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Akai MPC Studio & OS-Update 2.10

From boring to killer beat!

Published 1:42 pm on Friday 10th December 2021 by Beat Magazine

1 Basic beat
Load a drum kit and create a simple beat or load an existing project that might like to groove more. For our workshop, we created a simple 4/4 beat with kick, clap and hi-hat. The hat plays a shaker pattern, kick and clap an absolutely straight beat. Consequently, the beat is unspectacular to the max. Perfect then!



2 Duplicate hi-hat
Switch to PROGRAM EDIT with MENU + Pad 14. Hold the COPY key, press the pad with the hi-hat and then a free pad, say in Bank B, so that the position remains the same. With the original, we set the pad duplicate under SIMULTANEOUS PLAY, so both are triggered at the same time. Now the beat runs completely out of control for the first time.



3 Trigger on note-off
Select the destination pad and set playback to REVERSE in the SAMPLES menu. Switch to the MASTER tab and set SAMPLE PLAY to NOTE OFF. This will not play the sample until you release the pad. So the reverse hat will only start after the normal hi-hat (or when your fingers come off the pad and not at the end of the sample).



4 Clap copy
We use the same principle with the clap, but transpose it down -12 SEMI. For both copies, we set the LFO to Noise and turn the PAN knob all the way up so that the sound goes wide. Immediately, the beat benefits enormously from the simple NOTE OFF function. If you set the timing to 50% SWING, it really starts to shake.



5 Create bass
But that‘s not all, the function has another ace up in its sleeve: Duplicate the kick to an empty pad and have that play backwards, too. With the original pad, we also select the pad duplicate as MUTE TARGET so that the low frequencies do not overlap. In particular, kicks with decay create a pseudo-bassline this way.



6 Push bass
Sonically, this is still unexciting, so we switch to the DRUM FX tab and turn up the RingMod a bit. In our case, 197 Hz was enough; with other kicks, the value may differ. But less is more. In addition, turn up some BassE (Tight) and BitCrush and set TubeDrive to around 3 o‘clock. This should give the bass a good blow-dry.



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