Important questions to the pros

A)I make my beats on my mpc 1000, now when I turn my sequence into a song which usually has between 8 to 16 tracks, how do I mix them individually to get that right final sound? By the way I have pro tools with an m-box, but I don't have a midi interface. Is this really necessary.

B)How do I make a good bassline, How do yall go about creating basslines?

C)Finally, like I said I own an mpc 1000, a pentium IV 1GB, an m-box, Tapco speakers with built in preamp, a nice rode mic, and ten fingers. But I would like to play some keyboard on my beats what do u suggest with my setup. And how would I go about hooking all this **** up with the keyboard.

The beauty of having your MPC synced to your computer's sequencer is tempo mapping. I have Nuendo start my MPC via MIDI, it starts the instant I press play in Nuendo. If I have setup Nuendo correctly (tempo, midi settings, recording inputs, tracks etc.) It will perfectly record tempo-mapped bars. This way you can use snap and everything is on the bar, very handy if you ask me. I actually had not been doing this until I got the MPC and now I think it is the right way, at least for me.

You can get away with recording the audio without the MIDI sync, but then you will have to edit the wav recording so there is no space at the beginning and end etc. With the MIDI sync recording it only records a bar or two or three etc. without this empty space. I got away without tempo mapped recording for a few years, you could if you wanted to.

fernandez wrote:A)I make my beats on my mpc 1000, now when I turn my sequence into a song which usually has between 8 to 16 tracks, how do I mix them individually to get that right final sound? By the way I have pro tools with an m-box, but I don't have a midi interface. Is this really necessary.

B)How do I make a good bassline, How do yall go about creating basslines?
You have seveal ways to make baslines. I got two favorites.
1- I filter out the base from records off the turntable. If you find some good records with strong base you can filter out the low and compress it all in the 1k.

2- Get you a sound module. I have a Xv-2020. I sample a few sounds from there into the 1k, then filter it down to make something I'm hearing in my head.

There are more ways then that, but those are the way I do them

C)Finally, like I said I own an mpc 1000, a pentium IV 1GB, an m-box, Tapco speakers with built in preamp, a nice rode mic, and ten fingers. But I would like to play some keyboard on my beats what do u suggest with my setup. And how would I go about hooking all this **** up with the keyboard.

For this are you going to use a soft synth, or real keys. If you go the soft synth route you can get a USB keyboard, like a oxygen 8 or radium 61 and use pro tools to record and then mix with your 1k. Or you can buy a module or rack to record. I would recommend a JV 1080, motif rack, since you already have pro tools you can record everything into there.

You might need a midi interface so you can lock all you stuff onto a clock, I don't know how it would work with a m-box, but once you expand off the 1k and start to add more gear, weather its a soft synth or hardware you are going to need some type of midi so everything starts at the same time.

Hope this helps

b) basslines: I'm playing around with good old Sine waves, using a PGM you can get from my site if you want. That sounds like what I hear on hip-hop - just a pure deep note with nothing on top. Or, take the same sine wave program, bit crunch it, play chords, to get slightly evil aliasing FX out of it.