#mpc one

Akai is a Japanese company that has been putting out some of the best music technology tools for around 4 decades and will continue to. There’s many great MIDI controllers and drum machines and samplers but none will ever top the Akai MPC. The Akai MPC is not only a top of the line sampler, but is the heart and soul of hip-hop production. The MPC60 was released in December of 1988 and was designed to be user friendly, intuitive and functional. Well, it was just that. That is why many producers switched over to it. It came with 16 sample pads that allowed 13 seconds of sound in each one. It really became a big deal around the mid 90’s, when producer J Dilla came onto the scene. He used the MPC 2000XL and MPC 3000. He was such an important figure, in not only hip-hop but music as a whole, that his MPC 3000 is actually on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. This really took sampling to a whole new level and it is kind of a big deal. Music is forever evolving and with the MPC, the art of sampling continued to evolve. Sampling is when an artist takes a piece of another song and uses it in theirs. You can pretty much take these samples, assign them to any of the 16 drum pads and play the sample by just hitting the pad. Coby Ashpis is a musician out of LA and said in a Vox article, “You can play one sample like a full instrument; you can change it. It opened up all recorded music to be played with in a really freeing way — a way that still used beats and samples but is more similar to playing a traditional acoustic instrument like keyboards or drums,”. It really is amazing to see the longevity of the MPC as well. It is still a household name in production today.

Is this track too weird? Please tell me. It's the answer to the question, "Can I make a track on a modern MPC with nothing but samples of a TV show taken from an old VHS tape and run through a modular synth?"

Yeah so this happened. And what timing too. I had just ordered the mpcstuff.com pad kit & sensor replacement for the MPC1000 that's been the brains of the outfit for a few years now anyway, when a few friends (DVS NME in the US, and DAS MUSTER in Germany) turned my attention to the MPC ONE. What's that? Drum Synth you say? Up to four effects PER PAD in a program you say? 8 CV/Gate outs you say? Auto Multi-sampling? Touch screen? MIDI over 5-pin DIN AND USB simultaneously? Keygroups? Plugin synths? TAKE MY MONEY ALREADY!!!

So how does it compare to the MPC1000? Workflow is light years faster. Touch screen is a godsend. Satansend. Beelzebubsend. The works. I've only barely scratched the surface and I'm SO satisfied with this thing it isn't even funny. I took all the outboard that I don't need anymore between the PreSonus digital mixer and the souped up functionality of the MPC ONE and sold it off today to the vintage gear shop I frequent in Osaka. Another $1000+ to pay off bills with thank you very much. Still need to put two Soundcraft mixers up on the auction, as well as a. noise gate pedal and some odds and ends that the shop is iffy about. But still... setup is slimming down nicely.

Still got some tidying up to do but anyway. I still have a shitload of stuff. A new face that has re-joined the harem is the Nord Lead 3. I saw one with a buy me now price of less than $1000, and I just did a big translation job (secretly) for just more than that, so I thought fuck yeah and bought it. It's a synth I really liked but sold off when I got something else that I thought was gonna be bigger and better (Xpander I think). It's a neat as hell synth though. Pretty goddam flexible, though not as flexible as the Ambika, but the latter loses out in the polyphony game. Seriously the mod matrix and modifiers on the Ambika are nothing to fucking joke about at all, and that thing is really easy to program even though there is a wee bit of menu diving, but you can get your head around it in no damn time at all. The NL3 is pretty damn deep too though. Such a variety of sounds are possible with that thing. From a user interface standpoint, there isn't a synth out there that even comes close. LED rings are super awesome though I'm sure they were a pain to design and super costly to produce thus we don't see them on any other Nord synths (or really any other synths off the top of my head, not to this extent anyway).