or clips, and then with timing correct off, I'd play out the drums by ear to fit the groove of the acoustic content. You could also extract the loop, chop it up into a new program, export the hits to the grid, and then timing correct them, but this can frequently sound too mechanical, or even fake.

If you give more info on what you've got and trying to work with I'll see what I can give for tips to help, but at a high level those are probably the two approaches I'd personally consider.

Good luck and welcome to the fam!

Thanks for the response Tao. I guess my question is a little more on the technical side since the song I'm working on doesn't matter much, I'm just trying to understand the MPC One. Maybe to simplify where I'm confused, since I just tried it: It seems intended / acceptable to have an audio track refer to a portion or single bar in the middle of some sample. I'm not sure of the correct way to set the portion of the sample that I want.

In "edit audio", the 3rd q-link knob moves what appears to be a "start" indicator along the top of the track, and the 4th q-link knob moves an "end" indicator. And when I play this from the "edit audio" screen, it plays only the selection I've selected, correctly. If I try that sequence on a song, even by itself, the playback isn't right. It sounds like it starts playing the entire sample. Also on the "edit audio" screen there is an "Edit Start" and "Edit End" button which seems to use the main big knob to change the visible sample entirely. This is different than the indicators the q-link knobs that I mentioned were changing. So, I'm confused on the right way to do this, or even if I'm misusing the tools in a way I shouldn't be.

Otherwise, to your question, if I can't do what I'm trying above, then I'm not sure how to take a long sample like a synth that is changing over time so no part of it could be seamlessly looped, and needs to play through entirely. What would the proper workflow be considering I do want to use short sequences of drums and other stuff? Is it just better to make every sequence a self contained unit and break the synth up so it fits better broken into individual sequences? Should I record individual samples for each sequence instead of one long sample? I can definitely change how I should be thinking about this if I need to.

Thanks again.

Ah okay... I misunderstood what you were after.

If you've got a synth part, then I'd probably start it off as a midi track, so the midi goes out to the synth, and then the audio from the synth comes back in through your audio inputs on the MPC. Note: I am super high leveling this... there are all kinds of settings, midi loops, etc... to worry about... but if this is more what you are after...

This will allow you to record and then edit your notes played and modify your knob CC parameters to do things like filter sweeps, wheel modulation, that sort of thing. Once you've got the synth part down (of if you just wanted to record it without the midi), you can absolutely record out to an audio track. I think the limit of an audio track is 5 minutes 59 seconds or some such, but this is the intended purpose of an audio track.

You should also check out the looper, as this gets up to 16(maybe 8?) bars that you can record and then it will dump into playing the sequence as a loop. You can then move the loop into either an audio track or you can set it up as a clip.

Hope that helps a little bit.