Akai MPC One

While I've enjoyed using the Roland MC-707 groovebox, I've always been curious about the Akai MPC (Music Production Center) platform. From the introduction of the MPC-60, the first MPC model, and onwards, the Akai MPC became known for its impact on hip-hop and electronic music. My only previous experience with the MPC platform was trying out an Akai MPC Keys 61 at the store, along with a friend who had previous MPC experience. Having a friend show me how an MPC could be used to build up a song - drum track, bass track, etc. - was helpful.

The MPC workflow for building up a multi-track song, under the hands of an experienced user, looked pretty fast to me. Another appealing thing to me was the drum pads. The MC-707 drum pads feel fine. The MPC pads feel nicer - I'm not sure exactly why, but maybe the very slightly lower height of the MPC pads as well as the materials have something to do with it. Also, no matter how much I tweaked the MC-707 settings, I could never get its drum pads to be as responsive to light finger strokes as the MPC pads.

Another attractive feature is the autosampling feature, for easy sampling of my Moog Matriarch or Moog Subharmonicon - both synths that do not have patch memory, but do have MIDI input.

So when I realized the Akai MPC Live 2 and MPC One models were on sale, I decided to buy an MPC One.

First impressions:

The drum pads feel just as nice, and are just as responsive to light finger strokes, as the MPC Keys 61 drum pads. The feel is so pleasant that I'm motivated to work more on my finger drumming. The default color-coding is red for kicks, yellow for snares, amber for hi-hats, etc.

Volume knob is in the back of the unit instead of the top panel, which is a strang location for those of us used to the volume knob being the top panel on synths, drum machines, competing grooveboxes, etc.

The level meter is very useful for gauging how loud drum parts might sound in a mix. I've often been fooled before, by recording something that sounded loud in my headphones, but then it sounded soft in the mix when played back through monitors.

It was easy to learn how to load a preset drum kit for a track on the Roland MC-707. The process is less intuitive on the MPC. For a while I started to believe that preset drum kits do not exist on the MPC, and that if I wanted a new kit, I had to manually assign samples to each and every drum pad, every time. Then I learned that in the MPC world, a drum kit is called a "drum program".

This 5-hour tutorial for beginners is really good. Besides the generous amount of content, there is a lot of useful details like which buttons do what, the default colors of the drum pads and what they represent, etc.

The MPC One reportedly has bugs related to using external MIDI controllers. Video with advice on avoiding the bugs:

Some advice from a more experienced MPC user:

Sequences are your best friends on the MPC! Use them! Get an idea moving in one seq and duplicate it 4 or 5 times, have fun going in different directions with each Seq, then move between them to experiment and get used to this way of performing. This stops you getting locked in one loop, which is the fastest route to feeling irritated and frustrated IMO.