Share your knowledge on these two classic MPCs

By fritzifratzi Wed Mar 26, 2008 1:30 am
i think the mpc is good as a scratchpad and there is always the danger to get stuck on 4 bar loop. once you want to do whole songs etc you need a lot of discipline i find. I'm not great at it but

here is one way:

start with a four bar loop with 10 tracks, eg kik snare hh bass cowbell etc
name all tracks in that seq
copy that loop 5 times over to new sequences
change individual tracks
put together in song mode
convert to new sequence
...

on a computer you can see what you are doing, on an mpc60 you have to listen and grind it out in your head, after a while i started to prefer it...

i agree that it never sounds the same once it's in the computer. the best way i find is to put a bar with 4 clicks at the beginning of the sequence, then record each track solo into the DAW without midi clock or sync. then line up all trax in the DAW along the click. It's cumbersome but if you have an 8 input card that would be a breeze...

if you record all tracks as a stereo mix into your DAW, play around with compression etc to pump it up...

it did it with 'Blistas', check link below

http://www.myspace.com/thehomeoffice

By zapp Wed Mar 26, 2008 3:25 pm
co-sign with fritzifratzi...
I personnally don`'t really like that faze of the music making because it's really time consuming if you have a lot of variations but it can be very rewarding.... If you're making a standard beat the structure would usually be Intro/Main/Chorus/Main/Bridge/Main/Chorus/Outro
keep each part in multiples of 2 or 4 if it's a 4/4 beat and just split each sound that will be changing or coming in at different steps in separate Tracks to really be able to do it easily. I just Mute the undesired Tracks from each different sequence and I find this is the easiest way.

One good thing is to always lay every single track and variation on let`'s say Sequence - 1 and play arround with the muting of different tracks in rreal time.This will give you a good idea of what variations sound good before or after each other and really allow ytou to experiment.

By fritzifratzi Wed Mar 26, 2008 5:09 pm
totally!

also:

one of the best functions of the 60 is that the mixer inside can be set to 'sequence' (to my amazement i have yet to see that in any other mpc - maybe the 3000 has it also), so you can make a different mix for each sequence, including fx send/return, that way you can not only mute/unmute tracks but also change loudness, panning etc to make the mix more dynamic without actually changing any notes...