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Beatmaking on the Free JJOS By Andy Avgousti (MPC-Tutor) Published by MPC-Samples.com 2010 Text: Copyright © Andy Avgousti 2006 Audio files: Copyright © MPC-Samples.com 2006 Andy Avgousti has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the Author of this work. Notice of Rights All rights reserved. No part of this book nor any of its associated tutorial files may be reproduced, resold, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the Publisher. Notice of Liability The author and publisher have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of the information herein. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors nor Publishers (MPCSamples.com), nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any damages to be caused either directly or indirectly by the instructions contained in this book, or by the software or hardware products described herein. The Author and Publisher are not endorsed nor affiliated in any way to ‘Inmusic Brands Inc’ MPC-Samples.com is a trading name of Beat Box Digital LTD, a company registered in England & Wales, Company No. 6810062. Registered Office: 67/69 Dunkeld Road, Sheffield, S11 9HN
Before You Begin: Check Your Operating System! To gain full benefit from this version of the book, please ensure you have the latest version of the free JJ OS installed in your MPC! To check your currently installed OS, press MODE (so it lights up) and then press pad 10 (OTHER), then GLOBAL (F1). At the top, you should see the OS ‘Version’. For example: JJ OS: 3.15 Date: 13, AUG. 2012 If you don’t see the ‘JJ’ at the front, then you have the official Akai OS. To get the free JJ OS, go to JJ’s site and download the ‘Free’ OS BIN file from the following page depending on your MPC model: MPC1000: http://www7a.biglobe.ne.jp/~mpc1000/ MPC2500: http://www7a.biglobe.ne.jp/~mpc1000/mpc2500/ Transfer this BIN file to your CF card (chapter 4 of this book explains how to do this in more detail). Place the CF card in your MPC and hold down the WINDOW key. Switch on your MPC and when prompted, press REC. If you do have a ‘JJ’ OS installed but the version number is not as high as the one currently on JJ’s site, then please load the latest official version into your MPC please refer to chapter 005 – Loading Part 2 for information on how to update your OS via the JJ web site. Please note that you can change your OS quite freely between the Akai and JJ. Check Your Contrast!! Sometimes when you load JJOS, your screen contrast can go weird. If this happens, hold down the STOP button and turn your data wheel to adjust the contrast to your taste.
Beat Making Free JJ OS – Contents In Brief Preface i
How to use this book
Section A - Fundamental Skills
16
001 002 003 004 005 006 007 008 009 010 011 012 013 014 015 016 017
17 23 29 37 44 47 55 57 62 65 70 75 81 91 94 104 113
Audio Connections Understanding MIDI Memory & Storage Loading Part 1 Loading Part 2 Saving Naming Samples Sampling Sounds Understanding Mono & Stereo Editing Samples Part 1 Editing Samples Part 2 Looping Samples Programs The Internal Mixer Recording Sequences Editing Sequences Part 1 Editing Sequences Part 2
Section B – Manipulating Drums & Break Beats
121
018 019 020 021 022 023 024
122 124 132 139 143 145 149
Filtering & Tuning Samples Chopping Samples Part 1 Chopping Samples Part 2 Chopping Part 3 – Patched Phrase Chopping Part 4 – Stutter Chopping Layering Drum Sounds Rebuilding Decay Tails on Snares
Section C – Building Drum Kits & Breaks
151
025 026 027 028 029 030
152 158 163 169 171 175
Emulating Timbre Changes Building Drum Kits - Pure Kits Building Performance & GM Kits Creating Realistic Drum Performances Basics of Laying Down a Drum Beat Part 1 Laying Down a Drum Beat Part 2
Section D – Advanced Techniques
178
031 032 033 034 035 036
179 185 188 198 204 208
Fitting an Instrument Loop to a Beat Understanding Effects Effects & Settings Sequencing Tricks Part 1 Sequencing Tricks Part 2 Multisampling Part 1
037 038 039 040 041
Multisampling Part 2 Looping Instrument Samples 16 Levels Using Blue Box LFO, Slider & External Sound Manipulation
214 217 221 223 227
Section E – Building Songs
236
042 043 044 045 046
237 243 248 257 260
Building Songs From Sequences Song Arrangement Ideas Recording Your Beats Compression Part 1 Compression Part 2
Section F – MPC Studio Environments
264
047 048 049
265 272 278
Looping Multisamples in Soundforge Using Recycle with your MPC Part 1 Using Recycle with your MPC Part 2
Final Word & MPC Resources
282
Introduction Thank you for purchasing ‘Beat making on the Free JJOS, I hope you gain a lot of knowledge out of this book, and most importantly, have fun! This book was written to support the free third party operating system from ‘JJ’, typically referred to as the ‘Free JJOS’, which can be run on the MPC1000 and the MPC2500. The Free JJOS is pretty much identical on both machines, but if there are any differences that may affect appearance in some OS screens, I have pointed this out accordingly (e.g. the number of Q Link sliders, additional sync protocol options in the MPC2500). Please note that if you are running Akai OS, you should use the Akai OS version of this book, which was also included in the zip file you originally purchased. If after reading this book you are still struggling with the free JJOS you may want to post your questions on my MPC dedicated forums, I have an entire sub-forum dedicated to JJOS here: http://www.mpc-forums.com/viewforum.php?f=25 These forums are the centre of MPC knowledge on the internet where you’ll find tens of thousands of fellow MPC users who’ll try to give you a helping hand with your problem. Hope you enjoy the book! MPC-Tutor
