Hi,
I got the FORCE about three weeks ago. For the first week I thought I'd just dive in and see what I could make of it, helped by occasionally looking at the pdf manual. After a week, I decided to print off the manual. In learning a piece of kit like the FORCE, I think it helps to have some literature available to guide you. The manual is pretty good, but could have taken a user through the basic steps AND also provided an overview of the limitations of what's possible say as a chart.
There are many things 'hidden under the hood' which after using the unit for a period of time you'll probably come across, but there are some things that without going through the manual at some stage, most users will never find.
In my own case, I'm overjoyed with the FORCE at the moment. I've never liked using computers for music, but I've had to. With the FORCE however, I can do all the usual things (Sampling, sequencing, create synth patches, record audio, mangle audio) the ONLY caveat being, that as with any piece of hardware, you can either work WITH or AGAINST the machine. I'm still in the 'test period' of finding out what the machine can do, what it can do well and how I adjust my normal working practices to fit in with its workflow.
This is a longer reply than I originally was going to make, but I feel the FORCE is probably being misunderstood as just a 'loop player' or an 'Ableton remote' rather than one of the most innovative pieces of music technology to have been released since AKAI's S900 or for that matter AKAI's DPS24.
I posted this reply on a question about recording audio, but I've copied it here because a piece of hardware IMHO needs to be used to its strengths, not weaknesses. I guess the FORCE can be used in many situations and I'm not up on what a DJ needs to perform a set with the FORCE. Do you really need 26 stereo audio tracks running at once? For me, I need to re-think how I record stuff and how the FORCE will manage it. A lot of my stuff is a mix of analogue (real instruments) and electronic (synths, V-drums etc). I can see how by sub-mixing I could reduce a normal AUDIO '24-track' mono instrumental session to an 8-track stereo session right off the bat in FORCE, but a better way to record may be by assigning some tracks to 'sample playback' right from the start....an example of this would be a funk guitar lick or backing vocals or a repeating 8 bar shaker loop or loads of other things. My point being is that the FORCE will force me to record to its strengths, not its weaknesses. The main disadvantage I see with the FORCE (admittedly after owning one for a few weeks) might be that returning to a project after say 6 months, the user is a bit lost as to where the tracks are. I'll see how I get on, but I can see that a 16 x 16 'chart sheet' on A4 or even A3 may be needed (or electronically if you're inclined) might be useful. Then again, if you adopt a system of working which always puts keys on 1 , drums on 2 etc, this may be unnecessary.
Here's a piece I'm tweaking at the moment called Time To Live Again:
https://soundcloud.com/altruistica/tracks
