Transcripts
1. Introduction: [music] Hey, what's up guys. My name is Corey, and in this class, I'm going to show you how to use the machine Mikro mk3, this guy right here, a machine software in order to start creating your own musical ideas. In this class, we're going to create a 4-bar EDM loop complete with percussion, bass, lead. We're even going to use sy chin compression in order to create clean musical idea, clean mix. Really, this class is perfect for anybody that's curious about music production and wants to start creating their own music, and wants to learn how to use these specific tools in order to create their own music. If this is you, if you're just getting into music or you've been curious about how people make music on their laptops, just creating their own musical ideas and producing their own tracks. If this is something that's always fascinated you, this is the perfect class for you and I'm going to show you exactly how I start my own tracks, creating my own songs and come up with a musical idea on the spot. Let's go ahead and get started and we'll jump right into the software.
2. Creating the Kick Drum: So we have the machine software pulled up, and I've got my Maschine Mikro Mk3 connected to my computer through USB, as you can see. This is exactly how your Maschine Mikro should look once you first connect it to the machine software. This tool is used in tandem with software. It's not stand alone and it can't be operated by itself. You have to have it plugged into your computer, and you have to have the machine to software running on your computer. Whether you're working on a Mac or on a Windows machine, just keep in mind that this is not a stand alone product, that you have to use it in combination with a laptop so that you can plug it into it, and can control the software using the Maschine Mikro Mk3. We're going to start by creating our own drum beat, which is super simple on the Maschine Mikro, and I am going to show you the tools and tricks in order to create a beat. It's so quick. First start by opening up a kick and creating our own four on the floor, kick drum beat. Let's start by looking into our sound, which if we hit this "Magnifying glass" here, it's going to start looking into our sound. Then, moving over to the software, we're going to have to select what kind of sound type, we want to take a look at. It's broken up into a few different categories here. Looking at the software, we have the left corner, we have "Projects". These are other projects that had been started that I can go to and open up. Next we have all our groups, which is a lot of drum kits that we can use, and this is what we're going to look at in a second, after we go through the rest of these categories. Then we have other sounds. This is going to be a lot of synth sounds, like, leads and bases, and organic sounds. Moving over we have "Instrument Types". This is another sound selection tool. You can access different plugins, or you can even narrow it down with certain sounds that you're looking for. Then if we click this little arrow here, it's going to give us a pictorial representation of all the different kinds of instruments and sounds that we have loaded on our computer. I'm a complete, ultimate customer, which is, native instruments sound library. I have all these different instruments at my disposal through the Maschine Mikro to use. Moving over, we also have effects that we can use and apply and process our sounds with. Then there's also a bunch of samples that come with machine, the software. We're going to tap back over to our "Groups", and look for a kit that we can use. We're going to try to find a nice EDM kit. To see if there's something with a good kick drum that we can lay down our four on the floor beat with. Moving back to Maschine Mikro, where we're going to start controlling, machine to software with. We already have it selected on the magnifying glass. It was the very first thing that we did in the video. Now we're going to scroll through using this encoder to preview our different kits. You can adjust your previous sound at the bottom, using this little arrow to move up and down the preview. That's a pretty good kit. A bionic kit is definitely a kit that has a nice sizzle to it, has a really warm kick drum to it. I think that's going to be the kit that we're going to use to create our four-bar EDM loop. I'm going to go ahead and select that kit using the Maschine Mikro. I'm going to push down on the encoder to