MPC – YouTube Answers – Import and Manipulate
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YouTube answers approach
Shooting these videos has been a huge learning experience for me. I have been fortunate to have a very positive group of subscribers who have engaged in questions about the MPC, and because of that I am going to work on answering them. My hope is that by making content that directly responds to your questions, I can create a library of music production videos that quickly resolve questions musicians often have. I have been deeply enjoying the MPC because I don’t need anything else; this, combined with its standalone flexibility, means I can get work done efficiently. My typical style of production is to record live instruments into the MPC, but it has become clear to me that others often use it differently.
A question that has often come up is: “How do I process content taken from a song?” I have shown how to process vinyl in other videos, so now I want to show how I work with content taken from a Pro Tools session. In this video I take a couple of small loops from Dwight Schenk’s song “Plus a Hotel”, which appears on his album “Benefits of Insomnia”, released in 2017. It was a pretty quiet release but it is available for others to hear now, and I am very proud of how it turned out. You can check it out by clicking here.
Dwight is an easy musician to work with. He comes to the fiercemule frequency factory with a plan and set goals every time, meaning we are able to accomplish a lot in the course of a day, and we have more music coming soon. Because of his gift I have this great content to play along with. Thank you Dwight.
Chopping from different sources
When I am chopping up loops from Pro Tools I do a couple of things: I make sure that the song was recorded to click, and I make my chops using grid mode. This means that I know the content’s BPM. However, if you don’t have the luxury of knowing the BPM, you can go to >menu>sample edit on the MPC, where you can set the in and out point of your sample. After this, tell the MPC how many beats the loop is, and it will automatically figure out your BPM. Another way to get BPM is to use the tap tempo. By setting up BPM you are preparing your session and allowing yourself to easily speed up and slow down music. It also makes it much easier to chop your sample. I demonstrate how to figure out a content’s BPM in my Chopping Vinyl video – please check it out for more details.
Flexibility with BPM
Once you have the BPM figured out you can fly your content into one of the many MPC work environments and can start to manipulate your sample. This video shows you how to load in audio content, and how to assign it to a pad, an audio track, or even a clip. It then demonstrates the flexibility available for creating. After this is set up I show how to take some great-sounding stock sounds from the included MPC library and how to drop a quick beat over the music.
Thanks for checking out this article and YouTube video. My goal is to show you all the different possibilities of the MPC, helping you to open up your creativity. I love to hear about how you make music, and any comments and questions that you leave on my YouTube channel will give me content for future videos. Also, be sure to subscribe.
If you are a fellow Canadian and you want to talk gear in a music store near you, please check out my travel schedule on my Main page. I currently tour the entire country coast to coast and am always looking for new restaurant recommendations ;). If you want to know any specifics about where I am be sure to send me an e-mail.