Preface – How to Use This Book Overview This book contains dozens of step-by-step tutorials that in my opinion should be read in the order they are presented. Of course, if you are an intermediate MPC user, you may want to skip the ‘Fundamental Skills’ section and dive straight into the more meaty sections of the book. That said, you may be surprised at some of the additional knowledge you pick up from the early chapters as there are so many little features that tend to get skipped over by even experienced users. My advice is to go through each tutorial a few times so that you completely understand all the functions explained within it – remember that many of the more advanced tutorials actually require a strong knowledge of the earlier chapters. Tutorial Files Many of the tutorials in this book have associated files that are used to explain the concepts more clearly to you. All tutorial files are included in folders that came with this book and each folder is clearly labelled with the tutorial number and name so you should have no problem finding the files you need. There are hundreds of tutorial files including WAVs, PGMs, and SEQ files, so not only will these help you with the tutorials, you’ll also have a nice sample library to use for your own tracks!
019 Chopping Samples Learn how to chop and slice drum loops - by doing this you can re-arrange loops, change the groove and make your own drum kits. In chapter 12 we looked at the simple process of looping a drum beat – with a looped break we can theoretically just repeat this break a hundred times in our sequencer and instantly have a foundation drum track for a new beat. This however would make for pretty boring music! Drums are probably the most fundamental element to any hip hop or dance track, so it is important that they are well structured. A good drum track adds variety to the beat with subtle and not-so-subtle changes, fills, drop outs and special effects. To give us more control over how we use sampled breaks, we can utilise the power of chopping. Chopping down a breakbeat allows us to retain the original sound of the drums within the break while at the same time giving us the freedom to create something completely new, simply be re-arranging ‘chunks’ of the break into a new order. And once you get practiced in the art of chopping, you’ll be able to extract individual drum hits and then use these samples to create your own drum kits, giving you the power to create your own completely original beats entirely from scratch. And that’s just the beginning - the possibilities are virtually endless, and throughout the next twelve tutorials in this book we’ll be looking at the many practical uses of drum loop chopping including • • • • •
building kits laying down original beats from these kits Removing pops and clicks from an old break creating timbre variations of your sounds for more realism layering your extracted sounds to create completely new sounds and a variety of special effects
Plus as we move into the advanced sections of this book, we’ll use chopping techniques on other types of sounds (e.g. bass loops). Basically (if you haven’t already realised), chopping is a very important and creative technique for a beat maker to master! Methods for Chopping Breaks So how do we go about chopping a break? Looking back at 011 ‘Editing samples Part 2’, we came across the ‘EXTRACT’ function in the Sample Edit screen - this provides us with one method of chopping a break. This function allows us to select a section of a break and turn just this section into a completely new sample. So in theory you could keep selecting different sections within your break and creating new samples from it using EXTRACT. That's cool, and we shall use this later in the book to do some small chops, but our MPC has a quicker way of chopping an entire break into manageable chunks - the ‘Chop’ function. Chop Function Overview The MPC Chop function takes any sample (it doesn't have to be a drum loop) and automatically creates separate slices or ‘regions’ within that sample; each one of
these slices will eventually be a completely new sample in its own right. Each region is completely editable using the same trimming techniques discussed in previous tutorials. After creating your set of slices, they can be automatically assigned to a new program, allowing you to immediately start creating a new groove out of them simply by bashing your pads. The easiest way to see how the slice function works is to go through an example. Transfer the ‘019 020 Chopping Samples’ folder to your CF card and go to the LOAD page (MODE and pad 2). Load up the drum beat 'SIMPLE’ and assign it to any pad. Go to the TRIM screen (MODE and pad 6) to view our sample.
