Pad colours in kits - should I change mine to match Akai?

A customer contacted me last night to request that I start using the same pad colour scheme that AKai have used for their kits in the MPC Live 3 and I was wondering what people think about this.

A little history. BAck in 2012 when Akai first released MPCs with the ability to set colours (Ren/Studio) their factory kits didn't use any consistent colour scheme (some just set all pads as red). So I decided to create my own colour scheme, which I have used consistently now for over 14 years across all my expansions.

In recent years Akai seem to have quietly adopted a colour scheme of their own, which (of course) is different to mine (only matching colour is red for kicks).

This customer believes that in order to claim compatibility with the MPC Live 3, I should be using the same pad colour scheme as akai. I disagree that pad colour is a compatibility issue, but I do understand the desire for consistency and muscle memory.

While I can change my colours to match Akai's (albeit it a tonne of work), I wonder if my existing customers would find this unnerving to have all their existing mpc-samples kits change colour. Are you happy to have one colour scheme for my kits, and one for Akai's? Do you care? Do you crave consistency? Interested to hear what people think.

Additionally, Akai's scheme is less granular. For example, hi hats and crashes are the same colour (brown) but mine are green and yellow respectively. Similarly Akai give snares and claps the same colour, but I differentiate. So moving to Akai's scheme would effectively be regressive in this respect as it doesn't provide that instant visual contrast on all articulations. The only solution I can think of is to adopt the basic kick/hat/snare colours, but then go off on my own on some stuff (maybe same colour but contrasting shades). But if it doesn't provide 1-2-1 consistency, is it worth moving at all?

It's a weird one, trying to adhere to a so called 'standard' when the suggested standard is inferior

I use the studio kit and the rusty kit, and I use them a lot, and never missed any kind of color standardization.

As long as the colors are grouped, it doesn't actually matter to me. 16 pads are easy to memorize.

If you are comfortable with vibe coding you could probably whip up an app that could this do in batches and very quickly. As a suggestion, why not offer both program versions and a user can can choose which one they prefer.

That’s a silly request from that customer….. revoke his expansions license and refund him….

kaydigi wrote:That’s a silly request from that customer….. revoke his expansions license and refund him….

To be fair I’ve been chatting to him today and he now realises it’s not that important, he actually prefers the way I differentiate hats and cymbals and he reckons he might just convert the akai kits to my colour scheme.

He comes from NI ecosystem which uses its own colour scheme with the komplete controllers, but they do differentiate hats and crashes. I think akai have tried to minimise colours used for drums so they can reserve some colours for stuff like bass and loops.

SuperKonquer wrote:If you are comfortable with vibe coding you could probably whip up an app that could this do in batches and very quickly. As a suggestion, why not offer both program versions and a user can can choose which one they prefer.

I’ve developed a custom script that I use for batch processing folders of kits, like adding qlink macros, mass changing parameters etc, so adding an option to change colours wouldn’t be an issue (manually updating all my user guides would likely take the most time)

It’s more about whether it’s a good move in the first place, but after analysing it,I really don’t think akais scheme is good enough, it’s not a ‘gold standard’ so I’m starting to think that life’s too short to start messing with something that has worked well for me and my customers for the past 15 years.

Akai does use a pretty basic scheme. Some people just roll with it because it's what they are used to from stock kits and official expansions. I'm not sure it is worth your time to try and solve these edge cases either. Though, sometimes going overboard on those edge cases buys customer loyalty. Changing user guides and such seems out of bounds with a customer base who is happy and has higher expectations. If it is worth your time, you could create a small pad color changing script for those users(assuming more than one) if they must have Akai's standard color scheme.