Share your knowledge on these two classic MPCs
By JessaJessi Thu May 15, 2008 12:34 pm
I'm Hoping the allmighty ROHAN will see my post, or someone else who knows their stuff cuss I sure Need help.

saw a similar topic were ROHAN seemed to have a lot of wizdom. that problem was almost exactly like mine. Only A MPC 3000.

Lets go back to the beginning.

live in Sweden bought a MPC 60 Mk II with SCSI opt running OS 2.14 when in New York and brought it home with me on the plane.

I started sampling parts of a project in to it and needless to say it sounded CRUNCHY!

I was happy and allthough I don't think it has had it's memory upgraded that night sampletime seemed to last forever.

It came to the point when It was time for me to leave the studio and go home and sleep it of, and I thought I should try to save this first ever MPC 60 work of mine. I figured the floppy was dead cause it didn't respond. Now I have understood that it takes only a certain kind of disk, but I still believe it needs to be replaced. On to the SCSI then. In my fazed out state I hooked up´my zip drive to the back connector without eaven thinking about termination and channel issues. nothing happened at first and I remember it as if I was back trying to bring the floppy drive back to life the only way I could think of. I had the machine tilted back. Don't know if I gave upp and turned it of or if it just suddenly went in to this mode were the 16 levels/Full Level/Bank/Rec/Overdub/Disk lights all lit up. '

At this point I turned power off and prayed like hell it was going to be all good when I turned it back on but there it was still the same. I can reach most of the screens but, most notably, I can't get it to sample in to memory. It I get to the "Rec light on when treshhold is reached" message but allthough I can hear the 12 bit sound I don't get any readout and hence sampling doesn't start.

Am I missing something. I know It was a very stupid thing to do. I'm full of regret. My baby's gone crazy!

there are no professionals who really understand these machines in Sweden to my knowledge. (If you're out there make yourselfs known!)

I'm not trying to avoid costs here. I'm posting here cause it's the only thing I can do. I have a tech standing by who's the best in Sweden on vintage synth gear. He says Akai Drummachines gives him gray hair. I would also be willing to do some work myself. Not usually very stupid, only unexperienced.

Thank you all for great info.

Cherio

Jesse
By scsiforsamplers.com Thu May 15, 2008 10:19 pm
I cannot say whether you have blown up the entire 60 but one thing I do want to point out: NEVER hotplug SCSI drives when the sampler is powered on. If you didn't connect the SCSI drive before you powered on your MPC, then you are out of luck. Hotplugging a SCSI device is a bad idea - you might get away with it once or twice (or not at all) but sooner or later, you will damage your sampler's SCSI bus. This is probably why there are so many 60s and 2000s out there with bad SCSI fuses.

Rule of thumb we stress in our documentation: Power the sampler on last (after all external SCSI drives are connected and powered on) and, when you are done working, power the sampler off first (before switching off or disconnecting the SCSI drives). And never hotplug. Follow these simple rules and your sampler will love you for it.