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 maximize on the channel.
Look im 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 busses.
The MPC has this capability conveniently built in, however, mixing isn't just the only benefit.
Track Outs for Splice/Beatstars/Wavs.com/ Sample Packs
If you're someone who routinely sends stems you know this is a very important piece. Without sending your tracks to submixes, the force will only track out every single track. Unless your engineer wants the full trackout, sending instrument groups to busses means you can export each individual buss for stems.
This is also true for samplemakers, if you build your demo tracks around your sample, you can group all of your drums to one track, instruments to another etc. By grouping how you like them, you can make drum loops,samples, fx loops pretty quickly.
More control and clarity in your mix
Mixing using 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
*ive found that with 808 tracks, I'll have the 808 bass and any other bass elements on separate tracks highpassing the one with lesser energy.
Im 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.
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 *20fx 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 ProTools. 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 request for articles or tutorials. I'll do my best to provide as much value as possible! Thanks for reading!