Best Basic Upgrades to MPC 1000

Posted another thread about what to look for when buying a used MPC 1000.


From what I can tell the best basic upgrades are: filling up your ram to 128 mb, installing JJ OS2, and putting fat pads on the machine.

Any others?

Am I off-base?

im meh about the fatpads. Not absolutely needed, unless you get a blue mpc1000, they had crap pads. and I say JJOSXL not JJOS2 but that is me. Yes RAM but make sure it is a 256 mb RAM chip as per spec. see sticky

If its the blue and red model , make sure the pads have been upgraded. The one I bought off ebay had broken buttons all over the place (tac switches still function) and if you hit pad 1 the unit restarts itself

Gotta love akai, its put me right off there products under inmusic.

Fat pads and the pad upgrade are not the same thing.

elektrik_muz wrote:Fat pads and the pad upgrade are not the same thing.

Can you elaborate? Browsing MPC-stuff and can't find two different "pad upgrades". Thanks, I'm new at this, though I've been producing on a MPC-style controller for a number of years.

And do you think there are any essential upgrades to the MPC 1000?

alex1fly wrote:

elektrik_muz wrote:Fat pads and the pad upgrade are not the same thing.

Can you elaborate? Browsing MPC-stuff and can't find two different "pad upgrades".

That is correct. I did not say there were two different pad upgrades. I said, there is the fat pads and there is the pad upgrade kit. They are two different things.

Pad upgrade kit includeds a standard pad sheet and the pad sensors. You would need this if the MPC has the old unstable pad design.

Fat pads are just the pad top sheet with special thicker pads. They can only be used with the new pad sensor design, so if your MPC has the old pad sensors you would have to get the pad upgrade first.

So how do you know if the MPC has the "old unstable pad design?" Is it by year?

The BEST and most reliable way is to open the thing OR to jiggle one of the corner pads and see if the rest of the pads move. If they do it's the new type because it's all one pad sheet and set of sensors. The old style uses seperate individual pad units.

People on here have posted shortcut methods that don't requre physical access to the unit involving serial numbers and the color of the backplate but these are not 100% reliable and it's possible that even newer second hand units have had their pads "flipped" to fix and old unit.