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Beat Making on the MPC5000 - Look Inside Flipbook PDF
Beat Making on the MPC5000 - Look Inside
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Beat Making on the MPC5000 (OS 2.0 version) By Andy Avgousti (MPC-Tutor) Published by MPC-Samples.com 2010 Copyright © Andy Avgousti 2010 ‘RPG Vocals’ (chapter 45): Copyright © Jane Avgousti 2010; all licensing enquires to [email protected]. Andy Avgousti has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the Author of this work. 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 affiliated in any way to Akai Professional LP. MPC-Samples.com is a trading name of Beat Box Digital LTD, a company registered in England & Wales, Company No. 6810062.
Beat Making on the MPC5000 (OS 2.0 Version) – Contents in Brief Preface i
How to use this book
Section A - Fundamental Skills
17
001 002 003 004 005 006 007 008 009 010 011 012 013 014 015 016 017 018 019 020
18 28 34 41 52 60 73 75 84 86 94 104 113 128 134 148 157 172 177 193
Getting Started 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 Understanding Effects Effects & Settings The Synth
Section B – Manipulating Drums & Break Beats
203
021 022 023 024 025 026 027 028
Drum Manipulation Techniques Part 1 Drum Manipulation Techniques Part 2 Chopping Drum Loops Part 1 Chopping Drum Loops Part 2 Chopping Part 3 – Patched Phrase Chopping Part 4 – Stutter Chopping Layering Drum Sounds Rebuilding Decay Tails on Snares
204 211 219 229 238 244 247 257
Section C – Building Drum Kits & Breaks
262
029 030 031
263 272 277
Emulating Timbre Changes Building Drum Kits - Pure Kits Building Performance & GM Kits
032 033 034
Creating Realistic Drum Performances Basics of Laying Down a Drum Beat Part 1 Laying Down a Drum Beat Part 2
284 286 290
Section D – Advanced Techniques
293
035 036 037 038 039 040 041 042
294 300 309 316 319 327 331 338
Fitting an Instrument Loop to a Beat Sequencing Tricks Multisampling Part 1 Multisampling Part 2 Multisampling Part 3 Looping Instrument Samples 16 Levels & Auto Chromatic Assign LFO, Slider & External Sound Manipulation
Section E – Building Songs
346
043 044 045 046
347 352 365 376
Creating Complete Beats In Your MPC Part 1 Creating Complete Beats In Your MPC Part 2 Creating Complete Beats In Your MPC Part 3 Making Demos & Using External Multitrackers
Section F – MPC5000 Studio Environments
384
047 048 049 050
385 398 406 412
Using Blue Box & MPC Pad 187 Looping Multisamples in Audio Editors Using Recycle with your MPC5000 Part 1 Using Recycle with your MPC5000 Part 2
Final Word & MPC Resources
417
Introduction Thank you for purchasing ‘Beat making on the MPC5000’, I hope you gain a lot of knowledge out of this book, and most importantly, have fun learning your new sampler! I wrote this book because I thought the manual that comes with the MPC5000 was poor and assumed a lot of previous studio knowledge. Personally, I did not have this knowledge when I first bought my MPC, as it was the first piece of studio equipment I’d ever bought – so basically it was a lot of late nights and hair pulling for the next few months – I always wished a book like this was available at the time, so I hope this book makes some people’s live a little less stressful! The aim of this book was never to replace the manual, I just wanted to take the most important functions of the MPC5000 and explain them in the simplest way possible using step-by-step tutorials and audio examples to get the points over more clearly – hence there will always be some elements of the MPC5000 that are not covered in this book, but I feel I’ve covered all the important aspects that people will need to know in order to create great beats with their machine. I hope this book will answer all your questions, but if after reading this book you are still struggling, you may want to post your questions on my MPC dedicated forums found at http://www.mpc-forums.com These forums are the centre of MPC knowledge on the internet where you’ll find tens of thousands fellow MPC users who’ll try to give you a helping hand with your problem. Hope you enjoy the book! Andy Avgousti, MPC-Tutor
Preface – How to Use This Book Overview This book contains over 50 step-by-step tutorials that in my opinion should be read in the order they are presented. Of course, if you are an intermediate MPC5000 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 over 600 tutorial files including WAVs, PGMs, and SEQ files 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!
