Frustration: Sounds chopped during sequence changes

Hello,
MPC Key 61, OS 3.9.
Working in song mode, on a live setting, always with the following tracks:
- 1 or 2 tracks of drum instruments, with events on the grid.
- 2 midi tracks controlling 2 external analog synths, with events on the grid
- Maybe 1 other track with another sequence for a plugin synth, with events on the grid.
- One EMPTY TRACK (no events of the grid) loaded with a Fabric piano, or maybe an organ. This is the track I play in real time on a live situation.
- These tracks remain the same in every sequence of the project, no variations in track number, type, and instrument selected.

PROBLEM: the projects are structured as songs, with intro, verse, chorus, bridge, outro. So in any of the projects I will have 5 to 10 sequences, corresponding to these parts. Song mode seems ideal for this, and in fact it is, buuuuut... every time the sequence changes, and I'm playing the "live" piano/organ part, the sound gets chopped. As if every time there is a sequence change the sound needed to be uploaded into the project again. All the tracks with events on the grid play just fine, the chopping only occurs on the empty piano/organ track.

SOLUTIONS? I haven't been able to find one. But let's examine the proposed solutions I've found online:

1. Turn the whole project (or maybe its tracks) into an audio track. Yeah, i could do that, but then I'm stuck with one particular mix that I cannot change, and all the fun of tweaking the filters on the external midi synths in a live situation is gone.

2. Increase polyphony of the piano / organ. Many people propose this as a solution, but I haven't been able to try it, because the settings for the Fabric piano are hidden in a most mysterious location, accessible perhaps to the gods in Mount Olympus, but certainly impossible to find for simple mortals, even after extensive consultation on line, on the manual, and on the MPC Bible. These settings are simply not there. and even if I could find them, I am doubtful this would solve the problem.

3. But wait! I could just take my 5 to 10 sequences, and turn them into one long sequence for every track, right? Wrong. There seems to be no way to merge different short sequences into one long sequence in MPC, not in midi events terms. The only way would be turning them into audio (again, not desirable in this situation), or perhaps copy and paste, one by one, all the events in all the sequences that make the whole song, and little by little make sequence 1 longer and longer for each track, until in all the tracks I have sequence 1 of say 100 bars. I haven't tried this either, because it seems like a super drag: the room for error while copy/pasting is huge, and it would take me hours.

So as of today, none of these solutions really fix the problem.
This is supposed to be a world class, state of the art, professional device, and I'm stuck in something that is so simple, something that any old 80s sequencer could do. I find it hard to believe. My frustration knows no limits.

Sorry for the long post, just venting here, and I wanted to be very specific.
Final word of advice: as of today, MPC 3 does not seem well suited for live situations.

By chopped do you mean there’s a brief glitchy pause in the audio? If so this is an unresolved bug that only seems to affect gen 1 machines. Akai release notes seem to claim it was fixed a while ago, but it isn’t and it doesn’t require the set up you’ve described, I have seen it in other types of projects. I have reported this and sent example projects.

Not totally sure, but it sounds like, and I think, OP is describing a well-known flaw on 3.xx Akai hasn't fixed yet... where any midi-sequenced notes (esp long notes like pads/strings or pushed/early notes before the-1) are cut-off upon/after any sequence changes.

This too is my #1 request/priority to have fixed... as I've always composed in this style (coming form a classic mpc60) - work on first sequence, then to next sequence, then keep repeating. It's a nice natural flow while keeping nice smaller chunks sequences (8-16bar), which for me is easier to navigate than 1 huge song/seq.

Workaround is to work in a single huge sequence in arrange mode (no more cutting off, since it's never changing sequences)... but, it then gets harder to navigate to a smaller section of song quickly for edits.


At least Akai recognizes/acknowledges it and lists it in their latest "Known Issues" at the bottom of their FW Release Notes, "Held pad or key events stop playing when changing Sequence or Clip during playback."

Yes, I mean a brief glitchy pause in the audio. The new sequence starts, and I hit my piano chord on the 1 of the first bar, and nothing sounds. It recovers by beat 2 of the first bar, it's really quick, but it messes up my performance irremediably.
I figure that if I could make the sequence long, then the instrument would be already loaded up and I wouldn't have this problem, but MPC does not offer any option for merging midi sequences. It seems like such a small thing that should not be hard to fix, but that unfixed renders the machine useless for what I'm trying to do live.
Sigh.

Pegamin wrote:Yes, I mean a brief glitchy pause in the audio. The new sequence starts, and I hit my piano chord on the 1 of the first bar, and nothing sounds. It recovers by beat 2 of the first bar, it's really quick, but it messes up my performance irremediably.
I figure that if I could make the sequence long, then the instrument would be already loaded up and I wouldn't have this problem, but MPC does not offer any option for merging midi sequences. It seems like such a small thing that should not be hard to fix, but that unfixed renders the machine useless for what I'm trying to do live.
Sigh.

That sound like it sucks, but I haven't experienced the gap between seqs on the Force. I was getting gap at start of a row/clip if I had note data at very beginning like 1.0.0. Moving back a couple of ticks to like 1.0.1 or 1.0.2 helped. Also can't you convert all seqs to 1 song & convert that to a seq?

Indeed, this issue is listed as a known bug in the release notes.

However, I did a minimal test with just one drum track and one plugin track (Fabric Piano), and didn't experience any audio interruption when playing the pad live across sequence changes. Could the load be a factor?