select that kit. The kit is now loaded into the Maschine Mikro, and as you see all the paths have lit up here, meaning that they are all containing an individual sound. How it works is, you have 16 different sounds per group. If I hit this first pad here, we got a kick drum, and all these pads or velocity sensitive. If I hit really lightly, I'm going to get a light kick. Then if I hit really hard, I'm going to get a hard kick. You can create very dynamic performances using the Maschine Mikro. If I want to have all the sounds at a fixed velocity, we have this convenient button here, which gives me fixed velocity. Anytime I hit any of these paths, no matter how hard or how light I hit the paths, they are all going to strike at the same velocity. If I hit that kick drum lightly, its at a set, even tone. Same with my snare, my hertz. They're all going to strike at the same level. So let's go ahead and lay down a four-bar drumbeat. We're going to use the note repeat function on the micro, this button here. We're going to set the interval to be one fourth so that it hits at every bar. I'm going to go ahead and use the encoder to change the value for the note repeat. We're going to move this down to one fourth. Now that that's set, we're going to keep in mind that our kick drum's here, it's the first path. In order to record this into the program, we're going to give ourselves a little bit of time to get prepared by having a counting metronome. You can see there's a metronome feature here. You can set your speed by clicking it. You'll see updated inside the software that it changed that BPM and determined that that was 116.44 bpm. I want to use 120 bpm. That's the standard. I'm going to go ahead and click on the "Software", and type that back in. Now that our bpm is set. We're going to play this kick drum pattern in. In order to do that, I'm going to do a count in metronome. We're going to get ourselves one bar prepared. How we do that is, we hit "Shift" and then "Record". These two buttons here, in order to engage that count in, and then it's automatically going to start recording. As it's recording, I'm going to hold down "Note Repeat", and then the drum pad for the kick drum in order to lay down our four-bar kick drum. We're going to go ahead and record that in now. "Shift Record", and then, "Note Repeat". As you can see on my screen, I missed the first bar, it just means I was a little too slow. I'm going to stop it here by hitting "Stop". Which means I was a little slow to get to the kick drum pattern. That's, okay. We can go ahead and actually erase the entire take that we just recorded, by hitting "Shift", and "Clear". Then we're going to do the same thing that we just did. Hit "Shift", and "Record", to put that kick drum back in. So, "Shift", "Record", hold "Note-repeat". Then you can see that it started playing over again because I held it passed the four bars of this pattern length. What I can do is hit "Shift" and "Undo", and we have our four-bar kick drum back intact. Now we can turn off record and test out some of these other sounds that are inside this percussion, this kick group. I'm going to take a look at the snare. It's got a nice snap to it. Of course. I'm going to play it back this loop, to see if I like this kick drum better, or this one? It's not a bad sound, but I like the Boominess of this kick. What I'm going to do is, mute the kick drum that we just laid down by holding "Mute" and then selecting that first pad. As you can see in the program itself, it graded out and it's no longer going to be played back. If I hit, "Restart Loop" to start playing this back, we don't hear that kick drum. What I'm going to do to help you understand the process of recording in, I'm going to go ahead and record this other kick drum in, and do the same thing that we just did, so that you get a feel for how this works. We're going to press, "Shift" and "Record". Then we're going to use this Pad here, for the other kick drum, and then record that taken. So "Shift", "Record", "Note", "Repeat". I did the same that we did last time with that accidental overlap. We're going to hold, "Shift" and "Undo", which is pad one, to undo that overlap. We're back to our intact kick drum. As you can see, that's a very easy way to set down a basic beat for your four-bar loop. In the next video we're going to take a look at, creating the hertz for a beat as well as a snare in order to complete our beat, and then move on to making the base, and then the lead.
