BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. My name is Bill Holland and you're looking at the Akai Professional MPC500. In the last video, I showed you how to do your basic setup, how to go through and tweak some settings, but now we're actually going to make a beat.

So, what I'll want to do is I want to start off and make sure I got a patch here. It's a sequence that is empty. Okay. Good. We got that [BILL PLAYS SOME PADS] empty. Cool, and we have our pads. So, let's hit record-play [BILL SEQUENCES A TRACK]. Now, what I've done on purpose here is hit some notes out of sequence. Now, what you can do in this situation is if you're not quite good hitting your beats right, you can go to timing correct and it will allow you to set the resolution by which you can actually correct your time, in this case I've got it set to a 16th note and I have my swing set to 50%; you can take that all the way up to 100 if you want or take it back down to 50: pretty damn useful. And one thing that good about this as well is that you can do crazy stuff like you can either keep it so it makes just minuscule moves, especially if you're doing auxiliary percussion like bongos; you might want it at 1/32, but you can take it down as little as 1/8 and that will move all of your notes within an 8th note. Really, really good to take it down this far if you're doing bass kicks but for everything else 1/16 is usually pretty good. So, I want to hit "do it", make sure it's saved, go back to my sequence, and let's record.

[BILL RECORDS A KICK DRUM TRACK]

You can hear that corrects are working there so I'm going to erase this really quickly, and we're going to go back and make this beat all over again.

[BILL RE-RECORDS THE KICK DRUM TRACK]

I think this beat is way too fast. I just noticed we're at 119 which right now I don't want to be working that quickly. Let's take it down to like 103.

[BILL SLOWS DOWN TEMPO AND OVERDUBS HI-HAT AND SNARE PARTS]

Let's check out some of the other sounds on here.

[BILL OVERDUBS OTHER SOUNDS]

Let's see when I add effects to this. What I can do is hit mode -- stop this real quick. Go to mode>effect, turn your effects on, we can select what that is [BILL PLAYS SEQUENCE WITH EFFECTS], set that sweet break.

Together with individual pads, let's take a look at this real quick. [BILL SCROLLS THROUGH SOME PARAMETERS]. Okay, so here we can see where our effect sends are at. So, let's say for that I want to, for my snare, have an effect send to that flanger [BILL APPLIES FLANGER TO SNARE], really easy to do, [BILL TAPS ON PAD FOR KICK] do it here too [BILL APPLIES FLANGER TO KICK]. So, let's play it back real quick.

[BILL PLAYS SEQUENCE WITH EFFECTS]

And now, if I want to change it up, now you can really hear the effects as what I'm doing. Here we go. [BILL SCROLLS THROUGH EFFECTS] Here's what's called "grunge" is like a distortion effect. You have a compressor and EQ, phaser, tremolo, auto-pan, a delay, and if I take it back the other way there are chorus and there's also reverb in here, right here.

So that's it. That's the basics of making a beat with the MPC500. If you have any questions about control options, take a look at my first video where I kind of went over some of the basic controls. For more advanced features, get a hold of an MPC500 and play around with it. Really, it's all about learning and getting the feel for how everything's set up. And remember, you can also store your own samples right here in the memory card slot and put your own mic right through the back. But for now, I'm Bill Holland, this is Gearwire.Com, and you've been watching my video on the MPC500, Music Production Center from Akai Professional.