B Manipulating Drums & Break Beats Learn how to mangle and grime up drum sounds, chop break beats and various techniques to create new sounds using your MPC5000.
021 Drum Manipulation Techniques Part 1 There are many ways you can take your average kick and snare and produce something different; in this tutorial we take you step by step through the process of filtering, tuning and griming up your drum sounds using only an MPC5000. Tuning Drums By tuning down a sample, it instantly becomes a lot darker. Go to DISK (mode and pad 3), LOAD (F1), and from the chapter 21 tutorial files, locate the ‘TUNE’ sub folder. Load up the project file, 'TUNE001.prj’ – if you go to MAIN, sequence 1 and press PLAY START, you’ll hear a 2-bar break. Go to PROGRAM (MODE and pad 6) and select the TUNE program – this contains the drum kit used to make the break in sequence 1. Select PAD A4 - this has a single kick assigned to it on layer 1. Highlight the 'Tune' parameter with your cursor keys and take the tuning down to -04.00 using your jog wheel and preview by pressing pad A4. The kick sounds lower and darker - so what happens if we do this to all the sounds in the break? The quickest way to tune down all the pads in a program is to cursor over to the left hand side where the pad number is currently displayed:
Now turn your jog wheel several clicks to the left until it reads ‘MULTI’:
Now highlight the ‘Tune’ parameter for layer 1, and drop the tuning down to -04.00 using your jog wheel. This will drop the tuning down on all pads together, Now press PLAY START on the sequencer and you'll find that the loop sounds a lot darker and grungy. While the sequence is playing, you can continue to drop the tuning in real time to hear the effect this has on the beat. Basically the lower you go, the darker and more brooding the beat becomes, although watch out for tuning ‘artefacts’ – this is where massive amounts of tuning produce metallic rings and also highlight existing noise on the original samples. Settle on a tuning you like and press MAIN to return to the main sequencer page. Highlight the BPM field and change this from 80.0 to 70.0. The slower BPM makes the beat even more grungy, with a real tripped out feel. You can hear my tuned down version by playing sequence 2 – TUNEDOWN. Here I’ve just created a new program called ‘TUNEDOWN’ that already contains all the tuned down pads. What about tuning up? Well, this will tend to have the opposite effect - it will make your sounds tighter and brighter. Play sequence 3 of our project - 'TUNEUP’ – this uses a third program called ‘TUNEUP’ with all pads tuned to +04.00. Tuning up drums like this tends to give a more modern sound – just don’t overdo it! So from this one break beat you have created three very different sounding loops, just by tuning the individual drum sounds. You can of course tune entire drum loops the same way, however you’re then faced with the additional issue of time stretching or pitch shifting to ensure the correct BPM is obtained, which as we’ll see in later tutorials, have their own inherent problems. That’s why I prefer to take breaks, chop them down to their individual hits and make drum kits out of them – it gives you much more control over the make up of each hit, plus BPM is simply changed by
varying the BPM in the corresponding sequence file. We’ll explore the whole process of chopping breaks and creating your own kits in Section C of this book. Tuning Down Without Dropping Pitch If you sample from vinyl, try this. Take a 33rpm record and pitch it to 45rpm. Now sample a break into your MPC at this higher (45rpm) pitch. Once sampled, go to TRIM, WINDOW and adjust the tuning to bring the sample back to its original pitch, a tuning of -05.00 should do it. This way you've tuned down your sample (and hence, it's more grimy), but you've not changed its overall pitch which is still the same as it originally was on the record. This method also saves memory, as your sample is a lot shorter! Bit Rate Reduction We've all heard about the classic 12 bit sound of the Akai MPC60 or the Emu SP12, and most people would love to be able to recreate that sound using their MPC5000. Unfortunately it isn't really possible to recreate things exactly as there are many factors that decide the sound of a sampler, particularly the A/D (analogue to digital) converters. The MPC5000 offers us the ability to re-sample any internal sample to