Ways of laying a track out

pad-ophiliac wrote:

solah wrote:am i the only one here who digs for records? anyone else?

i dig every chance i get. and since i don't have a keyboard all my $hit is 100% samples.

I'm diggin HARD.
Just moved into a sleepy coastal town where the going rate for an old
LP is 20pence (about 40 cents). Buyin about 20-30 a week at least!!
And they're everywhere.

Perfect timing with my new MPC1K.
My computer is feeling abit lonely!
It's all about sampling for me. That's where the magic happens.

joeybells wrote:

pad-ophiliac wrote:

solah wrote:am i the only one here who digs for records? anyone else?

i dig every chance i get. and since i don't have a keyboard all my $hit is 100% samples.

I'm diggin HARD.
Just moved into a sleepy coastal town where the going rate for an old
LP is 20pence (about 40 cents). Buyin about 20-30 a week at least!!
And they're everywhere.

Perfect timing with my new MPC1K.
My computer is feeling abit lonely!
It's all about sampling for me. That's where the magic happens.

where do you live?

South coast of England, in East Sussex, in a small town near Hastings.
On the subject of sampling, I'm getting the feeling almost everybody's
given up?!? Alot of the hiphop and dance music I'm hearin recently sounds a bit dry and softsynthish, naa'mean? like presets with Apple Loops.
Alot of stuff soundin' like it's been put together in Playstation2 to rarted.
Too many people got the same sample CD's, that's sheeet.. I guess in this world where everyone has a laptop and access to music production software it's stuff like diggin, recording sounds and musicians urself, funny old bits of equipment, choppin ur own s***, real musical knowledge etc etc that's going to set the men from the boyz....

Go diggin! I went out yesterday morning with £2 ($4) in my pocket and came home with a stack of beauties. Gonna chop those badboys up to within an inch of their life! When you guys are sampling from vinyl into your mpc's, do you ever process it on the way?? Like through a pedal or something? I took some beats off an old vinyl yesterday, mono, through my dbx channel strip (adding tube warmth and a tiny bit of EQ, then into the MPC). Those beatz sound SUPERHEAVYWEIGHT now they're hopped up and rearranged, let me tell you!

How comes you lot are so tight wid ur techniques??

I started recording some melodica today. Bounced it down into the MPC, now it's locked in2 the goove. I thinkk it's good to have anything that's part of the groove sequenced on the mpc and other stuff played live into logic. keep it nice and loose and funky and real

if people have never tooken a music class or played an instrument then they cant really make tight music.

wtf is this nonsense hahah sooooo wrong. are you saying the mpc itself isn't an instrument?

mpc was the first instrument i learned (and only, as of now, besides turntable). i produced all of Edge City without knowing how to read music. only now am i finishing my first semester of a music theory class. couldn't read music, didn't konw what a quarter note was, nothing.

if it wasn't hard to make good hip hop beats, why do so many people suck? because it's not easy. btw i dig daily.

joey - i did the same thing for a while, samples and drum in the mpc, additional melodies in reason. however, now that i have a midi controller going into my mpc (which controls reason as well) i use the mpc sequencer exclusively.

Nice one Antonym, that gives me some ideas.
Specially regarding chords.
And I agree, you don't NEED music theory knowledge to make hits,
but it sure helps, and all the biggest HipHop tracks have been produced by people who KNOW their craft inside out.

One slightly off the topic question.
Is it possible to get rid of all unused samples in the MP1k?

When you guys are sampling from vinyl into your mpc's, do you ever process it on the way??


Word,
Sometimes i'll compress the sh** out of some samples on the way in or freek it out with the KAOS pad. usually i will resample it through an effect if its necesarry...
What made u want to stop using ur Computer?
I find the MPC and the computer together open up endless possibilities...

Don't wanna stop using my Mac forever.
Just finding that the MPC keeps things simple and heavy.
Also finding that the computer gives me too many reasons not to
get busy with samples.

I'm thinking of buying ProTools M-Powered and easing off on my use of Logic. Now that I'm getting used to the tightness of the mPC I'm finding the timing in Logic is a bit shakey too.

endless possibitlities = too many options = total confusion

To be honest, I've just rediscovered my love of digging!

Don't forget you can rename your sequences (i.e. Intro, Verse1, Chorus, etc...). Having labels rather than a bunch of numbers comes in handy when trying to arrange them -- especially when they're all out of order.

Peace \/
Chisel

this is a great thread.

dlf, i've been getting into preprocessing my samples a LITTLE bit, but only if they need some kind of correction. the unfortunate thing about preprocessing is that it's permenant...and if you'd rather have it not like that in the future, you got problems.

i used to do this alll the time with the sp404's lofi mode. now i try to keep that down, because 1, people started complaining and 2, it's destructive.

Antonym wrote:

if people have never tooken a music class or played an instrument then they cant really make tight music.

wtf is this nonsense hahah sooooo wrong. are you saying the mpc itself isn't an instrument?

.

i never said the mpc wasnt an instrument...so dont get your panties in a bunch....And i said if you HAVE NEVER...so that means if you have no previous knowledge about 4 bars or beats or a metronome, you are clueless about how to make music. Period.

Antonym wrote:this is a great thread.

dlf, i've been getting into preprocessing my samples a LITTLE bit, but only if they need some kind of correction. the unfortunate thing about preprocessing is that it's permenant...and if you'd rather have it not like that in the future, you got problems.

i used to do this alll the time with the sp404's lofi mode. now i try to keep that down, because 1, people started complaining and 2, it's destructive.

when i pre-proccessed samples and keep it that way its because they need to be fixed wether its clipping or hissy or what ever. But when i make beats and sample, i always sample it raw first and then save it and then sample it again and funk with it. That way if i wanna mess with it, i still can with the original. Plus i have 2 harddrives so its extra safe.

man i had no idea what a bar was

but now i'm just being difficult

solah wrote:But when i make beats and sample, i always sample it raw first and then save it and then sample it again and funk with it. That way if i wanna mess with it, i still can with the original. Plus i have 2 harddrives so its extra safe.

Word, that's the way forward. I need to hook a HD up to this baby.
But you could also argue that's it's good to "commit" to something
(like sampling through outboard) as ur narrowing ur options and getting
closer to the desired destination (a finished banger!!).

I spent alot of my younger years scared to commit.
Worrying about resmpling something because I might change my mind later etc etc (kind of same with girlzz). A similar problem for some people is when they save their song under a different name each time because they're scared they might save over something amazing they changed. You just end up confused because you never "committed". And you've got about 20 versions of the same song and you don't know which one to move forward with because there's something good (and different) about all of them!! (kind of like girlzz again!)

Committing is SO important I feel when you making bangers.
It's all about the self confidence in your taste and abilities.
The confidence to say "that's how it is" and just lay it down.
Makes the whole process faster, more fun too.
Am I talkin' s*** or do you lot agree??

solah wrote:if people have never tooken a music class or played an instrument then they cant really make tight music.

this is one of the dumbest things i've ever read in this forum.