akai lp8 and laptop?

I have an hour of a bus ride to work every day, and am looking for something fun and musical. Has anyone tried an Akai lp8? I have a little netbook and think this would make an easily portable combination.

I don't know much about producing using computers though. Any suggestions for how I might be able to do some work on the bus, but still use my MPC when I get home? I dont know how to integrate the two. I mostly am interested in breakbeat, choppage drumfunk kind of thing.

I'm open to other suggestions too

What your looking for isn't an MPC, you should grab the SP404, or even better a SP303. Those are some dope portable drum machines.

Or an old iphone with BeatMaker 2 on it. Dope.

sp303 is not portable.
i think i would rather use a sp404 than a computer + pads for beatmaking on the bus.

innovine wrote: choppage drumfunk kind of thing.

Good man.

What are the specs of your netbook? That will obviously have a big impact on what you can realistically use software wise.

Without knowing that I will preemptively say Ableton, perhaps the Lite version. Simply because you can use the regular QWERTY keyboard to trigger sounds, which would save your battery, and also having to take an extra piece of hardware with you.

Then all you'd have to do is bounce whatever you work with down to tracks/sections/whatever and then import them into your MPC (assuming you have a later model with USB connectivity).

There you could re-sequence, re-chop and generally continue the process.

aaonli wrote:sp303 is not portable.

How so????

Tha_Skywalker wrote:

aaonli wrote:sp303 is not portable.

How so????

i'm gonna guess he just means it can't run on batteries.

but in all honesty the 303 sounds so much better than the 404 that i could care less about being able to run it on batteries. i had a sp404 when it first came out and ended up selling it for a 303 later. the 404 has a really crappy sequencer too.

does the 303 have a different sequencer? i thought the 404 sequencer sucked too.

@OP, if your netbook can handle the software, i would highly consider a mpd 18 over a lpd 8.

check out this thread

http://mpc-forums.com/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=150893