Forum to discuss all matters relating to the MPC1000 and MPC2500 operating systems created by 'JJ' (all versions).
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By arebee Tue Jan 29, 2008 11:09 am
im trying to get a sequence to play at half speed, im not in a position to alter the sequence bpm tempo, but i need a 2 bar pattern to be 'stretched out' by 200% to get a 4bar pattern that runs at half the rate.

it can be done easily in any of my midi daw's, but in order to get any mpc seq's into a daw, it must be saved as a .MID, which loses all mpc specifics, like note event decay/tune etc......then saved back as a .MID, and reloaded in the mpc, but i need all the note specific data integral to the piece, so i'm stuck. are there any ways of changing seq rates properly?

any ingenious w/o's?

By dtaa pla muk Tue Jan 29, 2008 11:44 am
yeah man i saw your feature request for "halving" or "doubling" and doing all kinds of crazy cool things to the speed of a midi file. it's good thinking.

freezerman was telling me about his yamaha (rmx1 was it?) that could do a TON of stuff like that.

however in your case there are a few options

1 - manually...blah
2 - record the midi to a DAW and see if you can do it there. i know if you record the midi into a likewise-bpmed reaper project, then trim the midi file and get it sitting just right, and then grab one end while holding the ALT key and drag it around, you can stretch and manipulate the midi file.
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By arebee Tue Jan 29, 2008 1:16 pm
Nym wrote:yeah man i saw your feature request for "halving" or "doubling" and doing all kinds of crazy cool things to the speed of a midi file. it's good thinking.

freezerman was telling me about his yamaha (rmx1 was it?) that could do a TON of stuff like that.

however in your case there are a few options

1 - manually...blah

[impossible in this lifetime! heheh - too much detail in there....]

2 - record the midi to a DAW -

[no need if im exporting the seq as a midifile]

.... and see if you can do it there. i know if you record the midi into a likewise-bpmed reaper project, then trim the midi file and get it sitting just right, and then grab one end while holding the ALT key and drag it around, you can stretch and manipulate the midi file.


yeah sure, i can do alll number of ridicuous things to my midifiles in my DAW - dp is the wildest midi editor i have ever used,

but the core of my mpc stuff is that its full of MPC note variation data [decay/tune etc...] that i need if i want to keep the character in these seq's, as soon as mpc 'exports' the seq>'.mid' file, ALL that stuff is lost,ONLY note on/off data is kept.....so i lose everything i'm trying to copy just to stretch a seq's length.

cheers nymz but its a mad workaround i need - either that or JJ to sort out the seq edity end of this JJOS v1 and v2!
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By Bugfix Tue Jan 29, 2008 3:01 pm
I know 1more workaround inside mpc, but it's bit tedious and will eat up notes under some circumstances. Beside that I requested MIDI stretch in seq edit about 20times during os1 development. I'd love to see that.

workaround:
say, you've got 2 bars and you want it to stretch it over 4bars?

select an unused sequence, make it 1bar, change its Tsig to 1/32
now, go to seq edit and copy track/s you want to this new sequence,
open Tsig window, now the tedious thing: change Tsig of each bar to 2/32,
now you can copy tracks back to 4/4, note duration will not change.
it will not work if you have off quantised tracks and yeah, I know this workaround is worth sh!t
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By arebee Tue Jan 29, 2008 3:36 pm
Bugfix wrote:I know 1more workaround inside mpc, but it's bit tedious and will eat up notes under some circumstances. Beside that I requested MIDI stretch in seq edit about 20times during os1 development. I'd love to see that.

workaround:
say, you've got 2 bars and you want it to stretch it over 4bars?

select an unused sequence, make it 1bar, change its Tsig to 1/32
now, go to seq edit and copy track/s you want to this new sequence,
open Tsig window, now the tedious thing: change Tsig of each bar to 2/32,
now you can copy tracks back to 4/4, note duration will not change.
it will not work if you have off quantised tracks and yeah, I know this workaround is worth sh!t


hey hey hey, mbe i'll give that a go, like i was sorta precious about the stuff in there - but i've a feeling this is gonna throw up a few new bits to check out, so ill digest it properly then see how it goes.
nice one buGfiX.....infact u may have a massive point there, essentially its all in the time sigs!! yep ill start messing in no time,
props dude.
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By arebee Tue Jan 29, 2008 4:01 pm
yo thats fresh

yep its definately stretched, it even feels like its a timestretch cos of the data was quite high density event rolls, sweeping in n out of filters and tuning curves, u r right about note lengths not changing - thats fine, i kinda need all as it was, but spread out, i just add a little 'decay' higher than before in the note variations......

just tried it on one track first to get into the theory of whats happened exactly - i mean i get time sigs and their results, just didnt click to try this idea before!, very interesting solutions - cos its has created nice variant of what i had.

i needed a pattern that sounds native at 101bpm, but was porting it to a new song idea thats intended to be 170-175, so i knew its gonna be a bit slower that the native rate if i doubled the lengths then ran the new tempo (not202 but 170), so i knew it would be off a bit - but this workaround has kind of specialised it further to be pretty cool sounding.

mega creds earthling.
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By Bugfix Tue Jan 29, 2008 4:31 pm
It prolly sounds stretched, because things like attack and decay times are tempo based,
so if you changed tempo from 101 to 170 those "times" are shorter.

What's buggin me more is when I first started messing with Tsigs I found
it's weird that simply copying ie 4/4 beat to ie 2/4 wont stretch it, but it will
add second bar to it, and the beat will remain the same.
Seems like note placement in track is more important than its relative position to bar lenght.
I would like to hear an opinion of more advanced user who used older mpcs, and knows how Tsigs should operate.

By dtaa pla muk Tue Jan 29, 2008 4:34 pm
whoaaa, good thinking. very nice.


yeah, seq edit more and more needs some loving care.
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By elektrik_muz Tue Jan 29, 2008 9:48 pm
Nym wrote:freezerman was telling me about his yamaha (rmx1 was it?) that could do a TON of stuff like that.


Sounds more RS9000 to me. Not a perfect machine, but a lot of advanced and useful features. The kind of features Akai tends to sleep on...

By dtaa pla muk Tue Jan 29, 2008 10:55 pm
correct, i believe it was the RS9000. very cool things he was describing.
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By elektrik_muz Tue Jan 29, 2008 11:11 pm
Actually, that was a typo, I meant RS7000.

By dtaa pla muk Tue Jan 29, 2008 11:25 pm
haha dammit muz stop calling my hole-filled memory to attention
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By arebee Tue Jan 29, 2008 11:27 pm
fkin snipers everywhere maaaann!

; )
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By elektrik_muz Tue Jan 29, 2008 11:44 pm
Hey, it's not like mine is any better....
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By arebee Tue Jan 29, 2008 11:46 pm
haha gotcha,

out of the woods he cometh.
rB)