Welcome back to the channel. My name is Douglas and in today's video we're going to be talking about scale mode on the MPC Key 61. Now it's not directly called scale mode like it is on some MIDI controllers and if you've watched my videos on the Oxygen Pro series or the Hammer 88 Pro from M-Audio, you'll hear me talk about scale mode because they have this feature and a lot of controllers and keyboards have this feature where you can set a scale and it'll actually snap the notes to that scale. And there's a couple of different camps on user preference when it comes to scale mode and how it works.
So for example, if you're in the key of C major, your notes would be... And if you hit a note here, those aren't really in the C major scale. So that would be your scale.
And the two schools of thought here are one, if you hit a wrong note, it should duplicate the closest note to that. For example, if I'm... And I hit this note here.
maybe it should snap down and play an F. So if I'm playing chords, playing along, I'm not getting silenced notes in there for the wrong notes I hit. The other school of thought is mute those bad notes. And so as I'm playing, if I hit a bad note that it won't even play that note at all. So depending on the manufacturer, you'll get one over the other.
Sometimes the M audio controllers tend to shy towards the first camp of duplicating the note. If you have virtual instruments, sometimes those will give you the option. Well, I am happy to report that in the MPC Key 61, you have the option to set whether you want the notes to be duplicated or if you want the notes to be muted.
So let's check this out. So I've got the Steinway D pulled up here. Listen to that ring.
So nice. To get to scale mode, we're going to go up here to this keyboard control button, and this has all of our settings for our keyboard control. really around the key bed and some of the controls around it.
What we're going to do is scroll down a little bit to this scale filter. So this is scale mode and they call it scale filter, but it's essentially the scale mode that I talk about in a lot of my other videos around controllers and stuff. So we have three parameters here under the scale filter option. As played, I can just play a mishmash of notes.
Nothing happens. It's letting me play them as I play them. Makes sense, right? So we can double tap.
we can press down on the encoder to bring up the menu of our options for this field. So as played again, snap to scale, what that will do is it'll snap all the notes I play to somewhere in the scale. And it usually finds the closest note to the one I played.
Filter to scale will actually mute the notes. It'll filter the notes I'm playing only by the ones within the scale I set. So let's talk about snap to scale first. So I am right now, these other two parameters here are the root note, which would be your key.
So maybe this would be the key of C and then your scale. So scale major. So C major, let's check this out.
So I am on snap to scale, which should allow me to play every note here, but it'll snap them to the C major scale. So you notice I'm getting duplicates in there. So I can...
Now, if I play that same way as played... It sounds horrible, right? But if I snap to scale... It's like cheating. Yeah.
snap to scale, it's basically taking anything I play and snapping it to the scale. Now, obviously, as you get into more complex chord structures and stuff like that, where you want to play notes that might be outside the keyboard's knowledge of the scale, you might run into issues. So it really, I do encourage you to learn how to play the keyboard, learn how to play piano.
But if you're someone who maybe your main instrument is guitar or something like that, and you have this, you're trying to record, this can be a really cool way to make it sound good. So let's talk about root note and scale here. So if we tap on root note, we can go in here and we can pick any one of these notes. So this is generally going to be the key that you're in. So if the song's in the key of D, you want to make sure that you pick D as your root note.
Because in that scale, there are different flats and sharps. And so if I'm playing a song in the key of C and I have it snapped to scale to D and... I'm playing C chords.
So that's a one and a four. Sounds horrible in the key of D as my snap, but if I change it to C, sounds much better. So then our scale, if we go in here, we have a plethora. of scales that we can do. I am not an expert in theory by any means.
Being self-taught, sometimes you miss out on some of the things that you may have been taught if you went to college for music and things like that. But we can go in here and we can actually pick the scale we want this to be snapped to. Major bebop.
Why not? But if we go in here and we do like a natural minor, we played this, let's say our root note is C. Now if you notice what I'm playing here is actually major chords and it's snapping them to the minor.
Now if I change this back to major and play that same thing. So that's what I'm playing but it's snapping it to which I can't really play that until I go to Esplay. So that's in snap to scale minor.
So really cool. Again, I encourage you to learn how to play the keyboard, learn how to play scales and chords and all of that. But in a pinch, this can actually make you sound really good, even if you don't know what keys to hit.
So let's talk about this other option of filter to scale. So let's pick C major again, because that's a very well-known key. And again, our C major scale. Now, if we play any of these notes up here, listen, nothing.
So what it's doing is it's filtering my notes by the C major scale. So if I play... I'm hitting every key going up and down the keyboard, and it sounds amazing because it's filtering all my notes.
So depending on your preference, if you prefer the filter to scale or the snap to scale, this gives you the option to do both. It gives you the option to do pretty much any scale that you would want. And then you obviously can pick the key and you can go in and just pick it and... and you're good to go.
So really powerful if you've got any questions around scale mode. It's powerful, but it's simple. Keyboard control, filter mode, and you're good to go.
Again, I encourage you to learn how to play because it just, it's really awesome. and it's fun to play. But if you need it in a pinch, scale mode works fantastic on the MPC Key 61. If you've got any questions, throw those down in the comments below. I'll do my best to answer them. Thanks for watching.
Stay inspired and keep making that music.