This beat has already been trimmed and looped for you using the editing and looping techniques covered in chapters 10-12. The loop is four beats long (one bar) and is 63.9 BPM. Press and hold PLAY ALL (pad 16) to listen to this beat play through once. Now press and hold PLAY LOOP (pad 13) to hear the break loop through a couple of times. Slicing Our Break While still in the TRIM screen, press the CHOP button (F5). You’ll see the following:
We can see the waveform for the SIMPLE loop, but as you can see it has been divided into sixteen equal zones, or ‘regions’. If you've ever used the computer software 'Propellerheads Recycle', you'll know that Recycle analyses the peaks of the drum beat waveform and automatically slices your beat into perfect zones. The MPC on the other hand does not do this - in fact it is blissfully unaware of the exact position of your drum hits. The MPC simply takes the length of the sample and divides it into equally spaced zones. So if a sample was 1000 samples long and we sliced it into ten zones, each zone would be 100 samples wide. At this point, I don’t really want to slice our beat into sixteen regions. ‘SIMPLE’ is a one bar loop made up of four beats, so initially let’s slice it into those four individual beats. To do this, hit SLICE (F5) and you’ll spot that the bottom of the screen changes:
To preview a slice in this screen, use the left and right arrow cursor keys to select it, then press and hold any pad on the bottom three rows. To change the number of regions, hold down the TAP TEMPO button and turn the jog wheel to the left to reduce the number of slices to four (displayed as 4.0). To set this new region setting, press ENTER (F6) and you’ll return to the main chopping screen:
As we will discover later by closely examining each region’s waveform, the current region boundaries are not perfect – for example, Region 1 cuts into the snare sound at the start of region 2. Why is this? Well, take for example a one bar loop that lasts for exactly four seconds. If you tell the MPC to slice this into four regions, the MPC simply creates four equal slices each one second long. Now, the drum beats that you will sample from old records are played by real drummers - real drummers are not robots and don't play to a sequencer quantise template (we discussed quantise points in earlier chapters) - they sometimes hit a snare slightly ‘behind’ or ‘ahead’ of the beat, giving the music some swing and feeling - and even the tightest drummers simply make the odd 'mistake'. There’s no ‘step edit’ or ‘undo’ for a human being! So it is highly unlikely that a human is going to ensure that each beat falls exactly within the perfect quantise boundaries that your MPC assumes by default, and as such when cutting up drum breaks recorded by real drummers it is quite common to find that certain hits don't 'line up' within the regions set automatically by the MPC this is why you need to carefully adjust your regions. Adjusting Regions Adjusting regions is pretty simple although can take some time when dealing with many slices. It's the same method as you would use in standard trimming (see chapter 10), except this time you need to adjust the start and end points for all your slices instead of just one – so basically it’s like having four unique samples that need trimming correctly.
If it isn’t highlighted already, highlight ‘Region’ and jog wheel to Region ‘1’. As our entre break had been already trimmed and looped perfectly before we loaded it, there will be no point in adjusting the start point of region 1 – this is already set perfectly. So for region 1, we just need to edit the end point. However, while in chopping mode, the JJ OS is not capable of zooming into an end point, only start points. To overcome this problem, we simply remember that the end point of region 1 is the same as the start point of region 2. So to find region 1’s end point, just select region 2 and set its start point. It’s not ideal from a workflow perspective, but it does the job. So, with Region 1 selected, jog wheel to region 2 and use the cursor to highlight its start point. Now hit ‘Z.IN’ a few times to zoom into the end point of this region.