change it from a clean 16 bit sound to a lower quality 12 bit or even 8 bit sound - this process will have, in theory, an adverse affect on the sound, but in reality, this effect can be very desirable. We'll use one of the snares from the previous ‘tuning’ tutorial – I’ve actually created a brand new program called GRIME and have assigned this snare sample to pad A1, giving it a new name GSNR. So go to PROGRAM and select this GRIME program. If the pads are still set to MULTI from the previous tutorial, turn this off by highlighting MULTI and then just jog wheel to the right until a normal pad number appears. Select PAD A1 (GSNR) and go to TRIM (mode and PAD 5) so that we can start performing edits on this sample. Press EDIT (F6) and jog wheel to the right until you see ‘BIT REDUCE’. You’ll see the following ‘Sample Edit’ screen:
'Bit depth' refers to the bit rate of the sample - we'll leave this set at ‘12’ for the moment (’12 bit’). Remember that it is usual to work with 16 bit samples in an MPC, so anything with a lower bit rate will have reduced quality. To perform the resample, press DO IT (F5). By reducing to 12 bit, you'll not hear an obvious change in sound - your sample will become slightly more hissy and you may hear it become slightly more fat and grungy. 12 bit re-sampling is very subtle and a great way to add a bit of grit to your drums without obviously making noticeable changes to the sound. To take matters further, let’s try 8 bit reduction. First let’s return our sample to its original 16 bit state by pressing the flashing orange UNDO button at the bottom right of your MPC. Now select EDIT, BIT REDUCE, and set ‘Bit Depth’ to 8, and press DO IT. At 8 bit, the bit rate change is more obvious, you'll hear it affect the reverb tail of your sample which will become crackly and very 'bitty'. To counter this problem, let’s utilise some more sample editing features. Return to the main TRIM screen and highlight the end point of the sample. Now using either the jog wheel, number pad or the Q2 slider (as discussed in chapter 10), adjust the end point to approximately 15,000 (it doesn’t need to be completely accurate). Now, discard the unwanted data that occurs after the new end point (EDIT > DISCARD). Optionally, rename your new 8 bit sample by highlighting the current sample name and pressing WINDOW. My version of this sound can be found on pad A2 - I called mine ‘GSNR-8BIT’. By discarding the end part of the sample, we’ve removed a lot of the distorted reverb tail - however this abrupt end to the snare isn’t great, so we need to create some kind of decay. To tackle this issue we have several options including: 1. apply an ‘EDIT > FADE OUT’ to simply fade out the end of the sample
2. Assign this sample to a pad and adjust the ‘amplitude envelope’ settings to ‘shape’ a new decay curve for the sample. 3. Add some gentle reverb to mimic the decay of the snare 4. create a snare decay using a chopped portion of the actual snare combined with some nifty sequencing Option 4 is a little too advanced for this part of the book – however, we have an entire tutorial dedicated to this in chapter 28, so we’ll leave this for the moment. To apply a permanent fade out on the ‘8bit’ sample, let’s first make a copy. Highlight the sample name, press WINDOW and press COPY (F5). Call this new sample ‘8bitfade’. With ‘8bit-fade’ selected, go to EDIT and jog wheel to FADE OUT:
We looked at the ‘FADE OUT’ and ‘FADE IN’ functions in chapter 11. As the name suggests, this editing function will fade our sample out by gradually decreasing the volume to zero over time. Please refer back to chapter 11 for graphical representations of the different fade out curves. For ‘Fade Type’ there are three options; LINEAR (which fades out the sample very gradually), EXP (which fades out the sample gradually then fades quickly, but finishes gradually), and LOG (which starts fading quickly, slows in the middle, then finishes quickly). As we have the UNDO feature, we can try out all three FADE options to see which one gives the best results. So, try each one, pressing UNDO after previewing each one. After trying out all three fades, I felt that EXP gives the best results - certainly in terms of providing a snare sample with no distorted reverb tail. So the end result is a nice ‘crunchy’ snare sound. Listen to pad A3 – this is my version of this faded 8-bit snare; I’ve called mine GSNR-8BIT-F.
