Dkstr Does MPC part I
Link to song:
So I got Akai MPC 500 from Ebay. This is a REALTIME documentation of me trying to do my first song with it. I’ve watched couple of tutorials and understand the basics of the UI, otherwise I’m complete newbie with this machine. My goal is to make one song this saturday and document it here, it could be helpful for somebody. So lets begin.
1:06 pm
I got my MPC for cheap because it’s inputs are broken. It’s not big of a deal for me because I would probably slice my samples with computer anyhow. You can do all that in MPC too but I’m going to skip that for now.
So I have to upload all the samples to CF card with my computer. I found out theres a simple program called MPC Maid that lets you configure kits that you can upload to MPC. Some apparently call this cheating, I say its awesome.
http://mpcmaid.sourceforge.net/
Every Program (that I referred as kits above) can have 4 x 12 sounds in them, and apparently you can also layer sounds to pads (12 of them) but I dont know if I can choose the layer with velocity or if they just play at the same time.. Now I’ll sip some coffee, eat some salamimakkara and try to find some samples from my computer. I think I will have to format my CF card somehow to upload the samples to it. We’ll see what happens.
2:03 pm
Picking samples to use is really hard! But also exciting to do BEFORE knowing what its going to end up as! Im laying out samples as in one tutorial dude did: Bank A is drums (1 row of kicks, 1 for snares, 1 for hats and 1 for others), B for bass-samples, C and D for everything else. For sake of getting into the real business, I’m using a lot of various LittleGPT samples, some that I’ve sampled myself from some shitty cds, and I’ll throw in couple of short stabs etc. from my Auduino synth and from some VSTs.
2:21 pm
Ok! Samples chosen. MPC Maid exported dir thats 1.9mb. I want to make something really dirty sounding, thumping stuff, so not much soul samples or groovy basslines. Now it’s time for a cigarette and more coffee. After that, the boring part with CF Card and all. I have a card thats 128mb but havent tried it yet. My MPC is stock version, 16mb of space, but I guess I can fit my samples in there even though I’ve read that demo songs and samples take some space. According to my knowledge, the CF Card is just for moving stuff in/out of MPC and everything needs to be stored to internal RAM.
3:36 PM
Samples loaded! I think something went wrong though, samples are in different pads that I supposedly put them in. But Banks work correctly. Uploading was really simple, put MPC to Mode+Load, Usb, drag and drop folder to MPC drive. Now for the weird part! Saving and loading programs from the card to memory is something that I need to practise more. I thought that you just load the program once from card and after that you save it to memory and it stays there..nope. It seems to work that way that you have to load your project everytime to memory, but you keep the save files at card all the time. I’m probably wrong but I’ll keep this state of mind for today. I didnt do any editing to samples before moving them, so now I’ll figure out how to edit sample volumes, pitches and stuff like that on MPC. It looks pretty simple..
7:03 PM
I’ve started again couple of times, my sample selection was is shitty, but I try to cook something up with them anyways. Also, laying sounds in MPC Maid wasnt that necessary since pretty soon I discovered I would like to have multiple copies of this and that sound available at all times.. etc. I also accidentally erased my sequences or something couple of times.. Well, not going to give up, battle continues!
11:55 PM
Actually I’ve been done for couple of hours already, but wanted to eat, watch some tv and all.. I checked out how to chain sequences to songs but I think thats kinda boring, so I ended up recording live mixing with muting unwanted tracks and throwing some stuff live in the mix. I really liked to play like that with my Roland MC303 (which is actually pretty much the only other hardware interface I ever learned well enough to perform live with). That said, this is nothing really spectacular but I learned the interface good enough to continue from this. I played everything live when recording the tracks and sequences, and also most of the pitching of the samples is done live (mostly because I couldnt find way to do it with precision:D)
Heres the song(again):
Conclusions:
+++++++ Pros:
- Really like the touch and the swing of the machine (placebo or not) feels almost like cheating!
- Forces you to think differently with writing / jamming, I think every electronic musician should try to write at least one song with every machine/software they get their hand on to!
- No internet, no bullshit alt-tabbing around!
- It has just the right amount of limits, you can have zillion parts on songs (not in my demo), but the nature of the machine drove me to do simpler stuff
- UI is pretty simple and straight forward for sound manipulation…
———- Cons:
- File managing, saving and loading seems to be over complicated, logic of CF Card and internal memory and where to save what to keep good workflow is mystery to me.
- My index finger is sore from pounding the pads, they really need to be hitted HARD ( I actually turned velocities off from pads, I readed that pads will soften with time)
- Havent found yet fast way to control volume of separate tracks, that would be awesome..my child like optimism says its possible.
- Batteries run low in about 8 hours? I got some noise to my recording because of that too, earlier tests didnt have any.
Verdict
Not going to leave Ableton Live but I liked the feeling of working with this box, next I’ll have to try its features with controlling other hardware through midi..