As you can see, the current start point is set too far into region 2, cutting off the start of the snare. So, use the jog wheel to reduce the start point until visually it appears to begin just before the snare hit. Now zoom in further to make the final edit with your jog wheel. If you feel the waveform isn’t tall enough, you can enlarge the height by hitting the purple up cursor (the height magnification level is shown in the top right of the screen, circled in red above). Try initially pressing this twice and continue moving your jog wheel to the visual start point of the waveform. I finally set my start point to 41199. Now the start point of region 2 is perfectly edited; so in the process of setting this correctly, it follows that the end point of region 1 has also been set perfectly. Now zoom out (Z.OUT) until you can see the entire loop clearly again. If you magnified the height with the purple up cursor, reduce it back down again using the ‘down’ cursor so your top right magnification displays as ‘x1’ again. We now need to discover the end point for region 2, so with ‘Region:2’ highlighted jog wheel so it reads ‘Region 3’ and repeat the adjustment for this slice as you did for region 2, using the Z.IN and purple up cursor to get the appropriate magnification required to find the start point. I set my region 3 start point to 81711. So that’s region 2 fully trimmed. Note: Editing start/end points with Q link sliders does not work in the chopping screens. Also note that you can hold down a pad while moving the start or end point and it will continually playback the changing start point audio (scrubbing). Zoom all the way out again and reduce the waveform to ‘x1’ height using the purple down button. Highlight region 3 and jog to region 4. Now set the start point of region 4, which as we know will give us the end point for region 3. I set mine to 123303. Chopping
With your edit points set, you are ready to slice your regions. To do this, hit EDIT, and you’ll see the ‘Extract’ screen.
Here you can extract the currently selected region to create a new sample from it, just like the normal ‘extract’ function you find in the normal trim editing screen. But instead, hit CONVRT (F2). You'll get this following screen
The CONVRT screen may say ‘PATCHED PHRASE’ – highlight this and jog wheel to the left so it says ‘SLICE SAMPLES’ (we’ll look at PATCHED PHRASE in chapter 21). The ‘Release’ parameter is a great little feature that is much improved over the version you find in the MPC2000XL. Basically when you slice a beat, the end of each slice will obviously end very abruptly – this causes a couple of problems. First off, if you are chopping out an individual snare sound from a loop (to use in a drum kit), it would be ideal to have the snare end more smoothly with a natural sounding decay. Secondly if you are chopping a break into segments like we are now, when you piece the pieces back together in a different order in your sequencer, you are likely to hear obvious gaps in the audio (sometimes referred to as ‘choppy’). By adding a small amount of ‘release’ to all your chops, you will increase the length of your sample end slightly, by adding a kind of smooth ‘timestretched’ decay to the end of the chop. Set your Release to 35 (you don’t want it too high as this can cause some strange artefacts), and change 'Create New Program' to read YES. This tells your MPC to create a new drum program out of your slices. Press DO IT, and the MPC slices your breakbeat, creating a new program with your four slices on PADS A1 to A4. Initially you will be taken back to the TRIM screen where you will see a sample called ‘SIMPLE-1’ – this is the ‘region 1’ chop (press and hold any pad on the bottom three rows to hear this sample). With the top left sample name highlighted, jog wheel to the right to preview the other three slices. To view your new program you'll have to manually go into PROGRAM (MODE & pad 7) – it’s the program named ‘SIMPLE’.
If you like, load up the SIMPLE program file from the tutorial files. This is my version of the chopped up beat (you can use your version if you wish). Play the pads A1 to A4 to hear your slices. Now we have our beat in slices, let’s look at how we can try to recreate the original breakbeat within our sequencer using this new program of chops. Go to MAIN and select a blank sequence. Highlight the tempo field and set the BPM to 63.9 (which if you remember was the BPM of our original SIMPLE drum beat). Now highlight ‘Bars’ and jog wheel this to ‘1’ and hit DO IT. Now set a T.C. (quantise) of 1/8, this will allow us to insert our chops into the sequencer at single beat intervals – we discussed quantise and ‘timing correct’ in our Recording and Editing sequences chapters, so please refer back to those chapters if you need to refresh your memory on these concepts. So to set the TC - press TC (F1) and change ‘Note Value’ to 1/8:
Press CLOSE (not FIX). Now navigate with your purple cursor keys to track 1 and make sure that our new SIMPLE program is assigned to it – the second line should read ‘Type: DRUM Pgm:SIMPLE’ .
