By bob
Fri Jul 15, 2022 8:06 am
So I've had the mpc4000 for nearly 20 years now. I've tried out a lot of daws (logic, ableton, bitwig, reason, studio one, reason and reaper) and I still can't walk away from using the mpc4000 as my main setup. It was hard to learn. It was the first thing I learnt on, and before any daw. Once I moved to daws I didn't think most of them could offer me a lot of the same things. I think the comparible daw is Reaper because of its depth. Neither one is particularly pretty but once you get your head around how they work there seems to be a way of doing almost anything.
For me the concept of routing to an internal channel an then in the multi page assigning various parts to the same channel opens up so many possibilities. As far as I can tell this still hasn't been implemented on modern mpcs. It seems you are still stuck with being able to layer 4 samples on top of each other with the same envelope settings. Maybe I'm wrong about this but if I'm not, that seems pretty limiting.
It looks like Akai went all out on the mpc4000 only to have a lot of beat makers scratching their heads and complaining that it had lost the mpc vibe and not seeing the extra benefits that it could offer once you spent the time to learn how to use it.
We know that Roger Linn was instrumental in designing the 60 and 3000 but does anyone know which people have been responsible for for the 4000? As I say, it seems kind of sad that from what I can see the modern mpcs seem like a watered down version of the 4000. That must be frustrating from an engineers point of view. Again, I have not tried a modern mpc but I have flicked through the manuals and it seems they can't do as much. Anyway massive respect to the engineers of the mpc4000! Not so much for the designers of the box. Man, I think it wins the award for the ugliest mpc.
For me the concept of routing to an internal channel an then in the multi page assigning various parts to the same channel opens up so many possibilities. As far as I can tell this still hasn't been implemented on modern mpcs. It seems you are still stuck with being able to layer 4 samples on top of each other with the same envelope settings. Maybe I'm wrong about this but if I'm not, that seems pretty limiting.
It looks like Akai went all out on the mpc4000 only to have a lot of beat makers scratching their heads and complaining that it had lost the mpc vibe and not seeing the extra benefits that it could offer once you spent the time to learn how to use it.
We know that Roger Linn was instrumental in designing the 60 and 3000 but does anyone know which people have been responsible for for the 4000? As I say, it seems kind of sad that from what I can see the modern mpcs seem like a watered down version of the 4000. That must be frustrating from an engineers point of view. Again, I have not tried a modern mpc but I have flicked through the manuals and it seems they can't do as much. Anyway massive respect to the engineers of the mpc4000! Not so much for the designers of the box. Man, I think it wins the award for the ugliest mpc.