MPC5000 reviews, bug reports and fellow user support on the most recent standalone, hardware MPC from Akai
By b-righteous Sat Mar 08, 2008 7:20 pm
On my motif XS pattern mode, if you set the pattern to 2 bars and record the high hat it will loop two bars like the MPC. If I then use another track for kick and snare and change the pattern to 4 bars for recording, the high hat track automatically loops to fill the extra 2 bars.

This would be a nice feature on the MPC so you don't have to worry about the sequence length and copy all the time for different length tracks. Also, If your sequence is 16 bars and you want to add a repeating 2 bar track you would just change the sequence to 2 bars and record. Now you can change back to 16 bars and hear the whole sequence with the new 2 bar track looping. This way you don't have to play a two bar phrase for 16 measures or use copy. There could be an option to turn this feature off and on for all tracks.

I bring this up because the 5000 now does not delete bars when reducing the sequence length.
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By scd Sun Mar 09, 2008 10:00 am
b-righteous wrote:On my motif XS pattern mode, if you set the pattern to 2 bars and record the high hat it will loop two bars like the MPC. If I then use another track for kick and snare and change the pattern to 4 bars for recording, the high hat track automatically loops to fill the extra 2 bars.

This would be a nice feature on the MPC so you don't have to worry about the sequence length and copy all the time for different length tracks. Also, If your sequence is 16 bars and you want to add a repeating 2 bar track you would just change the sequence to 2 bars and record. Now you can change back to 16 bars and hear the whole sequence with the new 2 bar track looping. This way you don't have to play a two bar phrase for 16 measures or use copy. There could be an option to turn this feature off and on for all tracks.

I bring this up because the 5000 now does not delete bars when reducing the sequence length.


Good one. I will enter this in the feature request list.
A switch (per track) that enters a copy/delete function (per track)
Set to ON: if you extend a track from 2 to 5 bars: the mpc will copy bar 1 and 2 to bar 3 and 4 and will copy bar 1 again to bar 5.
If you decrease the tracklength, the removed bars will be emptied. from all data.

Set to OFF: MPC behaves as it is now.

Agree? Sounds like do-able to me. I like the idea.
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By Lampdog Sun Mar 09, 2008 10:10 am
I think it would be better manually done.

User has exact control of what goes where when copying.
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By scd Sun Mar 09, 2008 10:16 am
Lampdog wrote:I think it would be better manually done.

User has exact control of what goes where when copying.


That would be the OFF part of the switch. Then the 5000 behaves as it does now. I.e. you can copy manually your things.
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By Lampdog Sun Mar 09, 2008 11:01 am
scd wrote:
Lampdog wrote:I think it would be better manually done.

User has exact control of what goes where when copying.


That would be the OFF part of the switch. Then the 5000 behaves as it does now. I.e. you can copy manually your things.

Yeah I know, I understand. I just think too many automatic features are done now a days and people possibly loose track of combining features (being creative?!?) to get where they wanna go all the while gaining knowledge too.
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By scd Sun Mar 09, 2008 12:41 pm
Lampdog wrote:
scd wrote:
Lampdog wrote:I think it would be better manually done.

User has exact control of what goes where when copying.


That would be the OFF part of the switch. Then the 5000 behaves as it does now. I.e. you can copy manually your things.

Yeah I know, I understand. I just think too many automatic features are done now a days and people possibly loose track of combining features (being creative?!?) to get where they wanna go all the while gaining knowledge too.


From that perspective you have a point.

By b-righteous Sun Mar 09, 2008 2:07 pm
I disagree with that way of thinking. The point is to create and play music not to manually do repetitive editing task that the machine could do for you. Is this not the very concept of what an MPC does? It makes it easy to get your ideas out quickly. With that way of thinking there never would be such a thing as an MPC because its to easy and automatic. There would be no pattern style sequencing. This is one of the main selling points of an MPC. Now Yamaha has a one up on the pattern recording idea beating the MPC at its own game.

Trust me, if you had this feature and had to go back to using copy all the time you would feel me. But if you always want to work for yours then you could leave it off. My life has plenty enough hard work and complications already LOL.

BTW I would actually like track loop to be turned on or off from the loop window for all tracks in that sequence for simplicity. In song mode it would still play as is based on the track loop setting.

By k1 Mon Mar 10, 2008 5:23 am
for one that hasn't had time to read the entire manual yet, does the MPC5000 support individual track length now?
If so, that's awesome! If not, please add to "feature wanted" list :)
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By eknocbeats Sun Mar 23, 2008 6:03 pm
b-righteous wrote:I disagree with that way of thinking. The point is to create and play music not to manually do repetitive editing task that the machine could do for you. Is this not the very concept of what an MPC does? It makes it easy to get your ideas out quickly. With that way of thinking there never would be such a thing as an MPC because its to easy and automatic. There would be no pattern style sequencing. This is one of the main selling points of an MPC. Now Yamaha has a one up on the pattern recording idea beating the MPC at its own game.

