MPC Thread : MPC Live - MPC X - MPC One (Part 3)

Thanks @Elijah it did work in the end.

Do tell more about your setup with 3 (desktop? Standalone?) and ableton live? I’m curious!

I played a live set with my MPC live, a mixer, and an FX pedal yesterday. Some thoughts:

  • Streaming samples from the SSD in 3.0 made it possible for me to load multiple songs into one project
  • For some reason, saving “Tracks” instead of “Programs” doesn’t store related samples, or at least when I loaded tracks, they didn’t also load samples. And if that’s the case, I don’t really understand what they’re good for?
  • For reasons I can’t understand, I couldn’t simultaneously tweak a q-link and mute/unmute tracks. I had to take my hand off the q-link for it to register
  • New track mixer view was fairly usable live, except scrolling through tons of tracks got annoying - don’t love swiping on a touch screen live
  • I can’t wait for some kind of force-style clips to get implemented, track mute and changing sequences isn’t nearly as flexible live
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These 2 sound like bugs & you should report them.

The Force has multiple ways of moving thru tracks. One way is to use a button shortcut Shift+Right/Left directional button to move to next set of 8 tracks. Is there something like that on the MPC? If not there should be & requests need to be made for it.

A workaround is to use 1 set of the 16 Project macro knobs as track mutes. This will give you access to at least 16 tracks to mute at once. You can also assign multiple tracks to the same macro knob. I don’t know the limit but I once assigned up 512 parameters to 1 macro. You can also have it that when you use a macro to mute a track it unmutes another.

I hope it was a great show!

Did you mute by trying to touch the screen or by hitting the physical pads? The latter should work, but for whatever reason I think the entire touch screen functionality is always disabled when twisting a q link.

curious, have you tried the 2.15.1 firmware live, and if so how would you compare the two?

And another question if you don’t mind - how did you structure your set?

For me I like to have a pretty consistent Track 1 kick, track 2 snare, etc. and just change programs as I go along through sequences. For using an external sequencer this is also way easier. Also definitely way more of a mutes than clips guy, even for performance templates on Push I try to keep reliance on clips to an absolute minimum and do basically everything on mutes.

Although because I do it like this I don’t really tend to use long stems so disk streaming has never been really an issue. Were you trying to load and remove tracks while you were playing the set? Or did you have a whole bunch of tracks and try to find a way of moving through them?

Seeing how many comments there are about crashes, bugs, etc., I’m honestly impressed by your decision to perform live on the MPC 3.0. I’m not being sarcastic, I genuinely mean it with admiration. Unless something has improved with the stability of 3.0 and I just missed it (I’m still on 2.0). Do you use the MkI?

In my experience, both Programs and Tracks have preserved the associated samples when saved and reloaded. Programs are saved as .xpm files with samples in the same folder, while Tracks are saved as .xtd files, with the samples stored inside a hidden folder named TrackName_[TrackData] in the same location. Maybe the issue is that the file paths were broken?

Also make sure you have the option to show those that folder on. Click on the gear :gear: icon & select show hidden files.

Just some follow up -

  • I’ve played live on 2.something, maybe 2.13? And now the latest build the other day
  • My memory of setting up on 2 was it required more prep work, because I wanted all my sequences to have tracks in the same order. And I didn’t want the potential confusion of shared programs, I wanted them unique for each of my songs
  • For all the annoyances with 3.0 and I have a ton, I’ve had zero problems with crashes or that kind of thing. It felt totally solid live
  • I don’t really use stems live, but I have tons of very long samples (it was an ambient set) and it was more than my live 2 could hold in RAM. I totally could have fit everything if I optimized and baked some stuff down, but I was lazy and wanted to minimize my prep work.
  • my biggest frustration this time was that you can only change sequences once a sequence ends. When my set was made up of 16 bar loops a couple years ago and more beat driven that was fine, but I had these long textural 64+ bar loops and I had to keep watching for that, because I’d have to wait another minute or two for it to come around again.
  • I’ll have to dig around some more into my track files and see what got saved. My process was for each song I’d save out all the patterns and tracks and then load them all into one project.
  • Honestly if I hadn’t written all this stuff on the MPC, and had all my tracks saved out in similar ways on the MPC, it would have been too much of a pain in the ass. I found it pretty fussy with a lot of touchscreen, and it was really the fact I ran everything into a mixer on the six outs that made my set feel expressive.
  • One thing that was expressive, and that I used heavily, was the project q-links driving multiple parameters with tweaked start and end values.
  • In the past I had these very specific structures, like kick/clap/perc/pads/chops/textures that I applied to every song I played live. So each song would have exactly 8 tracks. This time these songs were so different from each other that all I did was run different kinds of stuff into subgroups: bass channel 1, vocals channel 2, chops and synth channels 3+4, pads and textures channels 5+6.
  • Were I to play a lot more, I’d probably get a cheap additional sampler like a p-6 for transitions and just let every song be its own project.
  • I’ll also add some of these challenges are specifically my own, I had multiple goals with this set: I wanted to it to feel like the material from the album while allowing each song to be as long or short as I chose, with seamless transitions, and the flexibility to dub mix the material live with my mixer and FX
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Thanks a lot for that - makes sense. I guess I’m quite locked in to the approach of moving vertically through a set - 8 tracks mapped to a midi controller in Ableton/Push, which I think where I’d go for dubbing things out, or up to a single bank of mutes on the MPC - that I hadn’t really considered the possibility of moving horizontally through a set in 3.0. Like in this video - of course on Push the thing is that you still have the option of doing whichever you prefer.