Using Program Parameters (Amplitude Envelope) As an alternative to using sample editing fade outs, we could assign our 8 bit sample to a pad and apply some envelope changes to remove the distorted decay. Go to PROGRAM (mode and pad 6), and on pad A4, you’ll see I’ve assigned our ‘unfaded’ 8 bit sample, GSNR-8BIT. Press AmpEnv (F5) to bring up the amplitude envelope screen.
We looked at this screen in detail back in chapter 13. Here we can shape the envelope of each pad to change the way the sound plays. We know from the previous part of the tutorial that an exponential fade out works well here, so let’s try to recreate that type of fade out. As we saw in chapter 13, an exponential fade out curve looks like the following:
To mimic this type of curve, try the following settings:
This removes the distorted decay and sounds quite similar to our ‘faded out’ sample on pad A3. My version of this can be found on pad A5. If you compare the three sounds – original (A1), faded (A3) and the ‘amp envelope’ version (A5), you’ll notice that the side effect of both fading processes is that the new snare sound dry with less reverb to the original. This is usually quite a positive side effect, as it’s better to work with ‘dry’ sounds whenever possible as you can always add effects later. That said, we can add a little subtle reverb to very slightly enhance the decay. Press pad A6 – here I’ve placed a copy of the 8 bit sample with some ‘AmpEnv’ adjustments as before. This time, I’ve added a small amount of reverb on FX 1, buss A, using the ‘Reverb Small’ patch (please refer back to chapters 18 and 19 for more information on using the MPC5000 effect busses). If you want to look at the reverb parameters, and select EFFECTS (mode and pad 11), highlight the reverb patch on FX1, and hit WINDOW. As you can see, the ‘Wet Dry’ mix, decay time and pre delay are all low to ensure the reverberation is very subtle. Some ‘hi cut’ also ensure the decay tail is not too ‘hissy’. 4 Bit Samples Don’t forget that you don’t have to stop at 8 bit reduction – EDIT > BIT REDUCE gives you the option to reduce samples down to as low as 1 bit. I’ve created a 4 bit version of the original snare on pad A7 – for this one, I not only added some exponential FADE OUT in TRIM > EDIT, but have also added some shaped decay in AmpEnv on the pad itself. The result is a very crunchy snare sound. The ‘Resampler’ and ‘Decimator’ The effects section of the MPC5000 also features dedicated effects that try to mimic the classic old sampler sound. The ‘resampler’ and ‘decimator’ effects can be added to any pad and offer real time manipulation of the amount of ‘grunging’ added.
Go to pad A9 – here I have our original ‘clean’ snare sound, but this time I’ve added some envelope shaping via ‘AmpEnv’ before we apply effects. So we are already starting with a fairly dry sounding snare. I’ve then applied the ‘Decimator’ effect via FX buss 2 in the MIXER screen (applied as an ‘insert effect’, i.e. DIRECT:OFF). Go to EFFECT (mode and pad 11) and on FX2, highlight the decimator bank and hit WINDOW to view the settings:
We have a bit reduction down to 11 and a ‘decimator’ of ‘4’. The decimator tends to add a slightly out-of-phase sound to the samples, especially at higher settings – in fact it can be quite similar to ring modulation. However at low levels it does give samples an added grimy dimension. On pad A10, I’ve added the ‘resampler’ effect via effect bus 3. To view the effect settings, go to EFFECT (mode and pad 11) and then BUS3-4 (F2). The ‘Rate’ controls the sample rate of our sample, which is normally 44.1 kHz – by taking the rate down from 100, you’ll hear the sound get darker and darker as the sample rate is being decreased (the numbers 100 to 0 do not appear to represent the actual sample rate itself though). I settled for a rate of 37. The ‘Decim’ option is the ‘Decimator’, again which adds additional digital ‘grunge’ to your sample. I find that the decimator option here is a bit more random compared to the dedicated decimator effect, and its best to just go from 0 to 100 to find a setting that works well. I found that 39 was a real sweet spot to my ears, pure dirt! Compare the two effected snares – which one sounds the grimiest? Got to be A10 for me. Also remember to utilise the BYPASS option in the EFFECT screen. This way you can turn off a particular effect to compare the clean and effected sound directly. We’ll look at more drum manipulation techniques in the next chapter, including distortion, compression and filtering.