Now, remember that we chopped our break into four slices and our break was exactly four beats long - that means each slice is one ‘beat’. So let's place each one of these slices exactly ‘on the beat’ in our sequencer. In your 'Now:' field (top right of your main sequence page), you have three sets of numbers - 001.01.00. In previous tutorials we saw that this represents the Bar (001), beat (01) and tick (00) position. So: • • • •
Beat Beat Beat Beat
1 2 3 4
is is is is
represented represented represented represented
by by by by
001.01.00 001.02.00 001.03.00 001.04.00.
So to place each of our slices 'on the beat' we simply go into STEP EDIT and add our slices at these four points. Press the FULL LEVEL key to make sure we get full sample velocity when entering our sequenced notes. Now make sure you are at the start of your sequence
(001.01.00) and press STEP EDIT (MODE & pad 14). To enter your first slice here, press the red OVERDUB key and then hit pad A1. Now navigate to 001.02.00. The easiest way to do this is to use the STEP cursors above the REC button (remember that the STEP key is activated by pressing the BAR key & SHIFT in the MPC1000). As your timing is set to 1/8, this involves pressing the right STEP key two times. Enter your second slice here (pad A2). Following the same procedure, enter pad A3 at 001.03.00 and pad A4 at 001.04.00. Press play - doesn't sound quite right, does it? Some of the beats seem to come in a little too late... Why it sounds weird Remember that we had to adjust the MPC’s region positions earlier when originally slicing the beat? We did this because some of the drum hits in the un-chopped break were originally played a bit ‘ahead’ of the beat (i.e. they didn't fall exactly ‘on the beat’ and hence had a bit more funky swing and feel about them). So to recreate our original beat, we cannot simply place all chops exactly on mathematically perfect quantise points like 001.02.00, instead we would need to place some slightly before these quantise points (placing them before will mean the hits come in faster than expected; hence the term ‘playing ahead of the beat’). So let’s start messing around with the position of some of the chops. It’s a good idea to keep the first beat at 001.01.00 as this is the fundamental anchor for the break, so there’s no need to do any editing here. Now navigate to the A2 event at 001.02.00 using the SHIFT and BAR keys (STEP), or by highlighting the ‘time’ field in the top left of the screen and jog wheeling to the desired position. Let’s move this 001.02.00 event back one sequencer tick to 001.01.95 – press and hold EDIT (F3) and you’ll see the EDIT screen options appear on the bottom row of your screen (MOVE, COPY, PASTE replacing the T.C, TRACK, DELETE, INSERT and PLAY buttons) – press MOVE (F2). You’ll now be viewing the ‘Move Event’ screen:
Change the ‘Move to’ parameter to read 001.01.95 and press DO IT – this event has now moved from 001.02.00 to 01.01.95. Repeat this procedure for A3 (move it from 001.03.00 to 001.02.93) and A4 (move it from 001.04.00 to 001.03.94). Your screen should look something like the following:
So, now chops 2, 3 and 4 are slightly ‘ahead’ of the beat (e.g. one or two sequencer ticks back from being ‘dead on’). Press PLAY START to preview our break recreation. In the next chapter we will show you how we can use this new drum program to immediately start re-writing that original break beat, and then we’ll chop down the break even further (to its individual drum sounds), allowing us to create a break with a completely different groove and tempo!
