MPC X, MPC Live, MPC One & MPC Key 61 Forum: Support and discussion for the MPC X, MPC Live, MPC Live II, MPC One & MPC Key 61; Akai's current generation of standalone MPCs.
By CCMP Mon Sep 20, 2021 11:53 am
Apologies if it's obvious, but when you change the Pitch, Level, Pan, Offset values from 0-100, what is it actually changing?
Say Pitch for example... is it controlling the probability of the Pitch being changed with each trigger? 100 would mean each trigger is effected/altered. Or is it controlling the depth of the Pitch? Or both?
Is it tied to any other settings? The LFO?

Official info from Akai seems sparse, all I could find was this;

'Drum and Keygroup programs now have a new randomization section. Add subtle
variation to drum samples or keygroup programs by randomizing volume, pan,
pitch, filter, sample offset and envelope parameters. On a hi-hat sample in a drum
program try adding a small amount of volume, pitch and attack randomization to
create the illusion of each note having a different hi-hat sample assigned. This is
great for making acoustic drum samples sound more realistic.'

So this still doesn't really explain what's actually happening...
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By MPC-Tutor Tue Sep 21, 2021 11:34 am
As with most of these features you can just experiment to discover what's going on. From what I can see from playing around with it, the 'Pitch' control is literally the maximum amount of 'FINE' tuning that could be applied randomly, i.e. if it was set to 100 you would get a random FINE value between -100 and 100 applied to the sample.

At 100, LEVEL seems to play the sample at a random level between 1 and 127

At 100, OFFSET produces a random positive offset between 0 and 9999.

Pitch doesn't seem to do anything?

The 'depth' control allows you to globally control the relative randomisation value for all the various parameters (pitch, offset etc). So if you set pitch to 40 and offset to 60 with a depth of 50 you'd effectively get pitch randomisation of 20 and offset randomisation of 30.