3. Adding Percussion: Snare and High Hats: All right, now that we've successfully laid down acute trial, which is the base for a musical idea. It's usually always where I start when I'm creating something that is more from the floor and very EDM classic style. That's where I usually start. Now what we're going to do is move into recording our snare part and then also the hi-hat part. We're going to hit the snare on every second beat that the kick drops. Then we're also going to add hi-hat on top. We're going to experiment with the divisions using the Note repeat function again. Let's move into Maschine now and we'll just play back the kick drum that we left with. We decided to go with the other kick drum. Stop there. Very solid sound. I think that's a good one. Now what we're going to do is we're going to move into laying down the snare and that's the second pad, if you remember. We're going to do the same thing that we did last time. For the note repeat function, what we're going to do is move it to one-half, and then let's see what that sounds like with the loop playing back. Make sure records officer, you don't record that part into the loop. Some skin restart the beat here and; hold down, no repeat and hold down snare. Okay, that's a good snare, I think for this, instead of playing in using the Note repeat, we're actually going to play it in live and we're going to try to hit it every time it hits on that second drop the kick. Then if it doesn't end up right, that's okay.We can fix it. What we can do is what is called quantization. That basically means moving our notes, moving on performance to the right division so that the timing is just right with our kick drum. What we're going to do is the same thing that we did last time be hitting "Shift Record to go head and give ourselves a counting. Then we're going to play those snares live into the kick drum pattern. I'm going to hit the "Shift record". I think I missed one measure at the end there which is okay, what we can do is we can actually hold down, Shift and Navigate, and then we can zoom out to see our whole pattern there. That way everything is within the scope of Maschine software. Then we can move in and out. You can also move left and right using these two very useful features. We're going to just leave it as it is right there. Going to shift and then navigate to get out of there. Again there we go. Then what we're going to do is quantize that performance. If we hit "Shift" and then Quantize, you can see that it jumped all those notes to land right on that second kick drum every time. We're going restart the loop and just hear the playback. Everything's perfect except for that last bar. What we can do is just hold down the note with the arrow and then hold on all or option on our PC or Mac. Then drag that note to our last bar. Then now if we play it back, we're golden. Now we have the kick drum and our snare setup. What we're going to do is put some hi-hats on top there are to complete this beat. In order to do that, if you remember the hi-hat as on this pad right here, pad three. Let's just explore the note repeat function again, I'm going to turn the encoder to maybe an eighth note here. Then if we play that, that might work, let's try that. We're going to play this sound, you account in Shift Record and then note repeat. Perfect. We actually landed that four bar loop completing with our kick drum or snare and hi-hat. Now that we have our drum section or percussion completely laid out, we can actually move into a more fun part now, which is creating a base and laying down our bass part. We'll go ahead and move on to that part in the next video.
4. Laying Down a Driving Bassline: All right, now that we have our Drum loop completed at this point, we can move on to something a little bit more fun. We're going to create a bass part for our four bar loop. So what we're going do is, first start in the machine software by selecting sounds over here. Actually we're going to go to the instruments. There's this specific base that I'm looking for and it's using an audio plugins, a VST plugin called MASSIVE. You may have heard of it. If you ever heard of the artist Skrillex, he uses it so much in combination with another plugin called FM8 back in the day to create a lot of those dubstep sounds as wobbly basses. We're going to use a little bit more toned down preset inside that same plug-in and we're going to create the bass part for our four bar drum loop. So what we're going to do is, since we're in the instruments now, we can start previewing the sounds inside of our library. What I'm going to do is just go back to the magnifying glass on the MASHINE MIKRO and then start scrolling through using the encoder again. [MUSIC]. Actually I have a specific bass that I like. It's called the addition bass. If I hit the star on here, I've already favorited some presets that we can take a look at. [MUSIC]. With there being so many sounds, it's easy to get lost in it. So actually, I'm going to go right to the plugin by hitting this drop-down arrow, and that we're going to select Massive and see if we can find that base that I'm looking for. [MUSIC] There it is. So I found it right here on the software. Yes, that's the base. So we're going and click the encoder on the machine micro to load it up and is now loaded into our project. What I want to do is actually put this on a different group. I don't want this to stay on this same drum loop because I want to be able to mix the levels at the end of our idea creation. So what I'm going to do is actually undo that by hitting Shift and Undo, which clears it out. It was actually sitting on one of the drum pads, it didn't really want that to happen. What I'm going to do is actually press Group on the MASHINE MIKRO and we're going to add a new group. What that does is essentially adds a bass onto a separate track. We're going to put the bass onto that group now, that way we have two different tracks to level out and set our gain staging or volume later on with. Since the addition base is still loaded up in our browser with the magnifying glass on, what we can do is just press the encoder and it's going to load it straight into our group now. As we can see on the software, it's on Pad 1 here. If I play it, [MUSIC] we had that one note, and because it's in Pad mode, it's still what would be considered like the kit mode. So what we're going to do is actually move over to Keyboard mode, so we have access to all the tones with that bass. Now if you look over here at this little window, it says that the note starts on C3. If we want to change the scale on the root for our note, we can just turn the encoder here. What I'm going do is actually make it an A-sharp because that's the key I want our project to be in. I'm going to bring it