Finger-drumming issue, notes disappear, a software bug?

MPC ONE 2.11.2

I bought MPC ONE to try finger-drumming and faced a very annoying issue. For example I load factory kit "Acoustic-Kit-Ac Fat.xpm" into an empty project and start my practice with the pads. Unfortunately sometimes when I play a dense hat or snare 1/8 pattern I clearly hear that some of the notes disappear. Not even they disappear but they abruptly stop the previous hat sound and the whole piece sounds awful. This is extremely annoying and frustrating.

I recorded my playing and found that in this cases MPC detects a very short and quiet note. So I tried to change the sensitivity/threshold pad settings and try to play harder. But it didn't help at all, the issue stops only if I hit the pad extremely hard which makes the playing uncomfortable.

I tried to find some setting or MIDI filter which allows to set minimum value for velocity and/or length of a note, but didn't find anything yet.

Then I thought my pads are just broken, as I bought MPC used on eBay.

But lately I decided to change the program settings for "Acoustic-Kit-Ac Fat.xpm". There are two ways to make muting for the hats or the snares:
- you can specify a "mute group" for a pad
- or you can explicitly set up to 4 "mute targets" pads for a pad

By default "Acoustic-Kit-Ac Fat.xpm" uses the simplest way with a "mute group" and uses "mono" polyphony for hi-hats (A03, A04, A08). For snares there is not mute group but polyphony is "mono" as well.

So I changes the settings:
- set polyphony to "2" instead of "mono" for all pads (for most sounds like kicks, snares, rides you can't hear the difference)
- for hi-hats I set the "mute group" setting to "off" and set the explicit mutual "mute target" for all (A03, A04, A08), to stop one hi-hat sound by another hi-hat sounds (looks like this specific change is not important here)

The issue has gone! Now I can play as softly as I want, nothing cuts off the sound, I don't hear any glitches. Every hit on the pads is detected in a way as I would expect.

So what was that? Does anyone else experience the same? I just have only a week of experience and only with 2.11.2 firmware.

Mono pads can only play one instance at time. If your second hit is really quiet it will cut off the original hit and will be so quiet it will effectively sound like the first hit is abruptly silenced. It’s a similar issue with pads set to the same mute group. Its not a bug.

Personally I prefer drum kits to be set to poly at all levels (pad and program), no issues at all no matter how softly you hit the pads. mute targets for open hats but do you do have to be careful with the quiet closed hat hits, it will sound odd when muting a loud open hat but this is not a bug, just how it is.

The other way to handle open hats is via note off

https://www.mpc-tutor.com/mpc-program-t ... -note-off/

Thank you for the response and the tutorial!

Yes, I get the theory of the process, but what really confuses me: this a factory kit with the default settings, and it behaves weird.

And the other thing, for 95% hits it works pretty well, but sometimes it detects my hit as a really short and weak note, even if my hit wasn't that weak. And it happens only with "mono" polyphony.

I'll check the tutorial you posted.

Mono playback is currently buggy, apparently a fix is being worked on, perhaps this is what you are seeing. Don't assume the factory kits have been set up correctly though, Akai usually outsource these to sound designers who generally don't even have MPC format kits on their own sites.

A huge THANKS !
I encountered the same problem and WAS very frustrated too !