022 Drum Manipulation Techniques Part 2 Distortion Adding distortion to a drum sound can help give it a very gritty sound and make it sound a lot fatter – we’ve already looked at the available distortion effects in chapter 19. Let’s try them out on our GSNR sample. Locate the DISTORTION folder within the chapter 21 folder. Inside you’ll find the DISTORTION001.prj project file, so load this into memory. Go to PROGRAM and select the DISTORTION program. Here we have five copies of our previously used snare sample, laid out on pads A1 to A5, all with some envelope shaping via ‘AmpEnv’ to give a nice tight and dry snare sound to work with. Pad A1 is the clean version, while the other four pads feature four different distortion effects; •
•
•
•
Pad A2: ‘Distortion Grimey’ via FX1 – this gives some serious grunging of the sound, to the point where the sound isn’t even recognisable as a snare. Drive controls the amount of distortion, grime affects the ‘dirtyness’. ‘Centre’ and ‘Width’ allow you to target the distortion to a particular frequency range, while ‘Res’ controls the resonance of the filter Pad A3: Distortion Overdrive via FX2 – this gives the snare a more ‘slappy’, dirty sound – ‘tone’ is a simple EQ control, while drive sets the amount of distortion. Pad A4: Distortion Fuzz via FX3 – a nice gentle distortion, with editable EQs to give control over the distortion applied to different frequency bands, giving you the ability to target a particular element of the snare for additional (or reduced) distortion. Pad A5: Distortion Amp via FX4 – a very aggressive grunging of the snare. Higher ‘tone’ gives a brighter sound, while a higher ‘dynamics’ value gives more life to the sound. The drive setting simply increases the distortion.
If you wish you can adjust the settings for each distortion effect by going to MODE and pad 11 (EFFECTS) and use the methods described in chapters 18 and 19. Please note that at this point I have tried to match the output level of the distorted sounds to that of the original un-effected sound on pad A1 (using the ‘output level’ parameter found on each distortion effect). However, we’ll see in the next section that it will be beneficial to increase this output to give us the hottest signal possible. Recording the MPC Outputs When creating sounds that rely on specific pad parameters or internal effects, there may come a time when you decide its better to create a ‘standalone’ wav sample of this pad. This sample can then be imported into other programs without worrying about setting up the correct parameters or effects – plus it will give you the opportunity to apply further effects or processing to it. This is actually very easy to do - we’ll use the MPC5000’s resampling feature.
Go to the REC SAMPLE screen (MODE and pad 4). In the top left of the screen is the ‘Input’ parameter – highlight this and select MAIN OUT; as this is a stereo snare sample, set ‘mode’ to STEREO. Leave everything else as it is.
What we have done is to instruct our MPC to sample its own main outputs. This means that once the sampler is armed, any sounds coming out of the MPC outputs will actually be sampled. At this point, the procedure is virtually identical to the one we described in chapter 8, except there we were sampling the audio from an external sound source. The difference is that in this example, the REC GAIN dial has no effect on the incoming signal level, so it is a bit more tricky to set the ‘hottest’ signal level to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. Let’s record pad A4. Press A4 to see what kind of level it is producing on the ‘level meter’ – if the level seems a bit low, there’s a couple of options. First, you can increase the MPC’s master output level. To do this, go to OTHER (mode and pad 9) and check what your master level is set at. The highest level available is 0dB – if it is set to anything lower than this, you can jog wheel to the left to increase it. Watch out though – during playback of some sequences, where many sounds may be played in unison, you may get distortion from the outputs when the master level is set to 0dB – if you do find this, just go back to OTHER and take the level down to ‘6dB’ or less. Alternatively, you can increase the output of the pad itself – in this instance, the pad and mixer settings are already maxed out, however all distortion effects have a dedicated output level control, so this could be increased. Go to EFFECTS (mode and pad 11), BUS3-4 (F2), highlight the FX3 distortion block and hit WINDOW. Take the ‘Output’ up to 90.
