My drums are choppy

Hey everybody!! I am new to the forum and Im glad I found it. Im new to the MPC and I have the mpc 2500 LE. I have a problem with making drum beats. So I sample a drum beat and I chop it and get it on the pads. And then I begin recording the sequence. First I do the kick drum and then the snare for 2 bars. Everything is okay. This is where my problem comes in. When I overdub the hi hats on top of the kick and snare the recording gets choppy. I play back the sequence and the hi hat and kick drum or the hi hat and snare never play back together. Sometimes the hi hat will record and then sometimes the bass and snare. Its driving me insane. Please help and let me know what im doing wrong.

welcome to the forums...

if your pad performance not comes out like you want it to be, it is most likely the time correction that is messing with your hits. some people need it badly because they have no natural rhythm and so the machine helps them in creating straight lines, but for others this is just anoying. if you have good timing then just turn off the timing correction in the t.c. window.
a faster way to turn it on and off is to hold the note repeat button and then deselect whatever mode is selected so none of the steps is highlighted.
turning of the t.c. will change the appearance of the grid in the grid edit window - there you will see all 96 steps per mesure now. you can turn the t.c. on and of as you like - tracks recorded with t.c. will stay unaffected by this.

peace jo

Great thanks!! I have one more question. Should I record each drum on a its own track? Like kick drum on track 1 and snare on track 2 etc? Thanks for the help. If anyone else has any other ideas of what the problem may be of the sounds cutting eachother off please post!! Thanks very much.

if you record only one drum per track or a whole drumset performance is up to you. generally people tend to use one track per drum for easier editing and muting of certain elements. some people can come up with better boom bap if they record say kick and snare in one pass and on one track - you can always make a copy of that track afterwards and the delete the snare from one and the kick from the other track. to do this hit erase and then the pad you want to erase and you will see "all events" change to the selected pad. of course you can mess with every single note in step edit also.

another idea for the cutting problem might be the pads set to note on instead of one shot -> program edit, select pad, hit window...

peace jo

Turn off timing correct, it took me a while to figure out but turning it off altogether, relying on your own timing worked better for me.

Yo Tripleoptix, I think it must be your poly/mono option. If the mono option is turned on, one sound will mute another sound when playing back. Actually it means you can playback only one sound at the same time.

Go to program, hit the params (f)button, and if I'm correct right on top you probably see the word mono. Change it to poly and try again.

Yo everybody thank you for all of your input. Nemco you were correct, the poly mono option completly fixed the problem. Thank you very much.

BostonGreen wrote:Turn off timing correct, it took me a while to figure out but turning it off altogether, relying on your own timing worked better for me.

very true.