I still don’t think it’s for me, but the context is pretty different - I’m using short samples of drums and chops for the most part would rarely have any audio loops. Although this is something I’ve been looking at more so on the 404. I much prefer manipulating patterns rather than doing much with sounds as the core of the performance, hence mutes are a better option because there’s more scope to break down elements rhythmically within the pattern rather than launching loops and letting them play. And I’m not really looking to do much on the mixer when working this way other than maybe rebalance things as required.

Food for thought, though - I don’t think I’d fancy trying to scroll the MPC mixer on the touchscreen, especially when things are moving at a faster pace. But if there’s a way of paging through maybe organising sets horizontally could be viable - it’s one area where I hit a complete brick wall in 3.0 in terms of options/workarounds.

Re bugs, I think I’ve been lucky in both versions that I haven’t really hit on many. The note-off thing is only an issue for me now because of the potential to cause unexpected issues when using an external sequencer. Even though I didn’t hit any issues in a couple of hours, I don’t really want to take the chance.

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You can copy a sequence to another sequence in MPC 3.5 desktop beta - right-click on the sequence name and select copy from the drop down menu.
No need to connect an MPC in controller mode to do that.

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Liquid Conan is back once again with the desktop software

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Sorry to bother again, but does anyone know if it is possible to filter the track event list by pad/note? I want to manually nudge only Pad A4s time values, and therefore it would be great to be able to see only these. Especially if you habe a busy track …
Its easily done on the 1k amd 4k, but I couldn’t find it one the 3.0 version.
Sorry in advance if this is on like page 2 in the manual :frowning:
Have a good day y’all!
Cheers

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Thanks that helped a lot. I feel so stupid about forgetting the right click . Back to the music. Peace

No, but they should add this feature. I asked for this year’s ago. What you can do is tap the parameters you want to edit, then tap any other pad 1st, then tap the pad you want which should highlight all the events of that pad on the list. Now you should be able to only move that pad/note across the list.

I would just go to the grid editor & tap the pad/note either on the screen or the pad/note use Select All options & use Nudge the notes from there.

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Thank you for clarifying. It’s quite weird that they excluded such a basic feature in their contemporary firmware… I will do it how you described… sounds not too complicated. I really liked working in the list view though …

Unfortunately most things sound too complicated until you actually do it. It takes about 2 seconds in the list view & the grid/Arranger.

I think he went over it this demo:

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:rotating_light: Cheatcode Alert :rotating_light:

Anyone have their DN2/DT2 setup to control their MPC hw?

**it’s super easy and str8 forward. Here’s a simple short video I found helpful for those looking to do similar. My setup is a bit more involved but this covers the basics of controlling pads via DN:

I’m using 8 midi tracks from DN2 to control MpC pads. 4 for melodic plugins, key groups etc. 4 for Digitone synths, audio rooted back into MPC for arranging and further processing.

You can also just use usb to connect DN->MPC to use DN chord, arp, folded scale keyboard to control MPC which is dope too :ok_hand:t5:

Finding it super helpful to have templates on DN2 for quick boom bap, trap, house grooves that trigger MPC sounds. Gets the juices flowing quickly and easy to switch off quanticize, tweak and improvise on the pads for variations.

Definitely supercharges sampling workflows to have a bunch of different grooves to audition chops to at the ready. Elektron sequencing obviously offers the ability to create so many different patterns to swap in and out.

Slow em down and practice finger drumming to the rhythms you program on the DN2 should help improve MpC pad chops as well.

MPC x DN2 is a GOAT’d combo imo.

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loopy pro/MPC X edition… somebody in the comments said they liked the original non-chopped version better… I definitely concur, but very nice process over all

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and some midi looping

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