down to A-sharp, maybe one or two because A-sharp 3 is going to be too high. If we play this back, [MUSIC] it's practically like lead sound. So what we can do is just hit Shift and then the encoder to take it down a couple octaves. Now if we play this back, [MUSIC], we have a much more classic bass sound. What we can do now is just go ahead and test out some different ideas while our loop is playing and then see what sounds good for a bass pattern. So what I'm actually going to do is turn off record on the machine micro and then we're going to hit RESTART Loop in order to start hearing the drums playback and we'll test out some bass sounds. [MUSIC]] This is a very organic process. Really take your time with it and have fun with it. This tool is made for you to have fun with first and foremost, and to make things that sound good to you because that's what making music is really all about. So I'm just going to have fun and explore a little bit. [MUSIC]. Sounds pretty gritty or dark technoy a little bit, but what I'm actually going to do is go ahead and set a specific scale for our bass so that it plays in tune with a certain key. So how you do that is you actually just use the encoder in order to set it up. We're also going to use these arrow knobs to arrow over. We're going to change it from a chromatic scale, which it's in right now over to a major scale. So very simple, easy to do, and you really have a whole bunch of different options. So you have minor/major, and then if you scroll back over with this arrow, you can actually change it to tones of different types of modes that are used in music. So what we're going do is go back to Main, click 'Over', change it from chromatic to major. Now if we play the tones back, [MUSIC] they're in a key of A-sharp Major. [MUSIC] So I'm going to hit the RESTART Loop now, and there we're going to play this back and also test some more bass sounds, some bass ideas. [MUSIC] I like that one, but I actually want to take it a little step further and use a note repeat function and start getting some groove into our bass line. So we're going to hold down the note repeat function while playing our base pattern back. [MUSIC] Pretty fun, right? So now that we have that on, we could actually change the archetype and the speed of it as well while we're playing it back. [MUSIC] You can see I'm not totally in time, I'm just playing around with the tones and the Arp function to see if I can come up with something cool. I think I like bass line. I like how it starts at a higher note and then works its way down. So I'm going to record that in and just see how that sounds with their Drum loop. [MUSIC] I really like how that sounds, and because we played it with the Arp function, it means that all of our bass notes are perfectly in sync with our beat and they're in perfect timing, so we have nothing to worry about. There's nothing to quantize, there's nothing to fix. They're just set up and they're perfect. So now that we have that setup, I want the bass and the kick to have their own space in the mix. So what we're going to do is we're going to set up a thing called side-chain compression, and we're going to do that in the next video.
5. Create Breathing Room Using Side-Chain Compression: All right. Now that we have both our drum loop and our bassline setup and they're both in our project, what we're going to do is since we created them both in their own separate group, is we're going to do a little bit of leveling with the volume and just balancing this out so that when we add the compression on the bass, everything just sounds really good and it's very glued together. What we're going to do is just play back and start our loop, and then we're just going to level inside of the mixer, inside the machine's options. If we press ''Restart loop'' here, and then before I do that, I'm actually going to switch over to the mixture, which is this icon at the top left here inside the machine, and then we're going to restart the loop, and this is where both of our sounds are. Actually, I'm going to rename this so that we know what they are. The first one here is going to be the addition bass, we are just going to can call this one bass, that's our second sound in group B1, and the first one, if we click on it, is the drums. What we're going to do is just title this top one, drums, and then I'm actually going to go back to B1 here and name that, bass. All right. Now that we have both of them named, we're going to level out the two just so that they sound good. We're going to hit ''Restart loop'' I think the bass is a little bit loud, so I'm going to pull it down. That's what you call very simple gain staging, and gain staging, all that it means is just making your gain or your volume level with the other elements inside of your idea or your track, just making sure all the sounds have their own volume and space, in the mix. What we're going to do now is add that compressor to our bass. What that is going to do is every time the kick on our drum loop hits, it's going to make the volume on the bass duck a little bit, creating some space for our kick to breath and for you to actually hear that sound. It has a very pleasing sound when it comes to electronic music. Let's go and add that compressor now. We're going to make sure that we're on the right group, we're on B1, which is the bass, and then if we go to this plus icon down here, we can add an effect, and we're going to use the internal compressor. The compressor is now added to the bass, and if we go over to the one option that says Side-Chain Input, we can click on it, and then we're going to click on ''None'' here. Then we're going to select the right kick drum, which is the second kick drum that we put into our drum loop, and it's Kick Bionic 2. Now if we play this back and we start to mess with the threshold a little bit, it's going to cause the bass to duck and give some room for the kick to come into that idea. If we hit ''Restart loop'', you can already hear the compressor is really hitting hard, we want to dial it back a little bit to taste so that everything has a balance to it. If we click over to the Main tab it's on the left-hand side of the Side-Chains Input, we can actually dial back some of that compression. With the threshold dialed back a little bit, it's tastefully put in there now so that we hear that the bass is ducking every time the kick hits, but things have more of a balance to them, and with that gain staging that we did, pulling the volume slider on the bass down, everything just has a more tighter sound to it and it's glued together a lot better. Now that we've created our drum loop, we've created the bass, and we've added some side-chain compression to the bass, what we're going to do is work on some chords in the next video.
6. Building Chords and Arp Leads: Alright, now we've come to one of my favorite parts using the micro, which is being able to control chords in chord sets inside of our project using the micro. If we jump back into our idea, we've already got the base and we got the drums going. What we can do now is add some chords, but first we need to add a new group. So we're going to go to group and then click that third pad there. What we're going do is now go to the magnifying glasses and start searching for a new sound, something that sounds good for making chords. I'm going to scroll through here. I'm not finding any sound that I like. What I'm going to use is the types tabs over here. I'm going to select a Piano/Keys tab to try to find something that works better with chords. Now that if I scroll through the Encoder, I'm going to try this droop sound just to see how it sounds with chords. I'm going to push down on the Encoder and loads into our group. What I'm going to do now is select Chords. You can see that it's still in the same key, it's still in A Sharp. But what we want to do is create a chord set or engage a chord set. If we hit this arrow over here, we can actually use an Encoder to turn up and it's going to engage chord sets. Then if we scroll over, click over with arrow key and then using Encoder again, we can scroll through a bunch of different chord set options. I find that I really like the chord set three. There's a lot of good chords in that, and if we play it back, you can hear that we're still in our lower register. If I hit Chords again one more time, you can see that we're in A sharp 1. We actually need to go up a couple octaves. I'm going to hold the Shift button and then hold the Encoder, turn it up a couple octaves here. See how that sounds, that sounds pretty good. So let's go ahead and start to loop back and see what it sounds like with the rest of our loop. That actually sounds pretty good. You can see that actually I forgot to turn off the record button here. If I disengage it and then also hit Shift and Pad 9 to clear that we can go ahead, restart the loop and just test out some more chords. Actually I want to try it at a different register, so I'm going to bring it down an octave hold Shift, turn the Encoder and now we are in A Sharp 2. I can already tell that octave is not going to work. Let's bring it back to A Sharp 3. I think we might need to apply and arp to this just to see if it sounds a little bit better and breaks up so many of these tones that are going on. Let's try that. So I'm going to restart the loop again. I like that, so what we're going to do is we're going to a count-in with the metronome there. We're going to record that pattern again. Shift and record. That's not working too well, so what we're going to do is clear it out and we're going to try a different Arp Type. I'm going to do in played order here. That part is a little bit tricky. What I'm going to do is take the first part of the performance that we recorded in, and then copy it over to the second part of our loop. Because that just seems to be like a really tricky arp there that's being played in. I'm going to delete this section here. I'm going to take what we got so far for the other half. Just duplicate this over "Command D", and pull it back here. Let's see how that sounds. We'll restart the loop. That sounds pretty good. I like how that sounds. What we're going to do is just go ahead and level these all here, we get three different groups. I'm going to rename this one, Chords. Let's go ahead and just gain stage this a little bit. We're starting. I want to put that bass up a little bit. That sounds pretty good right there. I do you notice that there's a little bit off at this loop here. Looks like there's a little bit of a midi separation that we can clean up. It's just this note right here at the last part of the loop. If we take that out and then move these two over, it should fix our loop issue. We'll go and clear out the second half there. Then hopefully when we duplicate this, it's a mirror image of itself. Let's go ahead and "Command A" to select everything and the "Command D" to duplicate it. Let's undo that, looks like it didn't undo the whole. Now we got some stragglers over that we need to delete still. Now let's do that. Then "Command A", "Command D" again. It looks like it's a little bit shorter here. I see you, okay, let's undo that. Looks this last part, excellent, got lopped off and I deleted everything else. "Command D" to duplicate that. Then "Command A", "Command D" again. All right, should be seamless now in our four-bar loop. If we play that back, perfect. SO our four-bar loop is perfectly set. At this point we've completed a four bar EDM loop. As you can see, it didn't take much time at all to really get an idea going. This is really how I've been starting all my projects lately as using the Maschine software and the Maschine micro. It's a very versatile tool and as you can see, I have all this control over your arp functions, your note divisions, you have all these chord sets at your disposal which are super useful for coming up with ideas. It's just a really inspiring way to start making music. I hope you enjoyed this class and if you have questions to leave it in the discussion tab. It's a very powerful way to start music and I highly encourage taking a look more at this offer. In the last video, we're going to go ahead and export this project out.
