New to the MPC production world? Got a music production question that's not really specific to any particular MPC? Try your luck here and get help from our experienced members.
By Olby Mon Aug 25, 2008 9:40 pm
Whattup everybody I am the new guy and got a question that is bugging me for a few days.

Now see I got my little home studio setup and what I wanted to do is to control MPC's MIDI track VOLUME & PAN from CUBASE. It is me or it is impossible to do it either with Cubase or MPC it self...
What I have done so far is that I created a sequence that has 16 MIDI tracks and each track is set to use one of the 16 midi out channels of the MPC. Now the beat is sounding ok on the MPC so then I added 16 MIDI tracks in cubase. Just to let you know that I have connected both MIDI in and out from PC to my EMU card and MPC is nicely syncing in time with cubase and as I said before what I want to do is to control those 16 MPC midi tracks from cubase while it is syncing. I tried everything but it still ignores any volume, pan, etc. changes sent to MPC. None of the MPC sync options help either. It apparently does receive signal from MPC as the meter on MIDI track in Cubase is showing midi activity... I am not genius in midi stuff but imo this should be possible.. Or it isn't and I have totally **** up understanding of what midi can and cannot do?

Did a quick dig on this subject but nothing useful came out...
By Olby Tue Aug 26, 2008 7:49 am
Well over night I thought about the chain in which this setup theoretically should work. So here we go:

1) I create a beat entirely on MPC
2) Connect MPC midi out to CUBASE midi in
3) Connect CUBASE midi out to MPC midi in
4) Sync them up so that they recieve midi data and mmc and plays correctly in sync
5) NOW! The real deal... MPC should send MIDI data to cubase and cubase should receive it -- then it should send the midi data back to MPC and MPC should playback it through it's internal sampler.

basically it is a double loop in which the mpc should play back only incoming midi data but not what it sends. This way it should be possible to do full song arrangements only using a simple 4 bar loop coming out of the mpc by muting and un-muting incoming midi tracks. I know this sounds really awkward BUT in real situation when a person is in recording booth I do not want to start changing my beat then waiting until it tracks out it to Cubase and so on. This approach is really hands down to do this.

and yes, by the way at first I tried to export my beat as midi and then open it up in cubase so that I do not have to send out data from MPC but only send it in from Cubase. but I hit a huge problem that standard midi files do not support some of the features from MPC thus the beat in MIDI introduces some artifacts like incorrect sample pitching, etc.

this is hard one, :)