Can the Akai Force Hainbach? Tape Loops, Drones, etc.

I’m into the Hainbach sound and style of music. I picked up an Akai Force on a whim. It isn’t the first choice in making Hainbach’s style of music, but instead of selling it and moving onto a different piece of gear I want to see if it’s possible to Hainbach on the Akai Force?

I feel like the Force has all the tools to make the kind of music Hainbach makes but I haven’t seen anyone put it all together within the Force. I don’t have the depth of understand either of all the Forces power. Maybe one of you bright folks can help me out. Can the Force Hainbach?

The core components Hainbach uses are:
Loops and Drones: Tape Recorder
Melody (Piano), Mixing, FX: OP1
FX: Delay/Reverb/Granular

Here are the videos that I’ve used as a reference point.

Hainbach - Composing with a minimal setup | OP1, Dicaphone, FX Deformer, Piano, Timeline
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKZi1V2 ... Fs5CV0fs0F

Hainbach - Full Set (Art School)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWTlvVi ... 3ReRe8KmWg

Hainbach - How to Hainbach on a Budget
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q00BqYf ... uEHFFNYHzN

Loopop - Ideas for live looping external gear
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qFlC3J ... CjTuTFWzGu

For Drones, I’m thinking the OPx-4 plugin would be awesome for creating evolving tones and then modulating them.

Thanks.

Yes.

Loop: audio clips/looping samples. The Force will do this just fine.

Drones: Take any one of the plugins with a suitable envelope, and also use macro functions to add to the sonic evolution of the drone itself as well as the effects on it.

Melody: Lots of options. This is the easiest, maybe.

Mixing and FX: the virtual mixer is quite powerful, with plenty of sends and submixes.

FX: Delay, several options. Reverb, several options, Granular, yes, only really one option but it's a very flexible one.

The one place where you might trip up to some extent is if you want to get very detailed on loop crafting, but even so the Force has some great options. Also, you can launch clips in parallel that are of wildly different lengths, so you can do weird things there, and you can have non-integer clip lengths, so that's potentially useful, and you can record events into the arranger view that aren't even clip-based.

So, yes. It can.

Koekepan wrote:Yes.

Loop: audio clips/looping samples. The Force will do this just fine.

Drones: Take any one of the plugins with a suitable envelope, and also use macro functions to add to the sonic evolution of the drone itself as well as the effects on it.

Melody: Lots of options. This is the easiest, maybe.

Mixing and FX: the virtual mixer is quite powerful, with plenty of sends and submixes.

FX: Delay, several options. Reverb, several options, Granular, yes, only really one option but it's a very flexible one.

The one place where you might trip up to some extent is if you want to get very detailed on loop crafting, but even so the Force has some great options. Also, you can launch clips in parallel that are of wildly different lengths, so you can do weird things there, and you can have non-integer clip lengths, so that's potentially useful, and you can record events into the arranger view that aren't even clip-based.

So, yes. It can.

Thanks for this. That’s a lot to unpack but I’ll tackle each section one piece at a time.

Make a feedback loop by connecting the Force's audio outputs to its inputs. For example outputs 3-4 to inputs 1-2. Or just one mono loop, or two mono loops. A feedback loop lets you do all sorts of wacky lo-fi delay looping stuff with distortion and delay plugins in the loop. I think it's not possible to do with software routing in the current Force software version. Maybe with a suitable external USB audio interface with an internal mixer could allow doing a loop without physical cables.

... of course be careful with your gains. And modulate delay times and filter cutoffs with envelope followers.

HouseWithoutMouse wrote:Make a feedback loop by connecting the Force's audio outputs to its inputs. For example outputs 3-4 to inputs 1-2. Or just one mono loop, or two mono loops. A feedback loop lets you do all sorts of wacky lo-fi delay looping stuff with distortion and delay plugins in the loop. I think it's not possible to do with software routing in the current Force software version. Maybe with a suitable external USB audio interface with an internal mixer could allow doing a loop without physical cables.

... of course be careful with your gains. And modulate delay times and filter cutoffs with envelope followers.

I'll try this technique.

I know you want to do stuff inside the Force, but still it's good to consider the price of something like the Mooer Ocean Machine... it has two delays, a reverb and a looper, and these can be routed in a selectable configuration, and the hands-on controls are just superb. And they can be MIDI CC controlled. And it sounds awesome, all in a simple box, for a fraction of the price of a Force.

HouseWithoutMouse wrote:I know you want to do stuff inside the Force, but still it's good to consider the price of something like the Mooer Ocean Machine... it has two delays, a reverb and a looper, and these can be routed in a selectable configuration, and the hands-on controls are just superb. And they can be MIDI CC controlled. And it sounds awesome, all in a simple box, for a fraction of the price of a Force.

I’m not opposed to adding an external FX. I like the hands on controls of separate dedicated boxes. In fact, I recently sold an Empress EchoSystem which is similar to the Mooer.

Truthfully I’d prefer that route, but now that I have the Force I’m seeing how I can use it for ambient, drone and Hainbachs’ style of meditative music rather than traditiona song structure stuff with a bridge, hook, chorus, etc., etc.

I may yet end up with separate dedicated boxes if the Force doesn’t suit my needs. The Force is powerful so I know it can do a lot. Just watching Joe Filbrums OPx-4 videos makes me hopeful that it’s just me that needs to get better at learning the Force, because it can do what I want. But the Force is several devices in one and so takes time to learn. Just going through the 2 suggestions above is gonna take me a minute to learn as they’re each a different piece of the Force to learn.

One thing you can do with a Force AND an Ocean Machine together, but cannot do with the Force alone, is MIDI-controlling rec/play/overdub/stop/clear of the looper. Put control CC commands in MIDI clips and send them to the Ocean Machine...

The same could be done with Boss RC-5 and some other loopers as well. Just not with the Force alone.

I’ll check out the Moer.

The Octatrack and RC-505mk2 are very controllable from Force MIDI.