Return to REC SAMPLE (mode and pad 3) and preview pad A4 to observe the level meter to ensure it is as close to 0dB as possible. You can of course return to the EFFECTS page and adjust the level a little. Once you are happy that this recorded signal is nice and ‘hot’, press RECORD (F6) to arm the sampler and press pad A4 to record. Once the sample has played through, press STOP and press PLAY (F4) to preview the recorded sample. If you are happy, press KEEP - for the moment, just use the default sample name. Go to TRIM and select this new sample. Using the basic sample editing techniques from chapter 10, perform a quick TRIM and DISCARD to clean up the start and end points, ensuring we have a tightly edited sample. Finally, go to EDIT > NORMALIZE and DO IT to ensure the output level of the sample is maxed out. My completed sample (D-SNARE) can be found on pad A9 in the DISTORTION program. I’ve set its pad level down to 40 as it’s so loud compared to the original snare – at this point compare it to the original sound on pad A1. You’d never know they were from the same snare. Compression Compression can be applied to drums to help shape the various transients and create a significantly different sound, without adversely affecting the inherent character of the drum. We touched on the built-in compression effects in chapter 19. Load up the project file ‘COMPRESSION.001prj’ from the ‘COMPRESSION’ subfolder. This simply loads up a program containing our GSNR sample on pad A1 (with an exponential envelope added to tighten it up). In addition, I have assigned the ‘Compressor Master’ effect to this pad via effect buss 1 (FX1). Go to EFFECTS (mode and pad 11), BUS1-2 (F1), highlight effect block A on FX1 and hit WINDOW to bring up the effect settings for the master compressor.
As you can see, all the parameters for the compressor have been set to extremes, which I find is a great way to begin investigating the effect the compressor has on the sound – what we’ll do is start reducing certain parameters and listen to how the snare sound changes. Once we get a better understanding of what each parameter is going to the sound, we can tone the settings down to make them more musical. Attack With attack at 0, press pad A1. The snare has a very tough ‘crack’ which really hits hard. Now start increasing the attack time of the compressor; as you do, this crack gets more and more diminished and the hitting power of the snare becomes softer. After an attack value of 10, the hard crack is gone. Reset the attack to 0. Release At a release of 0, the decay of the snare is short and tight. As you increase the release value, the decay becomes longer and more airy, especially from ‘40’ upwards. At 100, the snare sounds very open, almost like there’s some reverb added to it. Ratio This dictates the amount of compression applied, so at 20 (most likely this represents a ratio of 20:1), we have the maximum amount of compression being applied and the sound becomes very ‘squeezed’ as all the peaks of audio become compressed down – in addition, the changes in sound as dictated by the attack and release settings tends to become more pronounced. This squeeze is clearly reduced as the ratio is decreased, which is accompanied by an increase in volume. Hence at higher ratios of compression, we need to increase the ‘output’ parameter to compensate.
Threshold This determines the level at which the compressor will begin acting on your sample. If this is set too low, your sound is in danger of losing too much dynamic content; too high and the compressor will not be activated. So, let’s try to create some specific sounds. Pad A2 features the compression settings found in FX buss 2. Here I’ve applied some compression with the following settings: Attack: 0 Release: 0 Threshold: -30 Ratio: 10 This gives a nice tight snare with plenty of ‘crack’. Pad A3 is set up to use FX3, and here I’ve create a ‘flammy’ snare using the following settings: Attack: 22 Release: 83 Threshold: -22 Ratio: 12 Finally on pad A4 I’ve set the compression to be somewhat more gentle, with a short attack, short-ish release, a moderate threshold and tame compression ratio. The resulting snare has more presence compared to the un-effected snare, with a little more bite to the attack and a bit more body. In addition to the above parameters, the master compressor has an ‘oldskool’ switch, which grunges up the sound a little (it sounds like a combination of the resampler and decimator effects). Give it a go on pad A4 by setting ‘oldskool’ to ‘On’. Filters You can change the sound of a kick drum very easily using your MPC's built-in filters. Load up the program KICK.50s from the FILTER sub folder. Here we have four kick samples laid out in rows, each row contains four identical samples - so kick 1 is on PADS A1 - A4, kick 2 is on PADS A5 - A8 etc. Have a listen to each kick sample by pressing PADS A1, A5, A9 and A13 - you'll hear each kick has its own unique sound - I've selected kick drums that have an element of hi hat still in the chop, or kicks with a bit of reverb about them. Select PAD A2 and enter the FltLFO screen (F2).