020 Chopping Samples Part 2 With our break now chopped, let’s look at how we can rearrange these slices. We can then let’s take matters even further as we chop the break right down to the individual hits and create something completely new! Rearranging Your Break Currently we have a one bar loop that simply runs through our chops in the original order: SIMPLE-1, SIMPLE-2, SIMPLE-3, SIMPLE-4 (or pads A1, A2, A3, and A4). But now these are chopped up, why not change the order that the samples play in? In MAIN, highlight the current sequence name, press WINDOW, hit COPY (F5) and DO IT to create an exact copy of this sequence. Now go into STEP EDIT (MODE and pad 14) to see our four sequencer notes from before. Using the cursor keys, move down to the fourth (last) sequencer event at 001.03.94: 001.03.94 P:A04( 82)T:
0
D:
4 V:127
As you can see, this is currently playing pad A4. Cursor one place to the right so that A04 is highlighted and jog wheel two places to the left so that it reads A02. Now press PLAY START on your sequencer to hear the amended sequence. The roll has gone and now we have a drum loop that will sound better when continually looped. Unfortunately there is a problem – as we reach the loop point of our sequence, there is a very obvious pause in the break – this is because our A2 chop doesn’t really belong at this part of the break; it is obviously too short and hence sounds like it is being played a bit too fast. So what can we do about this? To fix this we need to ‘stretch’ out this final sample to make it fill the gap, so we’re going to use the MPC timestretch feature. Go to TRIM (MODE & pad 6) and select the ‘SIMPLE-2’ sample. Press EDIT (F6) and jog wheel to the right until you reach TIMESTRETCH.
Cursor down to ‘Preset’ and select PERCUSSION (A) – this is a good preset for drum sounds. Now cursor up to ‘Original Tempo’ and change this to 63.9, which if you remember was the original tempo of our un-chopped drum break. Now in order to ‘stretch’ our sample and make it longer, we need to lower its BPM (i.e. make it take longer to play), so in the ‘New’ tempo field, set this around 8 BPM lower at 56.0 BPM. Press DO IT, then KEEP to create a completely new sample (no need to rename the new sample as the MPC does it for us; mine is called SIMPLE-5).
Now go back to our SIMPLE program and hit pad A5 (which is empty) – cursor down to layer 1 and jog wheel to assign our SIMPLE-5 sample here. So now we have five pads in our program. Go back into STEP EDIT and locate the event at 001.03.94 – change this from pad A02 to pad A05. Press PLAY START in our sequencer. This is better, but now it sounds like the beginning of the beat comes in just too quickly, which suggests our new stretched slice is too slow – i.e. we over-stretched it! So return to TRIM and select the original SIMPLE-2 (not our new time stretched sample) and re-stretch it, this time try 60.0BPM and call the new sample SIMPLE-6. Now replace the SIMPLE-5 sample on pad A5 with this new SIMPLE-6 sample and press PLAY START in the sequencer. This is much better. Feel free to load up the ‘SLICES’ project file from the tutorial folder. This contains the following sequences: • • •
ORIGINAL – the recreation of our original breakbeat ROLLFREE – our roll-free version, with the time stretched fix above EXTENDED – this is a four bar version of the loop which features some additional sequence changes to show you the kind of thing possible.
Hopefully this has given you a good grounding in the fundamental skills needed for chopping – so with that knowledge in mind, let’s stop messing around with simple chops and instead chop this break right down so that we have absolutely no limit to what we can do with the drum sounds within it. Chopping it further Fancy a sneak peak at what’s we’re going to make now? Go to sequence 4 in our currently loaded SLICES project and you’ll find a beat called ‘NEW’. Press PLAY START. This beat clearly uses the sounds of our original breakbeat, but has a completely different groove and tempo. How do we do this? Let’s now start a fresh, so turn off your MPC, boot it back up, and load up our original sample ‘SIMPLE’ – this time, we’re going to chop this break right down to its individual hits, giving us a collection of single hit drum sounds which we can arrange in any way we wish. In the TRIM screen, select SIMPLE, and hit CHOP (F5). We want to split this break down to its individual hits – this means that each slice needs to contain just a single hit. Now we could try to count exactly how many individual hits there are, but I’m just going to guess 10 at this point – we can guess this because once the loop is sliced, we’ll have a further opportunity to ‘divide’ certain slices to create more slices if needed. So in the CHOP screen, press SLICE (F5), choose 10 regions (hold down the tap tempo button and use the jog wheel to select this), then press ENTER. Using Auto In the SLICE screen, you’ll also see a button called ‘AUTO’ (F2). If you press this, you’ll see something like the following:
If you turn the jog wheel to the left, you’ll see the horizontal lines that run along the top and bottom of the waveform begin to move towards each other. As they do, the number of regions will increase. Basically, these lines are trying to detect waveform peaks; if they find one, they create a new region at that peak. While this is a great idea in theory, in practice it never really works that well. While it certainly does detect the main peaks, it also detects peaks that are not there. For example, when set to ‘8’, it detects the third and fourth peaks fine. Now set it to ‘7’, and while it does now detect the second peak, it also suddenly creates an additional peak near the beginning of the third region. In my opinion, I’d rather just visually find the peaks, it doesn’t take too long. Adding More Slices
Now things get a little more messy. Your region markers are all over the place, so you’ll need to do a fair bit of work to get all your start/end points set for each individual hit. We’ll just use the exact same technique that we used in the previous chapter so there’s no need to explain it all again. Just remember that we don’t just rely on the waveform for setting edit points – let your ears be the final judge on the most suitable point to set. However, at this stage I would suggest we initially look at setting our regions quickly and roughly rather than trying to find the exact start and end points for each region – with the rough points all set, you can then dive in and get more accurate. So to do this, let’s just keep the zoom and waveform levels at the default settings. The first region is our initial kick/hat sample. As you can see visually on the waveform, this appears to be cut off halfway through by region 2. So with region 1 selected, highlight its end point and jog wheel so it is moved to just before next obvious peak in the waveform (around 20934). Now move to region 2 – this currently contains a hat followed by a partial kick drum; we obviously only want the hat, so highlight region 2’s end point and move it to just before the third peak in our loop, at around 30005.
Region 3 clearly now contains two unique hits:
So let’s ‘divide’ this single region into two regions – press DIVIDE (F4). At this point you’ll find yourself in region 4, so highlight region 4’s start point and change this to begin at the start of region 4’s peak, around 41868. Select region 5 and preview it by pressing and holding a pad on the bottom three rows. You should hear that you have the tail end of region 4’s hit followed the start of a hat. It’s this hat we want in region 5, so highlight region 5’s start point and increase it until you reach the very small peak in the waveform at around 62802. Now select region 6 and move the start point to the beginning of the kick at 71874. Change the end point to 82341. Now change the end point of region 7 to 102578. When you get to region 8, preview the audio and you’ll hear we have two distinct samples (a kick followed by a hat), so hit DIVIDE once again. Select region 8 – to get the pure kick, let’s ‘scrub’ the audio. To do this, highlight region 8’s end point, hold down a pad on the bottom three rows and slowly increase the end point with the jog wheel, keeping the pad held down. Eventually you will hear the hi hat from region 9, so stop ‘scrubbing’ and back off a little (remember we’ll be getting all these trim points more accurate later). I set mine at 113045. I then set region 9 end point at 123512. Region 10 is another snare that will lead into a snare roll in region 11. So I used the scrub technique from before to help me set the end point for region 10. I initially set this to 133979. Region 11 is our snare roll (which at this point I will simply keep as an entire roll) – I set the end point to 144446. Finally, region 12 is clearly two individual hits, so DIVIDE this region into two parts, and set this new region 13’s start point around 156309. So, there you have a way of roughly chopping your loop into individual zones. Some people may leave it at that, but I feel that’s sloppy. So let’s take another five minutes to set each region point perfectly. Remember earlier we mentioned that the JJ OS doesn’t let you zoom in to visually see the end point, only the start point? So at this point, we shall need to only set start points - that way all our end points will also be set. To get those start points we will use the Z.IN function (F3) and the waveform height magnifier (the purple ‘up’ cursor). So, go to region 2 and highlight the start point. Now zoom in six times and hit the purple up cursor twice to increase the waveform height. You should now be able to see that the current start point is too far forward. Jog wheel back to around 20579
