i think it's pretty safe to say that the NPC is one of the biggest players in the Sampler game the classic machines that started it all were so impactful that they had a profound effect on both the music and the music makers of their time today modern NPCs have expanded the platform even further adding a bunch of features and plugins that have made it become a standalone powerhouse but what if I told you that one of its best features has seemingly flown under the radar for a very long time and not only that if you already own an NPC1 Live Keys 37 or X you already have it available to you right now without even having to buy it as an add-on it is perhaps the most useful and at the same time underrated feature on the whole device as it allows you to take your entire studio with you anywhere you go or even better make a copy of someone else's synth i'm talking of course about the autosampler this little gadget will automatically grab an external instrument and through the power of MIDI and audio recording will create an entire multis-sampled instrument of any given patch in a matter of seconds in case you're not familiar with the term multis-sampled instrument or why it's a big deal that the MPC can make them automatically let me briefly explain the general idea behind the whole concept if you were to grab a sample and put it into a sampler like the MPC or the octat track you should be able to pitch shift it and play it chromatically now of course depending on that sampler's algorithm this sample will start to distort and deform in certain ways as you move further up and down the octaves from the original pitch this is a very basic function of pretty much any sampler and can yield some very cool and unexpected results however you don't always want those artifacts and imperfections sometimes you just want to be able to play the instrument that you wanted to copy while staying as close to the original as possible usually in that case what can be done in certain keyboards and workstations like the OBXY and the Roland Phantom is that you can record multiple samples of an instrument in different keys and then distribute them along the keyboard so that you pretty much get an actual copy of said instrument without the artifacts and that is what is known as a multi-sampled instrument the problem with making a multi-sampled instrument generally speaking is that the process is slow and very tedious that is especially true when multi-sampling organic instruments like a guitar or a cello where you have to play the same note multiple times and in multiple ways to get the full spectrum of what the instrument can do and that is why highquality sample libraries are so expensive thankfully with synthesizers and plugins you can use MIDI to do all those variations for you and that my friends is where the autosamper comes in so let's have a quick rundown of how this thing actually works first you need to have an external instrument connected to the MPC through MIDI and audio so that it's receiving MIDI from the MPC and so that the MPC is receiving audio from that external device right now I have my Arttoria Poly Boot 12 just off camera connected and ready to be multi-sampled so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to do a new track and I'm going to select MIDI then I'm going to go into the MIDI out ports and boop since I'm using USB it'll actually detect the name so it's much easier than just using the five bit MIDI now I have my Poly Boot 12 hooked up and ready to be sampled i really love this patch on the Poly Boot so let's make a multis-sampled instrument out of this one you get access to the multis sampler by just going into the sampler page and pressing this little button those keys with a plus sign right there and now you're in your auto sampler now we can select the audio input so I know that this is coming in through three and four cuz I want it in stereo but you can also select mono or whatever you want so now we go into the note ranges no range C1 to C4 is telling you how low and how high in the keyboard you're going to sample since this is a sample that I plan to use in the mid and the high ranges I'm going to give it a little bit more extension into let's say B6 on the other hand if you're sampling something like the sub37 for deep bass you might want to sample lower octaves and maybe cut out a few of the higher ones so as to keep the file a bit smaller the next important parameter is the notestry and that's going to determine how many notes it's actually going to skip between the ones that it samples you could sample one for one but it's going to end up being a huge file so it's not really necessary for example in note stride six that should mean that it samples this note then it skips 1 2 3 4 5 6 and it samples this one next and that would make all of these notes in between time stretch adaptations of said note of course the less the note stride the more exact the instrument but bigger the file and the bigger the note stride it's bound to have more artifacts and not sound as good but let's say okay no stride of four because the next thing we're going to do is add layers now these layers of velocity are very important if your synth has lots of expressions so for example I could layer this in two layers with just 127 which is maximum velocity and then let's say 64 or let's say 60 which should be around medium velocity that should be enough for most but this can actually let you layer up to eight levels of velocity which comes in very practical if you want to sample for example an analog drum synth next up is note length and that's how long this little robot is going to keep that note sustained so for example I have 3 seconds 1 2 3 and then it's going to let go now that's really important when you're sampling a patch that has lots of evolving sounds that way you don't miss out on all the nice textures now the tail is how long it's going to keep on sampling after you let go of that sample which is also important for things with long release or the nice reverb maybe an effect that you put in there after that you can actually start kind of mangling this cuz you can decide how that sample is going to behave itself in the instrument like for example looping forwards or you can make it go alternating or in reverse then you can also have these Xfade and X-fade type which is basically so you don't get any clicks and pops next is the autotrim start which is a real lifesaver because you don't have to go looking for each start of each one of the samples it'll do that by itself now one that I like to do is make current track so immediately after it's done sampling I can just go ahead and play this now down here you get the information on how long this is going to take to sample right now it's 48 seconds which is pretty decent if I wanted to sample this like for example with a two note stride look at what's going to happen down here 96 seconds if I start adding velocities of course it's going to get longer and heavier i'd recommend using the velocity and not strides sparely because they can result in massively sized folders of samples so that's not very practical when they end up being these huge bloated behemoths less is definitely more in this case and I try not to get too greedy with the amount of sample just enough to make it work after that you just press do it and this thing will get to [Music] work and now the instrument is automatically loaded in now you will notice we don't exactly have an envelope we have lots of samples but cuts out immediately so now we're going to go into program edit and start messing around so first of all is I'm going to go to the amp envelope now be careful and select all if you don't select all it'll just modify the envelope for certain keys and you may want that but generally speaking I want this to be global [Music] another thing that's really cool is that we can now choose whether to keep the patch just like the original or you can actually start tweaking it with things like the NPC's LFOs and the effects things like filters [Music] LFOs you also have unison [Music] mode and harmonizer [Music] you can basically have a lot of fun with this now this has other creative applications as well like for example let's say you wanted a polyonic sub37 you can just multi-sample that instrument in and [Music] voila polyonic sub37 if you want the sample folder for the multi- instrument that we just made head over to my Patreon and you can download it for free and while you're down there please consider joining i have an amazing community on my Discord and everyone is always welcome i'll leave a link down below now finally if you want to save this multis-sampled instrument for example to take to another MPC or another device you just go into menu save and go ahead and save the key group this seemingly simple feature has been a lifesaver when I want to keep a patch from a synth that I'm about to let go of or if I want to take my set on the road but I don't want to haul around a huge or delicate analog synth around with me the possibilities are truly endless and if you have an NPC I urge you to give it a try if you're still here and you enjoyed this video please remember that you can greatly support my channel with something as simple as clicking the like button subscribing or leaving me a comment even if it's just say hi if you want to see another unusual and amazing way to use your NPC you might want to check out this video right here as always thank you so much for watching i hope you found this video useful or at least entertaining have a great week see you next time [Music]