Building song around vocal track from audio

Is it possible to build a song around a vocal track in the MPC x like you can in cubase? Can you track Tempo from a vocal track? Can you find the key the vocal is in? Or the key a instrument is in? Does it show every note from a vocal track via instrument or a vocal?

The mpc does not do audio to midi like for example in Studio One with integrated melodyne..

It does a decent job of working out the pitch of individual notes and chords, i.e. one shots. Beyond that, no, as elstebbano says, that requires powerful DAW running high end software on poweful CPU hardware, the MPC is ultimately just a glorified groovebox.

i use acapellas of songs i want to either remix or incorporate phrases from in my tracks. MPC seems to autodetect the key at least when the vocals are sung at pitch (and correctly i think)

chrisroland wrote:i use acapellas of songs i want to either remix or incorporate phrases from in my tracks. MPC seems to autodetect the key at least when the vocals are sung at pitch (and correctly i think)

The MPC might detected what note is a sample, but it's not going to detect what key is a sampled melody, not to my knowledge.

It seems like working in a daw is the way to go for building a track around a vocal. What program would be recommended? Will abelton do that sort of thing. I would like a program the mpc would work with. Thanks for all the comments. Super helpful.

The MPC will work with any DAW, no matter how you wish to integrate (e.g. via MIDI, ableton link, exporting wav stems, using the MPC VST plugin etc). You can however export projects in ALS format, but I'm not sure how good or reliable that is.

Regarding vocals, you can of course use these in an MPC irrespective of whether the key has been detected, you'll just have to use your ears to match your instruments to the correct key for the vocal. This is what we've always done, long before the MPC had any kind of pitch detection. But for fast workflow a DAW is going to be 1000 times better.

Thanks so much for helping me navigate the rabbit hole. I'm really just a vocalist that wants to build music around my vocals. I'm in the 45 day return period and wondering if I should keep my mpc x or just go completely with daw.

It's hard to figure out what you're trying to do. What kind of workflow are you after? Don't you have a reference pitch when you sing, like piano or guitar or something? Or do you sing without accompaniment and then you try to figure out what you sang? And rhythm as well, no click or drum track to sing over?

In the latter case, I'd recommend Ableton Live where you can freely match and align the project time grid to the audio like Cubase's "time warp", and convert the vocal melody to MIDI notes. Maybe you'll need pitch correction too.

sampler > resample L / R and click the tuning fork. thats how you can find out what key your song is in.