Vibe Check №11 • mikie.zip

Thoughts on making beats, raiding arcs.

MPC Workflow

I will be the very first to admit that I am an easy mark. The Common Rube, if you will. By chance – and by chance I mean a very sophisticated algorithm engineered to directly target me with the goal of obtaining my money – I saw a video for the new MPC Live III show up in my YouTube feed. And as you could imagine, I pretty much immediately ordered it.

There’s a universe where I am financially responsible, but it’s not this one.

I’m no stranger to making music, it just really hasn’t been a regular part of my life since going back to before the pandemic. I’d finished college, got a full-time job, picked up new hobbies… you find other ways to spend your time. Life goes on.

I’d spent years making hundreds of (mostly okay) lo-fi/boom bap/trip hop beats, and all but like five of them have been lost to old hard drives. I miss finding a sample from an old Library record I wouldn’t otherwise have any interest in listening to, and looping it with a drum break just to see how it sounded. In fact, I think my favourite stuff of all the music that I had made was exactly that. The stuff I never had any plans for, the stuff made for no specific purpose, just something to do to pass the time and express myself. And so now I’ve decided I want to make that part of my life again. I think I need to.

An AKAI MPC Live III, a completely standalone DAW-in-a-groovebox. — Look at all these buttons.

Getting the new MPC Live III was particularly intimidating just due to the sheer amount of buttons you’re presented with. Coming from Native Instrument’s Maschine, I don’t immediately know the workflow, but I do know how to work with samples. I do know how to program drums, and I do know how to write MIDI and record guitars. So figuring out the new MPC is just a matter of conquering my biggest fear; reading the manual.

Thankfully, I’ve found a great tutorial series on YouTube to help me get my feet wet. And admittedly I haven’t even finished watching all of them – there’s like 85 of them at the time of writing – but I’ve learned enough so far as to get my hands dirty and make some mistakes. I’m sure I’ll learn more about all the features as time goes on, but I don’t think there’s any replacement for that type of learning. At least for me.

A dashboard I created inside of Obsidian to keep track of the videos I've watched from the tutorial series mentioned above. — workinonit

As a supplement to the video tutorials, I’ve found that I can use Claude to generate summaries from the video transcripts, exporting those notes as markdown files that I can put into an Obsidian vault. Having that quick reference instead of having to jump back into a video seems to be helping a lot with the knowledge retention.

Perhaps my favourite thing about the new MPC Live is the fact that it not only has an internal battery and speakers – so I can use it unplugged literally in my bed if I wanted to – but the fact that it’s a standalone device that doesn’t require any connection to a computer. In some ways that’s a limitation, in others it’s also a lot more convenient. Whereas all of the music that I had made before was done on a laptop, I’m loving the concept of having a dedicated device.

Jon Makes a compelling argument.

Another thing that has me really particularly excited about coming back to beat making is just how far along stem separation has come. It’s this idea that you can take any song and process the audio to isolate the vocals, drums, guitars, bass, piano, etc… into their individual components. It’s gotten to the point now where the results are actually kind of incredible. In a sampling context, there’s six times as much to take from many record now, whereas before you might find a sample but you don’t particularly like what the bass is doing, or that there’s vocals over it, or the drums are too prominent. You can now kind move past those sonic roadblocks entirely, and it opens up a lot more doors that weren’t there before.

I’ve found that the best stem separation tools available right now are through Logic Pro. And the help of BlackHole, I can record my system audio, meaning I can sample lossless audio directly from Apple Music. I know this digital crate digging solution would be frowned upon by many older heads, but if Madlib can make beats on an iPad with songs ripped off of YouTube, that’s good enough for me.

I’m not entirely sure what my goals are beyond just having another creative outlet to express myself. Admittedly, I’ve never figured out the whole releasing music part and I’m not sure that I have an answer for that yet. But I’m not too worried about that right now. I’m just enjoying making music again.

See You Topside, Raider

The long-awaited Arc Raiders finally came out on October 30^th and it’s since taken up more of my free time than I’d like to admit. I’d been playing Embark Studios previous release in The Finals on & off for about 2 years now, and I had a blast playing the Arc Raiders Tech Test for that one glorious weekend back in April. I don’t usually pre-order games but I was sold on this one.

A typical PVP encounter.

My experience with the game has been a real love/hate relationship thus far. I’d never played an extraction shooter so I wasn’t quite sure what I was getting myself into. The best way I could describe the game is that it feels like the Shopping Cart Theory of video games, where the freedom of how to play the game reveals a person’s true character. The Player vs. Player vs. Enemy (PvPvE) nature of the game has led to all sorts of encounters, with both friendly, and absolutely not friendly people.

Perhaps my favourite aspect of the game is the proximity chat feature, where you can talk to players who are close by. It took a frustratingly long time to get it to work on PS5 but I’ve found that singing Creed songs in tense situations has gotten me out of a jam on more than one occassion.

Highlights

Here’s all the stuff I’ve been into this month:

Movies

TV

Books

YouTube

I’ve unironically listened to this more than any other song this month.

I enjoyed these other videos, and you might too:

Purchases

I mean, what else would it have been? The MPC Live III will probably end up as my favourite purchase of the year. The additional 512GB USB thumb drive I picked up has been a real quality-of-life purchase as well, making it easier to transfer files back and forth from my computer.

If there’s any criticism I have, it’s that it didn’t come with a handheld vacuum. I didn’t realize how triggered I’d be by dust and debris. Now if only Decksaver could release an updated MPC Live shell…

A list of the other impulsive purchases I made this month that I don’t totally regret: