3 Painfully Obvious Reasons to Use Submixes on Your Force (MPC)
So i've purchased a few of Akai's Expansion packs so that I can get an idea of how AKAI approaches mixing on the Force/MPC software etc.
References to Akai Force still apply to MPCXL
I discovered that they basically mix inside of their drum kits, then essentially slap either a master bus compressor or a Maximizer on the channel.
Look, I'm no professional by far; however, I do know that you can get great results from grouping your like sounds and treating those frequencies/dynamics individually. The main way you would do that in any DAW is by using subgroups or buses.
The MPC has this capability conveniently built in; however, mixing isn’t the only benefit.
Track Outs for Splice/Beatstars/Wavs.com/ Sample Packs
If you routinely send stems, you know this is a very important piece. Without sending your tracks to submixes, the force will only track out each track individually. Unless your engineer wants the full trackout, sending instrument groups to busses lets you export each individual bus as a stem.
This is also true for sample makers; if you build your demo tracks around your sample, you can group all your drums on one track, instruments on another, etc. By grouping how you like them, you can make drum loops,samples, and FX loops pretty quickly.
Submixes Offer More Control and Clarity In Your Mix
Mixing with submix tracks can give you more control over the energy, dynamics, and gain staging of your final mix. By grouping like instruments, you can 'glue' like frequencies together, giving your final mix compressor a bit more room to work its magic.
A simple trick is to group instruments with like frequencies together. OR my preferred method is this
* I've found that with 808 tracks, I'll have the 808 bass and any other bass elements on separate tracks, high-passing the one with lesser energy.
I'm not going to go into much detail about that here, BUT on here you can get some pretty good information that applies to any DAW and the Akai Force here.
Submixes Provide Additional FX processing
There are only 4 insert slots per track, which can be limiting at times; however, creative use of submix tracks can actually open you up to* 20 FX per track.
Ok, I'll break it down in another post, but essentially this method is used for extreme sample manipulation/resampling, etc... not typically for performances, but hey, if you like it, I love it.
One of the final benefits not listed is giving the Master compressor room to breathe. At first glance, the AIR plugins may seem a little lackluster, but these are the Same AIR plugins that ship with Pro Tools. Those, in combination with some of Akai's classic compressors, are pretty dang good.
That being said, they behave in the same way, and I've found some great mixing tutorials from RecordingRevolution, and they feature the AIR effects a bunch (you may have to do some digging)
Feel free to send requests for articles or tutorials. I'll do my best to provide as much value as possible! Thanks for reading!
