BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. My name is Bill Holland and you're looking at the MPC500 from Akai Professional. This is a pretty standard MPC setup. We have 12 pads, all here. And if I go over to pad bank, you can hear them there. We have our record gain; this is for inputting your own audio for your own samples, a main volume knob, a slider for use with MIDI, value knob, cursors for moving up and down in your display, and pad banks to switch between the pads [BILL PLAYS A COUPLE OF PADS], and not all of these have preset sounds but you can load whatever you want.

So you have 12 x 4 pads to work with, 48, and each of these equates to a trac so you have 48 tracks that you can work with in the mix, 16 channels of MIDI. We have our tap tempo here. You can just hit the button and then hold it down and hit your pads however fast you want to go. We can go up to 300 BPM, maybe even faster. I haven't really tried; 300 looks to be the cutoff but [BILL PLAYS SEQUENCE] we'll take it back down for now for something a little more useable. Or actually, you know what, let me hit my sequence button for main sequence and go up to track that is empty. Okay, there's an empty track.

Now look, you also have your metronome here. I can turn that on or off. You can set the count in, in record rate, so I can actually set this to be if I wanted like an eighth note, I can set the metronome to be in eighth note, bu normally you're going to want it to be four on the floor. I can actually assign the sound; right now it's an MPC tick but I can assign other sounds to that. You do a click, you can do a -- oh, there's only two I guess: click and MPC tick. Moving over back to our count in, you can select it to be count in, to be record only. You can also do it record and play so it will record on playback.

And next to the metronome button, you'll see a numeric button. Let's get out of here first of all. Numerics, which are your pads, are to work as number buttons basically. You'll also notice a yellow value above each of these. If you press mode, you can access that, you can access your effects, song settings, step editor. So, you can actually go through an edit step by step, like I did if you saw my Alesis SR18 video; it's a very similar way of doing it.

Notice also your controls for setting your various settings. If I go mode>program, and let's say I want to change up one of the pads' sounds. So I want this to assign this to have a value. If I hit the pad here, I can go through [BILL TESTS PAD FOR KICK DRUMS]. I'll keep that kick; that's good. I will hit "do it"; this will save the pad. I can go back to my sequence and I should be able to hit that. There we go. This is interesting because you actually have two of the same pad. I think you can pitch these down; if you go to your sequence, hit the pad, hit mode>program, you should be able to go to this, make sure it’s the same kick, there's the B-Kick, go up here to your sample sign and go over, and you can actually tune that sample so it has a little bit o a different sound than the other one. Now we hit "do it", let's see what happens., go back to my sequencer [BILL AUDITIONS PADS]. Pretty useful for switching up your bass kicks.

And also, below that, you'll notice there's Locate. Locate allows you to move between the different steps of events within the step editor, so if I mode>step edit, that will let me go down here, go over -- I should be able to go over between my steos. There we go. Notice the number's changing back and forth. You can also use this mid-song if I go back to my sequence and I want to say play the song, go to track that is open right now [BILL PLAYS SEQUENCE], I can locate back and forth [BILL FIDDLING AROUND THE MPC500]. So that's really, really useful.

Also, we have an erase and undo. This is for erasing any type of value you might need to take care of. For example, we want a blank sequence [BILL DEMONSTRATES INSTRUCTION], so on sequence 7 here, I'm just going to erase that by hitting "erase" and then "do it", and now it's cleared out.

Also you'll see controls. We have been using the sequence control. There's also a track which allows you to go to the individual tracks within the sequence. Notice how I'm still in the sequence but just inside of that track. I can switch up my pad banks by hitting A, B, D, or C [BILL PLAYS PADS], very easy, and also the play start button, which is just an automatic play/start for your sequence. So, if I go to my sequence, go back to one that's open, and hit that [BILL PLAYS SEQUENCE].

So that's it for how to basically set up your MPC500. In the next demo, I'm going to make a basic beat and we'll take a look a recording and overdubbing and working on getting your beats sounding right and adding effects, but for now this is Gearwire.Com and my name is Bill Holland.