Trust me, if you had this feature and had to go back to using copy all the time you would feel me. But if you always want to work for yours then you could leave it off. My life has plenty enough hard work and complications already LOL.

BTW I would actually like track loop to be turned on or off from the loop window for all tracks in that sequence for simplicity. In song mode it would still play as is based on the track loop setting.




The Triton has being doing this from day one.................and yes when i got a MPC i was like "damn this shit can't track loop"??? Its a great feature and good for laying down the basic 4-16 bar tracks looped to start with.

By Dirty J Sun Mar 23, 2008 9:57 pm
how about having the track mute menu go from sequence to sequence in song mode , instead of having it hang on to the one sequence and hold the entire song there , or am I missing something on my 2500?

By renegadebliss Mon Mar 24, 2008 4:29 pm
Robert for Holland of the MPC 4000 forum sent a request to Akai over 3 - 4 years ago to Akai requesting they add the ability to have individual track lengths. Both Old AKai and NuAkai ignored the request. It would be a GREAT benefit to the MPC to have individual track legnths. If you would like me to dig out his propoal, maybe Akai would be smart enough to implement it on the 5000....



Dave
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By scd Wed Apr 02, 2008 7:18 am
renegadebliss wrote:Robert for Holland of the MPC 4000 forum sent a request to Akai over 3 - 4 years ago to Akai requesting they add the ability to have individual track lengths. Both Old AKai and NuAkai ignored the request. It would be a GREAT benefit to the MPC to have individual track legnths. If you would like me to dig out his propoal, maybe Akai would be smart enough to implement it on the 5000....



Dave


Yes, could you get me that?

By renegadebliss Wed Apr 02, 2008 11:50 pm
scd wrote:
renegadebliss wrote:Robert for Holland of the MPC 4000 forum sent a request to Akai over 3 - 4 years ago to Akai requesting they add the ability to have individual track lengths. Both Old AKai and NuAkai ignored the request. It would be a GREAT benefit to the MPC to have individual track legnths. If you would like me to dig out his propoal, maybe Akai would be smart enough to implement it on the 5000....



Dave


Yes, could you get me that?

No Problem..

Here's the link to it:
http://home.planet.nl/%7Erobnet/mpc/Mpc ... ength.html


This would be a boon to ANY MPC. It would greatly open up the possibilities of sequencing on the MPC... and is something that has been seriously lacking
on the MPC. Would definitely add something that Roland hasn't done, and I've
sent the same doc to them to try to get them to integrate something similiar into the
MV series... (i'm personally don't care who implements the next UBER sequencer,
as long as it gets made, so I can buy it).

I create about 90% of my sequences on my P3 and then transfer them to the MPC if I want to sequence more things, or I"m going to a live show and leaving the P3 home that time. This can be quite tedious if one has a number of different bar lengths set for each track. Imagine Track 1 looping after 3 bars, Track 2 looping after 7, Track 3 looping ever y 16, Track 4 looping every 13 and Track 5 looping every 15, and then trying to figure out where to set the MPC's pattern, so they will all intersect.

Another thing that this will do, is free up more sequencing abilities within the 100,000 Note limit that for some reason Akai chose to have for the 5000. The 4000 has 300,000 Note limit and if I have a Lot of Sequences in Memory and they have a lot of Sysex info for my external synths, you can really see the sequences eat memory. This would make it so that if you have a 4 on the 4 BD programmed in for a 128 bar sequence, that you can just have the 1st bar repeated 127 times instead of taking up 127 spots of memory.

This alone (plus the Mute Groups that are already on)
could push me onto a 5000 to sit next to my 4000.


Cheers,
Dave
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By scd Thu Apr 03, 2008 7:05 am
renegadebliss wrote:
scd wrote:
renegadebliss wrote:
Here's the link to it:
http://home.planet.nl/%7Erobnet/mpc/Mpc ... ength.html

Ahh. THAT Robert. He's a friend of mine and lives about 12 km away from me :)
He is *always* talking about individual tracklength...
I will bring this again under the attention of Akai.
It is a sort of freak-feature for the average user, but nevertheless interesting.

Robert is actually in the process of selling his 4k to get this one:
http://www.genoqs.com/images/rsgallery/ ... alFull.jpg

We saw this one working on the Musik Messe and it was quite impressing and sort of doing what he wants (with individual tracklength/tempo). The interface is just mind- and eye blowing!

When purchasing this stepsequencer he will wait and hope for his idea to be implemented in Roger Linns/Dave Smith Linndrum II later this year.
Another interesting machine to wait for! 8)

By high198 Thu Apr 03, 2008 8:39 am
This is a feature I feel is really important. It just makes it so much easier to have variations in your sequences. Plus it saves time. I think anyone who has used it would agree. I've become used to it with my Motif ES and now XS. If the synth and effects sound as good as I think they do, along with individual track length. I'll be the first to trade up from my 4K. If not, I'll stick with what I have until Linndrum II is released.