Navigate to the ‘Type’ and set to LOW PASS (usually this is the default). A low pass filter (as the name suggests) filters out high frequencies, only letting the low ones ‘pass’ through. The cut off point at which the filter attenuates the signal is set by the ‘Freq’ setting. Now highlight ‘Freq:100’ and start to decrease this value and at the same time, keep hitting PAD A2 so you hear the kick gradually change sound. To my ears, that kick started to get pretty grimy sounding around a setting of 75. At this point, it still sounded quite natural, but with the filter applied it sounds fatter and crunchier and still has a bit of 'thwapp' about it. Try comparing it to the unfiltered version on A1. This is something I tend to use a lot when building drum loops. Now select PAD A3. This time add more low pass filter to the pad, take it down to around 30 - things are getting less natural sounding now as a lot of the high frequencies have been removed. The kick is sounding a lot more subby - take it down to 10 and you'll hear that no high frequencies are there - it's just a deep boom which sounds like a heart beat. Kicks like this can be used on their own for deep sounding beats, or layered with others kicks to produce a very thick, dark kick sound (more about this in the Layering Drum Sounds tutorial). Now select pad A4. This time we'll play around with the resonance. The resonance exaggerates the effect of the low pass filter creating some different and sometimes unnatural sounds. As on pad A3, set the filter to 30, but this time set the resonance to 100. Compare PAD A3 and A2 - you can hear that the resonance has given our filtered kick a lot more presence and has ‘opened up’ the sound. Now compare this to pad A1 - you'd never know that they were the same kick sample. Your sound may not resemble a natural kick drum at all, but nevertheless it’s another sound in your arsenal.
The ‘Slope’ settings changes the subtlety of the filter. At the default ‘2POLE’, the effect is fairly mild and is good for general filtering usage. Change to more poles, and the filter effect is increased; on pad A3 change to 4POLE and you should hear the kick start to sound a little more aggressive. Change to 6POLE and the kick is much more in your face. 8POLE gives a deeper but hard hitting sound. Of course, filtering doesn’t stop there. With the MPC5000, there are several more filters available that all shape your sounds completely differently. Select pad A4 and set a frequency of 30 and a 2POLE slope. Now highlight ‘Type’ and jog wheel to the right to see the filters on offer: HIGH PASS - this works in the opposite way to LOW PASS. This one filters out lower frequencies in favour of the higher ones. With a ‘Freq’ of 30, you should hear that the kick loses a lot of it’s bottom end thump; at a ‘Freq’ of around 90, it sounds more like a hi-hat! The hi-hat like nature can be improved by increasing the ‘Res’ setting try this at 65. BAND PASS - here you are setting a bad of frequencies that can pass through unfiltered (indicated by the graph to the right of your screen), while all frequencies either side of this band are filtered out. Try a ‘Freq’ of 83, a ‘Res’ of 28 and a 6POLE slope to give a percussive sound similar to a shaker. Take the ‘Freq’ down to 55 and you’ll get a door knocking sound. BAND STOP is the opposite of BAND PASS - here the frequency range indicated by the graph is cut while all other frequencies remain. Decreasing the ‘Res’ setting widens the frequency range affected. A ‘Freq’ of 32 and ‘Res’ of 0 gives a mild kick sound with minimal bass. BAND BOOST boosts the selected frequency range. Apply this to the BAND STOP settings above and you get a really boomy kick. There are many more filters and settings to tweak in this section, but I’ll explore more LFO goodness in chapter ‘042 LFO, Slider & External Sound Manipulation‘ You can hear my version of the above on the FILTER.50s program. Now load up the project file FILTER001.prj. Go to MAIN - I’ve then recorded four sequences, each one using just one single row of sounds from my new FILTER2 program – i.e. each entire sequence is constructed using a single kick sample. Play through each sequence to see the kind of sonic possibilities available with all these filters.
That’s the end of this free preview of the ‘Beat Making on the MPC5000’ – you can purchase the full book at MPC-Tutor.com: http://www.mpc-tutor.com/product/beat-making-on-the-mpc5000/