7. Exporting Your Loop: To export is very easy. First, what we're going to do is save the project. So we'll go to file, Save As, and we're going to save this as EDM Loop. "Enter" to save. Then if we go back to file and then export audio or command E, we can go and export our idea out. We're just going to leave it set to Master Output at the time, but keep in mind that you can have selected and then select individual groups and sound outputs. But just to keep it easy for now, we're going to do Master Output. Then we'll export this to the desktop click "Choose" and then "Export". It's going to export that idea. Then if we close and go out to our desktop. My desktop will open under Ableton Live here. It's put into a self-contained folder. If we click it and hit "Play", we have our full loop idea set up. Then what we can do is that, you can see I had Ableton Live open here, I'm just going to drag the scene into Ableton Live. You can put this right on your track here. Then you have a starting point already set up in a full-fledged, fully-featured DAW to use.
8. MIDI Mode in Ableton Live: All right. It's a little less than a month now since the Maschine Mikro mk3 has been out, and Native Instruments already has an update, it is Maschine 2.7.9, and there is a firmware update for the Mikro mk3, and this introduces MIDI mode, which I'm super stoked about because I want to be able to use it directly in Ableton and trigger my Simpler as well as my drum racks. Actually I'm going to go ahead and update the software now and show you how to engage MIDI mode and use it on Simpler. So the first thing to do is just make sure that your Maschine Mikro mk3 is plugged into your laptop, and then go ahead and open up Native Access on your desktop. Like I said, it's Maschine 2.7.9. You are going to go to the install tab and update it. You can look at the release notes for any other updates they have introduced with this updates and Maschine. Now that it is updated, you can quit Native Access and then open up the Maschine app. Since your Mikro mk3 is already plugged in. It is going to give you notice of a firmware update. Just go ahead and click "Upgrade" to update it. It is going to download an installer to your downloads and then you are going to open it up and click "Update" on that as well. Once it is updated, you can actually close out of Maschine and then open up the DAW of your choice. I'm going to be working Ableton Live 10. I'm just going to go ahead and load up a simpler device to use for this demonstration. I'm going to load a drum loop into my simpler device now and pick one of these in this pack I got here, say that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, that is really good drum loops in here. You can use this loop right here. I will put Simpler into slice mode and then I will also put into manual, so that I can lay down some custom slices. I want to press shift and the Maschine logo in order to engage MIDI mode and then press this first pad here that's going to trigger my first slice in my Simpler device. I'm going to go ahead and lay out a couple more custom slices inside of Simpler and just trigger some drum pads here. So that is pretty much it. That is all you have to do in order to engage MIDI mode, it is super simple and like I said, you can use this with simpler devices, you can use it with drum racks instead of Ableton, and then also you can use it in other DAWs as well, whether it's Reason or Cubase or Logic, any of those DAWs you can use MIDI mode. It does not control transport which kind of stinks. There is not the integrations you have like you do with the S-series keyboards from Native Instruments, but it is still useful. You can use it inside of your different drum plugins with your own projects. So super simple, super easy, and I'm glad that they've updated it and I didn't take too long, less than a month now. That is pretty much it for this video. If you have any questions, leave a comment below and do subscribe to this brand new channel. I'm going to be uploading just purely music production videos from here on out.
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