By Straker
Fri Jan 03, 2025 12:40 pm
Given that we are going to say goodbye soon to MPC2 (soon in Akai world could also mean a year, but let's see), I would like to share my experience with MPC.
I bought MPC Live in 2019, I was mostly looking for a good sampler, I have tons of samples I made in my life working with cinema and theatre, so I wanted a box that could easily play, manipulate, slow down, pitch all this material to create sort of soundscapes and atmospheres.
At the beginning, in 2019, I was disappointed.
Mpc was at a really basic stage, the fx were really lame, the manipulation features were basic, I felt it was a overpriced box with a glorious name and a confused OS, nothing more.
But I could see the potential. I bought it second hand and could resell it without loss, but I chose to wait.
Meanwhile I bought an ssd, put all my samples inside, organized in folders, built some drum kits chopping samples and so on.
Things started to change when Air entered the arena and put their fx and synths. The fx arsenal was decent, finally we had some good eq and comp, gate, etc. Modulations were meh but a useable Phaser, Reverb was not good but useable at low decays, delays enough to give an echo and still I had 4 outputs to send anything to external fx so it started to be workable.
Synths were also meh but good to have more sounds to manipulate, sample, resample and so on.
MPC was starting to be a box of tools, mostly, some good, some decent, it could be a sampler, a synth, a drum machine, an fx box. Good idea.
But how about the sampler, which was its starting point? Nothing really changed, it looks like developers forgot about it, it stayed like it was, very basic but also fast.
So I started to think that Akai was moving MPC from being a sampler to being a box of tools, which is ok.
At a certain point, MPC became reliable anyway and I started to use it as I wanted from the beginning but I found myself using things I never thought about, mixing samples with synth sounds, using Lofi features, putting altogether and I came to the conclusion that this is where MPC shines, you have a bit of all, you try, you surprise yourself, and once you learn the workflow, it's fast enough to always stay inside the music flow without stopping, which is what I like.
I tend to think that MPC is still better to be really used live, you prepare your project, tracks, qlink in project mode to tweak in real time, track mute, sequences.
I would really never use it as a Daw, I mean to build a song, arrange it with pencils and things like that.
I have the feeling Akai is moving in this direction, though.
The sampler features are still the same since 5 years, more or less.
Air is upgrading the tools anyway, Opx4 is really a gem, delay PRO seems to be a step forward (I still have to try it but people are happy with it), possibly Air will put better fx, hopefully a Reverb PRO, which is a must in my opinion.
So how will MPC3 be?
I don't think there will be an upgrade of the sampling features, it looks like they just make a better GUI with arranger and disk streaming, so all is moving to a sort of DAW style.
We will know when MPC3beta will become MPC3.
At the moment, I enjoy the last MPC2 update, all is finally working fine, it reached a good stage, I have enough to make anything I want, all in a box that you can switch on, use, switch off, and it sounds good.
I bought MPC Live in 2019, I was mostly looking for a good sampler, I have tons of samples I made in my life working with cinema and theatre, so I wanted a box that could easily play, manipulate, slow down, pitch all this material to create sort of soundscapes and atmospheres.
At the beginning, in 2019, I was disappointed.
Mpc was at a really basic stage, the fx were really lame, the manipulation features were basic, I felt it was a overpriced box with a glorious name and a confused OS, nothing more.
But I could see the potential. I bought it second hand and could resell it without loss, but I chose to wait.
Meanwhile I bought an ssd, put all my samples inside, organized in folders, built some drum kits chopping samples and so on.
Things started to change when Air entered the arena and put their fx and synths. The fx arsenal was decent, finally we had some good eq and comp, gate, etc. Modulations were meh but a useable Phaser, Reverb was not good but useable at low decays, delays enough to give an echo and still I had 4 outputs to send anything to external fx so it started to be workable.
Synths were also meh but good to have more sounds to manipulate, sample, resample and so on.
MPC was starting to be a box of tools, mostly, some good, some decent, it could be a sampler, a synth, a drum machine, an fx box. Good idea.
But how about the sampler, which was its starting point? Nothing really changed, it looks like developers forgot about it, it stayed like it was, very basic but also fast.
So I started to think that Akai was moving MPC from being a sampler to being a box of tools, which is ok.
At a certain point, MPC became reliable anyway and I started to use it as I wanted from the beginning but I found myself using things I never thought about, mixing samples with synth sounds, using Lofi features, putting altogether and I came to the conclusion that this is where MPC shines, you have a bit of all, you try, you surprise yourself, and once you learn the workflow, it's fast enough to always stay inside the music flow without stopping, which is what I like.
I tend to think that MPC is still better to be really used live, you prepare your project, tracks, qlink in project mode to tweak in real time, track mute, sequences.
I would really never use it as a Daw, I mean to build a song, arrange it with pencils and things like that.
I have the feeling Akai is moving in this direction, though.
The sampler features are still the same since 5 years, more or less.
Air is upgrading the tools anyway, Opx4 is really a gem, delay PRO seems to be a step forward (I still have to try it but people are happy with it), possibly Air will put better fx, hopefully a Reverb PRO, which is a must in my opinion.
So how will MPC3 be?
I don't think there will be an upgrade of the sampling features, it looks like they just make a better GUI with arranger and disk streaming, so all is moving to a sort of DAW style.
We will know when MPC3beta will become MPC3.
At the moment, I enjoy the last MPC2 update, all is finally working fine, it reached a good stage, I have enough to make anything I want, all in a box that you can switch on, use, switch off, and it sounds good.
