By voodooclown
Thu Jul 12, 2007 9:03 am
Hi people
Got my first MPC yesterday, the 500. I normally make music with Reason and Logic, Reason for dance Logic for guitar based stuff so an MPC is a bit different, but I'm moving and won't have access to my stuff for quite a while so I wanted something to be able to use for making music without the need for a PC etc, hence the 500.
Preamble over....
So far I am mightily impressed with the 500, sounds great, easy(ish) to use, very compact and portable and the learning curve seems reasonable, so I'm looking forward to learning more and getting more out of it.
As a few words of advice for any other new MPC owners I'd say autoload and save/load. Ok, we all know that nobody is going to read the manual right off, you have to plug it in, have a play etc, so skip that part and go to when you first sit down with your new pride and joy to make your own music.
The first thing I would advise anybody to do is turn off the autoload. When you're new the last thing you wnt is a bunch of sounds and patterns you didn't ask for sitting there, taking up memory and basically taunting you. So get rid of them and turn autoload off!
Second thing, and this took me a bit of time, but I did find some help right here on these forums, learn the save and load commands. In my opinion, the save all/project and load project. For fellow newbies, basically first load in some sounds, you can load programs (a bunch of assigned samples, like a drum kit) or individual samples. Once you've done this you can make some music. So go ahead and play. Once you're ready, you want to save the killer beat, so, if you use the save all (project) option, you save EVERYTHING. The sounds, the sequence, the whole thing. If you create a new folder you can keep each tune and its components all together, how clean and easy is that?
Those two things would have saved me a couple of hours of swearing yesterday! All the things I mentioned are covered in the manual, but the workflow of doing that isn't. I honestly think for a newbie this might help, along with getting a spare CF card to back everything up!
Hope thats good advice, I'm sure if I'm talking crap an experienced user will put me right.
Lastly, its good to be here...this MPC machine might just catch on you know!
Voodooclown
Got my first MPC yesterday, the 500. I normally make music with Reason and Logic, Reason for dance Logic for guitar based stuff so an MPC is a bit different, but I'm moving and won't have access to my stuff for quite a while so I wanted something to be able to use for making music without the need for a PC etc, hence the 500.
Preamble over....
So far I am mightily impressed with the 500, sounds great, easy(ish) to use, very compact and portable and the learning curve seems reasonable, so I'm looking forward to learning more and getting more out of it.
As a few words of advice for any other new MPC owners I'd say autoload and save/load. Ok, we all know that nobody is going to read the manual right off, you have to plug it in, have a play etc, so skip that part and go to when you first sit down with your new pride and joy to make your own music.
The first thing I would advise anybody to do is turn off the autoload. When you're new the last thing you wnt is a bunch of sounds and patterns you didn't ask for sitting there, taking up memory and basically taunting you. So get rid of them and turn autoload off!
Second thing, and this took me a bit of time, but I did find some help right here on these forums, learn the save and load commands. In my opinion, the save all/project and load project. For fellow newbies, basically first load in some sounds, you can load programs (a bunch of assigned samples, like a drum kit) or individual samples. Once you've done this you can make some music. So go ahead and play. Once you're ready, you want to save the killer beat, so, if you use the save all (project) option, you save EVERYTHING. The sounds, the sequence, the whole thing. If you create a new folder you can keep each tune and its components all together, how clean and easy is that?
Those two things would have saved me a couple of hours of swearing yesterday! All the things I mentioned are covered in the manual, but the workflow of doing that isn't. I honestly think for a newbie this might help, along with getting a spare CF card to back everything up!
Hope thats good advice, I'm sure if I'm talking crap an experienced user will put me right.
Lastly, its good to be here...this MPC machine might just catch on you know!
Voodooclown