MPC Learning Curve Estimation

I am new to MPC X and I am working with the MPC for 4 weeks now. It was really hard to understand the workflow, because I am coming from NI / Maschine and this workflow is different. I would like to ask, I hope experts can estimate this, how much time it will take to learn all the functions of the MPC X (stand-alone) if you did not use earlier versions of the MPC? If you have 2-3 hours every day, ... 3 month, ... 6 month, ... 3 years???

Do not take this question too serious, I am just interested in your estimations.

Thank you & best regards

You should be up and running with confidence in a few weeks, there's no reason not to be making music using the basics within a few days. I'd recommend you check out my complete course for the MPC X/Live, the MPC Bible, it's fully structured to take you from beginners right up to advance topics. https://www.mpc-samples.com/product.php ... ive-bible/

I switched from Ableton to Mpc and it took me some 6 months to master its workflow.
And after a year and half I am still discovering new features.
My opinion is that if you start step by step, focusing on the basics, after a month you start having good satisfaction, after 3 you start to have good projects to develop and after 6 months you forget the stress.
My suggestion is to use it standalone so you learn faster and everything you try, save it in a folder to develop it later.
And its very important to organize your folders and keep the datas well organized, so you can work faster.

Thanks! I can confirm - today (after 5 weeks, 2 weeks with the MPC Bible) I‘m getting creative. That’s great. The very beginning is pretty hard, but then it‘s very cool.

MPC-Tutor wrote: I'd recommend you check out my complete course for the MPC X/Live, the MPC Bible, it's fully structured to take you from beginners right up to advance topics. https://www.mpc-samples.com/product.php ... ive-bible/

Honesty, the ability to learn a new instrument is more about your grasp of musical concepts and composition than it is about the piece of hardware sitting in front of you. Maschine, MPC, Beat Thang, etc. Doesn't really matter as long as you understand music.

Buy the book recommended above, and I'm willing to bet that if you sit in front of your MPC for 8 straight hours experimenting, recording, editing, referencing the book... you'll know everything about the hardware sitting in front of you. After that it's all about your musical talent, not the hardware.

My mentor always told me, "if your skills are tight the instrument is just a variable in the equation, and that variable can be solved with 8 solid hours of focus."

Not trying to be contentious. Just trying to give you a different perspective to your question. Don't worry about the hardware, a few hours will take care of that. Buying that book will make it easier.

Just for the log ...

Now (after 4 month) in most cases, I know how to realise what I want to do

But ... for me it‘s just a hobby, so I‘m not so experienced with DAWs in general and I think that made the beginnings really difficult to me.

Cheers, Sascha

Once you get used to it, you realize that the workflow isn't very different at all then any linear DAW like Logic, Cubase, etc.. Ive only had it for about 3 months now, almost 4 and I can use it in my sleep for the most part now. The parts I cant, are simply the features I dont use, kinda like 90% of Logic Pro haha.

Think of the MPC like a microscope. You have to break your song down into pieces in your head and look at working with sequences as working on a section of a song instead of looking at the whole linear picture. This is what made it click for me. The rest of it is actually pretty much standard DAW affair. Once you get the Song-Sequence-Track-Program relationship down, the actual use and implementation of everything becomes just like everything else. MIDI input, audio recording, arranging, etc. That part you can be up and running in five minutes, its figuring out what the hell they mean by 'track', 'program', 'sequence', etc that will throw you at first. Reminds me of the few times Ive tried to get along with Digital Performer. I just do NOT understand how that thing is laid out, the workflow makes no sense to me. Yet 'composers' and lots of folks swear by it.

I would say that the MPC X really doesn't have a workflow, in the sense. Well, obviously it is a system, and in that sense it must have a flow, which it does. What I mean, and what it does have, is a collection of older concepts, that nowadays aren't being used much. They may be used, but in obscure ways.

The fact that Akai is adding a linear track mode (aka 1-to-1 tracks, etc.) is really a testament of the DAW workflow and how easy it is to get into and to understand.

I don't mean to say that the (traditional) MPC workflow is inferior or that it is bad. No, quite the opposite in fact. There are a number of variant concepts of the past, that many young ones never got to experience. In the right context, many of them excelled well beyond the DAW concept. E.g. sequences (in the MPC) seems to correlate almost directly to MIDI files.

Anyway, I think that the simplicity of the DAW concept is also it's kryptonite. It is not very good for re-usable "parts", so instead we end up with "ghost" copies, "shadow" tracks, "group" tracks, etc. It's almost inevitable to the structure. I quoted the words, because in different DAW's they behave and are named slightly different.

So how could you estimate the learning curve? Well, why think of the MPC as a whole. Pick your immediate need and satisfy it to "acceptable" and head for number two, and so on. The reason for this is because they are almost separate "modules" or concepts by way of adopting. So then the curve become perhaps... less curved?

Invariably, one will never fully master everything in a system. We (humans) tend to favor and disfavor, which is of course not very good for the system itself. We should specify on the likes and accept the not-likes. They aren't going anywhere anyways. This way you can still benefit from the not-likes, even if you are not a fan.