New user! :-) A few early queries...

Hey y'all,

Just got my 500 in the post today after weeks of waiting and it's the biz. Been reading up on the manual and on here to try and get grooving quickly but still got a few qs, can anyone help a newbie?

1. I am finding it hard to get a consistent BPM using the tap button, any ideas or tips on how best to gauge what this is?

2. I use a yamaha qy90 sequencer and have some choons laid down on it that I want to try out with some chromatic samples I got in a music mag, is there any way to use the 500 as a sound module playing back these samples?

3. Lastly, with this baby around, how can I convince my missus that I am gonna get anything done round the place?!

Cheers guys.
gwm

1. are you trying to match up a loop to a bpm, is this the problem? Or are you just trying to set the bpm to a specific value?

2. One way of doing this would be to do all of the Chromatic sample work on your mpc using the 500's sequencer and then set the mpc to recieve midi clock messages so that when you press play on the Yamaha the 500 will play as well...but hey that's just one way of doing it.

3. LOL, that's a tough one.

Hey upright, cheers for the reply.

Upright wrote:1. are you trying to match up a loop to a bpm, is this the problem? Or are you just trying to set the bpm to a specific value?

Yeah... got a beat from a track intro that I have sampled... I have trimmed it to a single bar length and then tap along to it... just thinking about it maybe I should tap to the whole tune? Or maybe work out the BPM from the trim start and end points? I know the beat has a fixed tempo as its from a drum machine.

Upright wrote:2. One way of doing this would be to do all of the Chromatic sample work on your mpc using the 500's sequencer and then set the mpc to recieve midi clock messages so that when you press play on the Yamaha the 500 will play as well...but hey that's just one way of doing it.

So how do I assign each of the chromatic samples to midi notes, as opposed to pads on the 500?

Upright wrote:3. LOL, that's a tough one.

1:45am last night, gotta leave for work in 10 minutes, I'm shattered LOL!! Having another wee problem, if I have a sample that lasts longer than a bar (in this case, a piece of film dialogue, it gets truncated at bar end. Any ideas?

ghostlywhitemachines wrote:
So how do I assign each of the chromatic samples to midi notes, as opposed to pads on the 500?

When you assign the samples to your pads they automatically have a corresponding midi note. So lets say you assign a horn sample to bank A pad 1 , the default midi note for that pad might be B0.So if you were to connect a midi keyboard to the midi input on the mpc 500 and play the B0 note on the keyboard subsequently the bank A pad 1 would be triggered.