Support and discussion for all of Akai’s modern standalone MPCs including the MPC X / X SE, MPC Live 1, 2 & 3, MPC One / One+, MPC Key 37/61.
By 3bc Tue Mar 18, 2025 1:01 am
I'm in the process of building an "analog" style 909 kit in my Live mk2. I'm using the SFM 909 samples which is pretty robust. For instance, for kicks, they have long, medium and short decay samples. At each decay length, they sample pitches A through F. And at each pitch and decay setting, there's 6 levels of "attack" from very round to very punchy.

I have all the kick drum samples mapped, for example. One pad is Pitch A, long decay, and then 6 sample layers on the pad for the 6 different attack levels.

I was hoping you fine folks might give me an idea on how to quickly scan through sample layers. I wasn't trying to do it by velocity if I could help it, by somehow setup q links to do it. In scrolling through all the Q link settings for pads, I see the different level and pan settings of the different layers, but no way of scrolling through the layers with a q link.

Am I missing something obvious with Q links, or some better way of quickly scrolling through sample selection in this way?

Thank you!
By T-Monk Tue Mar 18, 2025 4:11 am
I do stuff like this with multiple drum hits, which I call Stacks. If you put all the samples into one wave (either resample on the MPC or in an audio editor) one after another, then use the sample editor to slice it like a drum loop. Put the stack sample on layer 1. Then assign a Q-link to adjust the “slice” for layer 1. Basically layer 1 will be all 6 kicks (played one after another) and the a-link allows you to “choose” the kick.

Hopefully that makes sense.
By 3bc Tue Mar 18, 2025 1:55 pm
I do and that's a great idea, thank you.

I'm not excited about all the extra steps and chopping etc., but it sounds like a great solution! Also make my sample pool a little (lot) more manageable too.