Good time to buy an MPC Live?

Heya lads and lasses,

Thinking to go for it and buy an MPC Live. Been deliberating between the octatrack, SP-16 and Live for weeks and I think it suits my live performance needs best... probably (aaaaarrgh).

Anyway, for those in the know - is now a good time to buy an MPC Live? Any good reason not to right now?
Appreciate your help in advance.

Cheers

Need some clarity in your question... you mean “good time” as in price? Features? Stability?

If features, yes, it’s in a good enough state that you can produce professionally, if that’s what you’re doing. There are some questionable omissions in the feature set, but they don’t impact me much, but grain of salt, I don’t produce COMPLETE songs in the MPC, it’s just a part of my production arsenal. Never used one for live performance, so will leave those perspectives to someone else more experienced.

If stability, that’s a difficult question, because not all bugs / issues impact all people. Similar answer as above... I don’t run into any bugs or challenges, for me I have minor annoyances, but nothing that keeps me from doing what I want / need. Others may not have that same perspective, and that’s only natural.

If price, I never recommend paying full price for any of these items (MPCs, or the other options you listed). Negotiate with the seller, they’ll always give you a better deal than the advertised price - that’s been my experience anyway.

So, short answer is, I don’t know that you’ll get a “tipping point” answer. Your question could get some wildly different responses. If you feel it’s good for you, get it, and you have 30 days to return it.

Shorter answer - is it good for what it’s supposed to do? Yes. Nowhere near great though - it’s just good.

I’ve used mpc live for live performance and it worked great. Also owned a OT but personally prefer the mpc live. Transferring files backward and forwards to mpc is easier plus great software and hardware integration makes the mpc live way more useful for me.

OT is amazing from a performance point of view, sample something, slice it across the steps, use plocks, effects, and add in the crossfader gives very immediate and quick results however I found OT was a little disingenuous because those immediate results didn’t often easily translate into something concrete. MPC live doesn’t have the same level of performance options however you can achieve good results using qlinks, fx and thinking a bit out of the box in terms of arrangements.

I can’t under sell the fact that mpc live has a battery and is super portable!

Check out sites like reverb.com. The Live appears to be selling for $800-$900 used, so it appears to be holding value well enough, but you can get it for a pretty reasonable price.

AES is this week and WINTER NAMM is in 3 months. Wait for those announcements and deals will be all over the place. People will sell them, to get the newest toy.

Unless you need it immediately for performance reasons , I would also wait for winter namm.

But if the Live can do everything you want right now go ahead and get it.

Interesting feedback thanks a lot.
Seems like a fairly luke warm response overall which I kind of wasn't expecting. I suppose waiting for NAMM might make sense as it's not too long off now.
Unless I'm missing a better option that's currently around? As I say it's primarily for live use.

gka9dd9 wrote:Interesting feedback thanks a lot.
Seems like a fairly luke warm response overall which I kind of wasn't expecting. I suppose waiting for NAMM might make sense as it's not too long off now.
Unless I'm missing a better option that's currently around? As I say it's primarily for live use.

It’s gotten better with every update, check out some videos and stuff. Inclusion of air effects is a pretty big boost to the units.

It’s a solid machine outside of the 60/3000 for character reasons, the only mpc that may be better is the 4000 or jjos2xl branded mpcs.

No one knows when/if a new MPC will be released, if that's what you mean by good time. Akai could release new MPC X/Live at Winter NAMM 2020, sure. Will they? No one can say and this lass has no idea XD. These things are computers with bespoke MIDI controllers wrapped around them. Buy them for what they do now, not what Akai could do tomorrow.