and zoom in all the way. Now increase waveform height again by hitting the purple up cursor once only. Clearly, we are still too far forward so jog wheel to the left to 20455. Now set the height magnification to the maximum ‘x64’ and once again, you’ll see we have to make one more adjustment. Jog wheel to 20341 and pat yourself on the back! Now press Z.OUT several times to return back to normal zoom magnification, and then return waveform height magnification back to ‘x1’ by using the down purple cursor. Select region 1 and preview it – perfect. Now simply repeat this procedure for all the remaining regions. You’ll soon find you can zip through this kind of editing very quickly, it just takes practice. As a guide, here are my other start points: Region Region Region Region Region Region Region Region Region Region Region
3: 29937 4: 41121 5: 60006 6: 70825 7: 81541 8: 102360 9: 112641 10: 123304 11: 133995 12: 144176 13: 154621
Phew! All done – so before there’s a power cut, press EDIT (F6), CONVRT (F4), select ‘SLICED SAMPLES’, release 35, and ‘create new program: YES’. Press DO IT. Go to your newly created SIMPLE program (mode and pad 7) and listen to the various single hits. You now have the making of a new drum kit. Making a New Break With this program in memory, you are now free to open up a blank sequence and record your own original break beat. In the coming chapters we’ll look more deeply into the various methods we can use to record such sequences, as well as the various ways we can construct our drum kits to help performance and realism – but at this point I feel we’ve covered enough in this tutorial – you could probably do with a break (no pun intended). Feel free to reload the SLICES project file and examine exactly what I did in sequence 4 (NEW). You could also examine my version of the individual chop program, which I (imaginatively) called ‘CHOPS’. You should notice I’ve renamed all the samples – we’ll explain what these abbreviations mean in chapter 26 (Building Drum Kits), but for the moment I’m sure you can probably work out that ‘K1’ is most likely a kick, while 'KH1' refers to a 'kick with a hat laid over it'. Using only your best samples If you examine the sequence events in NEW (via STEP EDIT), you'll see that I only used one hi hat sample even though there was two that we salvaged from the original chopping session. This was because the second hi hat sample (CH2 on pad
A7) sounds a bit duff - it has a bit of bass reverberation running through it and it also sounds quite ‘clicky’. But that's the beauty of this method - you can pick and choose the best samples and ignore the bad ones. Of course, it's nice to have several variations of the same sample to make our beat a little more interesting, but we'll look at drum programming in more detail within the Drum Manipulation section of the book where we will also look at ways in which we can change these drum sounds, beef them up, recreate timbre changes and build our own drum kits. A Word of Warning – Slicing Turns Stereo Into Mono In this tutorial, we used a mono drum loop sample. But it’s important to note that if we use a stereo sample and we slice it using the SLICE functionality, your MPC creates mono slices. This means any panning information is lost – for example, let’s say the hi hat in the original loop was panned slightly to the left, this would be gone and it would just sound centred. There are several ways we can try to overcome this issue: 1. If you create a drum kit from your break, select only the ‘pure’ drum hits to be included in the kit. These are the samples that just contain a hat, a kick or a snare – not samples that have (for example) a kick with a hat playing over it (as you’d normally find on the first main kick on any beat). You can then use the MPC mixer to add panning information and pan your hat to one side while leaving your kick and snare centre. This gives instant and real stereo to your resulting drum breaks. We’ll talk about this in much more detail in chapters 25-27. 2. Add a stereo effect to the entire program – like a reverb or a delay. This isn’t true stereo though, and it will not give you any panning for your hats, but at least it can give your entire beat a little more stereo spread. But this is always a last resort! 3. Add additional panned percussion – something like a tambourine, cabasa, shaker, bongos, ride cymbals etc. With these panned to one side, you can give the illusion that your beat is in stereo. For example, you could have cymbals panned quite hard left, and a shaker panned slightly to the right. 4. Don’t use the SLICE function – instead use EXTRACT. The sample EDIT function EXTRACT (TRIM, EDIT), lets you slice a loop one bit at a time. The resulting ‘chop’ remains in stereo. The downside? Well, you don’t get the nice time stretched decay added to the end of your samples like you do with SLICING, which in turn means that there’s more chance of your resulting sequenced beat sounding ‘choppy’, especially if you decide to slow down the tempo – but if you speed up the tempo, this problem isn’t so bad.
That’s the end of this free preview of the ‘Beat Making With the Free JJOS’ – you can get the full book at: http://www.mpc-tutor.com/shop/