Digital Hygiene on the MPC Key 37
Getting pretty quick with the MPC Key 37. For me, it is kind of the perfect idea machine. The term “digital hygiene” is out there, and I like it for this at least. I went through all my tracks from November — there are ten of them. I am definitely deleting three, one is questionable, and a few others are keepers.
And what that did was, on the first or second day of December, I made something that could be a template. The idea is maybe I end up with three or four templates to work from. It is very quick to go through old tracks in MPC world, so you can do that kind of review work quickly. And because of the way you section things out on the MPC — verse, chorus, whatever — you can really see what was just a nub or nothing vs something to come back to.
Any idea I have for eight or sixteen bars is always titled the same: “Main.” And if there is only a Main section, I can bet it is a throwaway. But if there is an A/B/C section, or a Verse or Verse 1 with Pre-Chorus and Chorus, then you know you are dealing with something good.
And again, like I have talked about before, I have no memory of making a lot of these tracks. I can close my eyes and remember the feel, but I just cannot recall the actual making of them. Now that I am back in the MPC ecosystem, it is getting better, it is getting quicker, and I could pound out a whole song in ten minutes if I had the inspiration.
I saved some keys presets, so I have those to go to, and honestly, with an eye toward live use with Daphne Falls, if I can just use this little keyboard — it has everything. Very simple. And I think it is more reliable than the MPC One Retro that I had, which looked beautiful but crashed, had pad issues, had double-triggering issues — and none of that has shown up here yet.
And this thing was super cheap, which makes me very cheerful.