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Routing and Automation Demo with Flux

Lesson 14 from: Mastering The Maschine

JK Swopes

Routing and Automation Demo with Flux

Lesson 14 from: Mastering The Maschine

JK Swopes

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Lesson Info

14. Routing and Automation Demo with Flux

Lesson Info

Routing and Automation Demo with Flux

Today is the day where I dive down the rabbit hole bit okay, but what I'm going to start with is some things that tying really tightly with what he's showing so he showed earlier the tapes stop effect which tape stop effect is something that a lot of people use especially in d j mixes and whatnot that's that's a really common effect and if you're doing a live performance to be really powerful, another common effect is doing glitches, so having your drums kind of stutter so we could do no repeats, we can do things like that but using that same plug in the green stretch plug in we can actually make drum rolls that are, you know, physically impossible by a drummer on and I'm going to get into that right now using that, so we're not going to be using any external plug ins were going to be using just what machine uses so first thing I'm going to do is I'm gonna load up a drum group again the way we do this is we hit browse, we do or groups and we can start selecting through some kits here I...

'm actually going to press the user button when we pressed the user button, it sends me into whatever sounds are not from the machine factory library, so maybe you saved some drum brakes that you were working with maybe you have some third party kits because machine can import all kinds of different things and one thing to remember about your user sounds it's not going to browse your hard drive, so if you want something to show up in your user sand, you have to actually imported into machine first exactly know, the other day before the show I had imported these the's third party expansions and by doing that in the software here you can see kind of their deal where they would import that. Ok, so the first thing you would do is to import a third party expansion is you're going to go over to your believing preferences here we're going to your library and you're going to see a user selection and when you click user we see here we have the's, different folders and these air different paths. So just like in finder if your own mac or where the cold peace explore explorer ok, so you're just finding the file path okay? And depending on the expansion, you may or may not need an alias, so for instance, we have dominant drums at the top here, which is a drum expansion pack. It doesn't need an alias, so all we do is is pointed to it hit three scan and it will import all the sounds if it's made specifically for machine, it will map our tag out all the sounds so they know if it needs an alias or not they were reading the instructions say you go okay it's think it's extremely important if you get an expansion pack from any third party provider there's usually going to be a short pdf it's you know it's not rocket science stuff here we're talking usually a pager too and it's going to tell you how to import so the dystopia expansion here has an alias and you need to type it exactly as it is described in your manual so if it's capital letters you want capital letters if it's not you don't want it the alias essentially is kind of like a like a short cut it's a shortcut name so it tells machine okay no matter what if I see this alias I know that that's where I need to look for the sounds because otherwise you'll come up with missing samples and you'll have problems. Okay, so and if it's an older expansion library from something like machine one then what you would do is you could import it and then click import machine one dot x this is after this is after you set it up in the princess's yes so you have to do both if it's an older that's version of the urban expansion so then you click import one dot aks pointed to that library and it will convert it to oh, the new format. So what I'm going to do right now is I'm actually going to go, and so we have these expansions sounds here I'm going to do two different things at once. First, I'm going to go to my boom bap kits and just glued a kit uh, to use the fish kit, no pattern on here way had these the's drum sounds, and what we can do is, again, I'm going to loot a second group, and the reason I'm doing this is to just kind of show you how to navigate this. I'm going to files and I'm going to be on the desktop and see little folder that I set up earlier and I have these drum brakes, so I'm just going to drag this sample great to the pad here, going to get myself a little bit of room, so I have a sample here and let's hear it and I cut is a long sample, I cut it off very quickly it's a short cut on the mission machine controller itself. If you have a long sample, maybe you accidentally trigger something, maybe you're doing a show and you need a quick panic button to shut everything off shift to plus me will shut everything up so that's extremely useful when you're doing a lot of show that and you screw something up so I know that I've done that I'm going to go to my plug in window here and I'm going to set up just some basic things setting my prolife knee toe one so that I can re triggering okay now let's go ahead and shortened this guy up take it right about here now a cz joe was talking about the other day when he truncate samples or when he's adjusting starting and points he's using his ears to do it you can also if you're if you're just trying to work quickly, you can really get awful close just by looking at the way forms like I just I was talking about before so I'm just looking at the transients and I'm adjusting my end point here and kind of getting close to where I want to pay so and then you can just kind of, you know, adjust from there so it was definitely a lot faster when you're working with something that has a lot of transients like drum loops and stuff and I just go in and look at it, you know? I'm going to keep this loop pretty short because I wanted to have not a lot of variation the point of what I'm shelling is we're going to take something with very little variation and make it have a whole lot of variation so okay, so let's get right about here, I believe right there so now we've got this little guy and I'm actually going ahead truncated so I have this loop and, um, see what temperature we're at right now, so we'll bring it down to about ninety two and I'm going to, uh, going to time stretching and I'm just doing this just to make things easy, okay? So the original source bpm of this is eighty two I'm time stretching it to ninety two, so I'm actually compressed time compressing it, so apply okay, you guys following how I did that kind of thing that goes back to what we're talking about. Yes, there is much easier to work with the time stretch when you have a exactly when you're working with a perfect loop like that, where I truncated it exactly where it needs to be. There's no extra okay? When you go into the settings, you'll see that your source bpm is the actual bpm of the sample that you're working with its it's a mathematical equation that makes it very easy to find. But if you leave slop, you're not going then readouts not going to be accurate so it's very important that you you slice worried on these transients that's definitely that's actually a question I get a lot when people try to time seriously think that they can just throw anything in there in time stretch it but if you have it on beat mode it's really looking for a specific measure so it doesn't have to be one bar could be two bars or whatever, but it has to be exact now if you're doing again when I show what the lot example if you're doing it in free mode that you could just kind of go in adjusted by percentage but if you really want to get too specific tempos it's really, really beneficial if you have it in a perfect lou so another quick tip about working with with drums and samples is when you bring it over here when you're in preferences uh knock was using double time at some points yesterday, right? Uh sometimes I like to work in double time, but I don't like to work in double time it's it's kind of like a preference thing, so I like to trick my years into thinking I'm in double time so you can actually change your metric and time signatures up here. So instead of being on quarter new metro new, sometimes I'll put it to eat new so it gives me that double time feeling while I'm while I'm playing, but I'm still keeping the original bpm so on some of the older drawing sequencers, you really couldn't do it quite as easily like that so we would we would double time it would make her home exactly or use a high hat as your metro room and then go back and change it later. So now if I want if I want to hear what that metro name sounds like announced a faster ok, so basically what I'm doing and you could do this instead no, tio I'm just laying down very simple so now that that is looped perfectly right? So what we're going to do now we have this loop that is really basic there's not a lot going on there. We're gonna hit shift, browse we're gonna bring up, uh green stretch okay, this is the same plug in that joe was using earlier and when we use shift browse we're not bringing up. There are a presets for these inbuilt effects I'm not using any process. I'm going to make this on my own because there's only what seven parameters here? It's really not that difficult to get to know it and sometimes by not using presets, you'll find that you'll learn a whole lot more about sculpting your sound. So uh important things to know about the green stretch is we had the master on and off which turns the effect on and off we had the stretch ok, the stretch is important because that tells us how far is it going to break apart the sound greens are individual tiny slices of audio and the loop is how many of those slices it will play before it loops back around? I'm going to be setting the loop toe one pitch is obviously the pitch of those individual greens link will set it tio linked to your bpm what I'm going to do now is I'm going to turn my stretch all the way to one hundred percent and I'm gonna automate the on and off so you can hear what happens now so again how many plug ins out there do that and you already have it right there a machine so I've just duplicated four patterns they're all the exact same there's not a lot going on it's just that straight drum loop what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna leave the first pattern alone go into my second pattern and I'm going to do some automation like what joe was shown so let's go ahead now on this last pattern, I'm going to get a little bit more wild with it and this is where the stretch amount comes into play. This is where you can get some really interesting facts with that you can actually make the drones break apart and kind of get slow and robotically you know and it's important to have the link on if you really wanted to sound like you if you could show that so wantonly what is how crazy was sampled? Linkov s o it's actually really fun and remember when you're not holding down when you're not holding down the auto right button and you change a parameter that will affect whatever you've already auto written okay, so meaning I had before I started I had link on all right I'm not touching ordering and I'm turning link off now everything is going to have link off because I didn't autorite anything with that so that's already there and if I for instance, if I change the stretch of mail and without holding down order right, it changes the the relative position of the automation ok? So when I hold down order, right and I'm adjusting things, I'm adjusting things as a percentage away from the set point, okay? You follow him saying ok, good. So without the link corn oh, c'mon, mike, anything that question uh, when when you're going through and you just loop playback, you know, you overriding the automation you prior prior players that you overwrite it over? Yeah, so this is a one bar loop and if I'm still holding down order, right? And I'm doing this and it's looping, I'm order on just going right over top of that and that could be really useful if you want to have the loop have like a really seamless flow in automation to it you know, as joe was saying with that with the river, maybe you don't want it to bleed into the beginning, but sometimes you do want to write into the beginning because you want to have a seamless loop, some what's here and now I'm gonna just a relative position of this stretch, and if you look at the software, you can see the yellow marker on the stretch. You'll see how now it's moving lower, and if I turn it up, it'll be moving higher. See how that's moving that's because it's it's a relative position, but also the automation explained the percentage is what they're