Using MPC for Live Performance

Does anyone have any tips for taking beats from your DAW and importing them into an MPC One or MPC Live to perform live? Would you load all of your stems into one session file? I tried once a while ago and in my experience loading like 15 mp3s, (not even stems) caused high CPU usage. Could've been how I loaded them in or something but I think Ideally I'd love to take advantage of the clip launching. Just my thoughts, would love to hear yours

The MPC isn't really a DAW, and it's much better exporting stems from the MPC into a DAW, and not the other way around.

If I may ask, what specifically are you trying to do, because there are likely much better ways to do it on the MPC, than working with stems.

Straight up I want to use it to perform my beats live without a computer. I want to be able to mute sections of songs/beats that I have and develop a live set strictly on the MPC

This is something I have been doing a bit lately both for live and remix purposes. It can be fairly tortuous but depending on the nature of your music (i.e. how loop-based and repetitive it is) instead of exporting full stems, you can isolate and edit down the relevant parts, import them and rebuild the sequencing in the MPC. You may have to cut corners (DAWs generally export stereo files so check whether you can sum any material to mono; use on board reverbs to rebuild tails; sometimes you may get away with using the plug-in instruments instead of audio). With the older MPCs you could drop the bit rate to create more space but not on this one alas.

You can get as granular as you want with this and get down to slicing up beats and samples into their constituent parts, the smaller the raw audio you’re utilising the better.
Obviously this method won’t work if you’re making free jazz or improv but for most loop-based music it’s doable. I’ve even exported a Cubase project as a MIDI file and reconstructed the song in the MPC using MIDI notes for events and assigning the revelant samples - but that was so grim to do I’d never do it again, I’d rather play the parts in manually.

This method will still yield a fairly large project pegging the CPU occasionally, but it works for me. If load times are an issue try bundling two songs together sharing some material (again, plug-ins can be your friend here). You may not be able to exactly replicate but you can get close

Bro I salute the hell out of you for putting in all that work for one song. I actually also tried that once before and did it successfully but its soooo much work. I'm tryina come up with a 20-25 minute set so that would take forever. I really don't wanna just use my SP 404, but it's looking like the only option at the moment. I'm also looking into the Akai Force as a potential solution

I did it for a whole album actually

Yea bro I got nothing but admiration for you lol. The more I'm looking into the Akai Force though the more I'm convinced that's the solution I'm looking for

I recommend trying the Force first. But since there's no free trial, be prepared for failure.

The arrangement view won't be of help, it cannot handle long timelines. And there are no automated tempo changes, you'll have to adjust tempo manually.

Whoa that's a big deal. I don't understand how they've let that happen.

Would your set include tempo changes?

Yea definitely. I do a lot of different genres so my BPMs are all over the place. I was just thinking about it though, as long as I can edit the initial clip of each song to be independent of the project Tempo, I can manually change the Tempo in that time and launch the next clip. That would give me about 4-8 bars to do it every time which is all I really need. Not the end of the world in that case.

Hi

The mpc is actually a pretty good stem player- the only limitation being that stems tend to fill up the ram pretty fast. I try to keep to 4-8 stems and have made a template where I route everything to the 8 submixes. I then have the submix controls midi mapped to a controller (I uas a Korg nanokontrol) so I have level/mute/fx send controls for all 8 tracks. I have an mpc live and am able to send a click to a drummer out an additional output. Mono things like basses and kicks o save a bit of space..

cheers

Phil

ceeprm wrote:Hi

The mpc is actually a pretty good stem player- the only limitation being that stems tend to fill up the ram pretty fast. I try to keep to 4-8 stems and have made a template where I route everything to the 8 submixes. I then have the submix controls midi mapped to a controller (I uas a Korg nanokontrol) so I have level/mute/fx send controls for all 8 tracks. I have an mpc live and am able to send a click to a drummer out an additional output. Mono things like basses and kicks o save a bit of space..

cheers

Phil

Yoo I appreciate this input. Even if you do 4-8 stems per song, how do you get to the next song in a live setting? I'd like to avoid having to load up a new session for each song in a set. I really want each song to flow seamlessly into the next, so ideally I'd love to load them all in one session. Do you just bite that bullet?

yeah unfortunately thats the downside- I usually cover up the loading time gaps with an external synth or an external delay pedal. Disk streaming for this is desperately needed- people have been talking about it for years but no sign of it yet.

For sets with less stems I sometimes have a few songs per project so theres less loading. Ive been consideing getting an sp404mk2 to run alongside the mpc as it can stream stems off an sd card.

sxrgwrld wrote:

ceeprm wrote:Hi

The mpc is actually a pretty good stem player- the only limitation being that stems tend to fill up the ram pretty fast. I try to keep to 4-8 stems and have made a template where I route everything to the 8 submixes. I then have the submix controls midi mapped to a controller (I uas a Korg nanokontrol) so I have level/mute/fx send controls for all 8 tracks. I have an mpc live and am able to send a click to a drummer out an additional output. Mono things like basses and kicks o save a bit of space..

cheers

Phil

Yoo I appreciate this input. Even if you do 4-8 stems per song, how do you get to the next song in a live setting? I'd like to avoid having to load up a new session for each song in a set. I really want each song to flow seamlessly into the next, so ideally I'd love to load them all in one session. Do you just bite that bullet?

Yea I have a SP404A that I could integrate into the setup too if needed, but personally I would just use it to fill any gaps that Im missing with my main groovebox. I just ordered a used Akai force tho, the disk streaming 1000% sold me. Shouldn't be too many gaps to fill with that thing