Switching from MPC 1000 to MPC 2000XL

An issue I noticed when I got my first 2xl yesterday was the mute groups. All the samples I loaded up kept overlapping one another. To be honest I was a little disappointed because on the 1000 I could hit a pad and then cut it off when I press the next one. I did some research online and found out that you have to assign those mute groups yourself and you're limited to how many pads you can mute by 2. I've accepted this reality and I'm willing to work around it. Its gonna take a little getting used to.

My question is: How do you get around this problem? How do you figure out your sequence when all the sounds are overlapping one another? I'm not musically trained or anything so I can't instantly know what sample would sound good and whats next to play. I was so used to using the mute groups and just playing around and experimenting on what would work with what.

I've been using mpcs for about a month or two and I was so comfortable with the mute groups.

Been a while since I used the XL, but I don't believe it is possible. You can set each pad to be monophonic with itself (PARAMS (F2) > Voice Overlap > MONO), but I believe a program wide mono setting isn't available in the XL.

TBH, unless you had a very specific reason to go from a 1000 to an XL, I feel you are going to discover a lot of frustrating issues like this. The XL is a great machine, but for day-to-day work, the 1000 has the better OS (sample layers for a start), and the 2500 is even better if you need the additional outputs and tilting screen.

Yeah, I just gotta deal with the difficulties then. The 1000 was a really good machine but there was just so much work I had to put in it. Especially since it was an earlier model. The pads were janky, I had the akai OS, and on top of that I didn't even have that much memory.

It'll just be a different learning curve on the 2XL.

One way is you can make a pad simultaneously trigger two other pads that have silent samples, just to take advantage of their mute assigns. but that only gives you 6 mutes

I think this is the best way is to just deal with it while you record sequences, later it can be solved by setting pads to NOTE OFF, go to STEP mode, you manually set your duration values so there are no gaps no overlaps. They should have made a button that just automatically does this to a track!