showing down there in the automation lane. Yes, of those percentages are the relative position from your from your initial mark. So down here, you see, see these percentages down here as you move the that's, the percentage above them below where you're at so we can go way down here this and again, if I wantto quickly just clear my automation, the clear button above it in white says clear auto shift clear auto. Now that automation is going now, let's say, I want those glitches to get like, look, I'm a fan of, like, affects twin and like they have, like, really strange glitches in that, you know, we used to have to draw these things in and do really detailed slicing inside of q base or whatever doll you're using you don't have to do that on machine on machine you can just turn it up so so you're getting these really interesting in time glitches small thing to note about the size the size of this size portions I've found that they're certain numbers that work more musically so like twenty five percent fifty percent seventy five percent you tend to get these more even slices even with the link off you know you still get the's the's more musical sounding slices so yes answer my question I was like oh which were just doing I was like, was the link supposed beyond but you just answered it now so you meant for to be off, right? Yeah. Okay that's it that's the story he's sticking to it I'm on well, I'm reading his mind before it is they're so uh so that's one typical way of glitch ing there is there's a few different ways that we can go about this. I wanted to bring up this other drum group real quick to just kind of show an example um just check something out here they're so thank you that group right here way have a very basically right there's another effect that is also a grain based effect that works really interesting on drone and what I'm going to do now is load that up so again I'm doing shift browse because these air all when you hit shift browse it's all the machine built in effects so this is you get to just the initialized version because if you're just going to browse and you go through the fix those of the presets so green delay is another green based effect and we have a lot of the similar controls we have the size of the green the pitch of the grain we have cloud density modulation and mix are essentially the delay aspect of it so there's two sizes the cloud side which is your delay and then there's the green side, which is the slices for that delay ok, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to show ways that you can use it to kind of make weird behind the scenes glitches if you like a lot of w type sounds so I've set my pitch up and active, which is twelve semi tones and I'm adjusting the mix of mt okay? So now on I haven't even touched this size I kept it twenty five, but by doing this it lets me get into some interesting, some interesting different pitched glitches so let's go ahead and do that now now when you're doing that with the with space down, you're not getting a whole lot of extra all for the end when you start bringing in the space, you have to be very careful because with the space and density you can actually self obsolete, which means that it will start to feed back on itself and it'll speak its own language at that point, you know you've got to be careful, so I'm gonna make another pattern now when I've duplicated the pattern that already had automation on it. So now I have two patterns with same automation on it, and I'm going to add to the automation than I previously had. Ok, so let's, go ahead and hit play, and I'm gonna just the cloud. Now now I'm going to duplicate that and I'm going to adjust modulation and the modulation is going to basically be moving the amount of the space and density through here. So let's, check that out. So you get these really cool, kind of like spaced out effects and it's at this point that you've got to turn the black later on and just have some fun with it. A really interesting aspect of the density is I'll just play it so you can hear because it's it's one of those things that it's more technical than just turning a knob, but if you just turn the knob, you get the instant gratification, which is what's so great about machine wait and that's that's, where you start having a whole lot of fun with it, you know, you're kind of, you know, get a little bit lost in yourself on that the reverse function of that is going to flip the sound backwards as it comes through the greens. That is very useful for getting these kind of like, rubbery effects if you autonomy, you see what I'm saying flips it backwards and and the the transients normally would be more spiked at when we looked at the way form before we had this spiked front and transients, because it's flipped around, you're getting this kind of fade into it so it gives it this washing sound that makes us all feel happy. Uh, now going back to that drum break can't dive a little deeper on that one. Yeah, ok, so I'm gonna show um a let me let me make sure I get rid of any automation on this. So back to the original drum break that I had I'm going to show another way teo teo completely glitch a drum break that is just simple drum break. And you see if I can interrupt you real quick what you just did, just killing all the automation that you put on the track that was actually someone asking in the chat room what was that key stroke you did just again again, that is shift and clear. So on the controller itself, it says, clear auto above shifting above clear, and that is just for clearing out automation. Now, if I hit clear by itself, it would clear all the notes, all the data that we got a pattern. Exactly that would clear out your pattern and event you can. You can go through your events and do that as knock was showing the other day, which, again, we're all learning here, and these guys are showing things that I'm learning from, and vice versa. So it's, it's, it's, a really great given take.

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Ratings and Reviews

George D
 

Even though it's a bit old now this is still a fantastic walkthrough of Maschine. Lots of great content here!

Joseph Castaneda
 

Pretty dated, but an excellent class. JK walks through everything he explains with thorough, real-time examples. Extremely helpful!

William Parmlee
 

Just what i needed, great work flow an easy to follow. looking forward to the next level . Thanks

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