a year with the 500

after a year with this little thing i love it,i use it back to back with my xl,instead as a second sampler or a sketchpad.right about now i´m more efficient and faster with it and have become used to trim samples by ear(this little thing will appeall to a lot of 60 and 3000 users).i lot of people hate on it but they sleep no doubt:portable,good pads,batteries ,synth record to pad directlly(no midi,thanks god)...this is my little beast.
by the way i´m not the only one loving it:

Q: So you’re writing primarily in that studio then?

DF: Yeah, but when I’m on the road I’ll take the battery-powered [Akai] MPC 500. Everybody laughed at that little thing and said it wasn’t for pros, but when I’m on the plane all I need is six AA batteries, and I’m banging away on the next record.(excerpt for and interview with Dennis Ferrer respected house dj and producer,eqmag.com)

CLOCK 470 wrote:after a year with this little thing i love it,i use it back to back with my xl,instead as a second sampler or a sketchpad.right about now i´m more efficient and faster with it and have become used to trim samples by ear(this little thing will appeall to a lot of 60 and 3000 users).i lot of people hate on it but they sleep no doubt:portable,good pads,batteries ,synth record to pad directlly(no midi,thanks god)...this is my little beast.
by the way i´m not the only one loving it:

Q: So you’re writing primarily in that studio then?

DF: Yeah, but when I’m on the road I’ll take the battery-powered [Akai] MPC 500. Everybody laughed at that little thing and said it wasn’t for pros, but when I’m on the plane all I need is six AA batteries, and I’m banging away on the next record.(excerpt for and interview with Dennis Ferrer respected house dj and producer,eqmag.com)

Yeah, at first trimming by ear was pretty hard, now I do it even when using a JJ 1000. I think the 500 is really underrated. People have made good music with less, it's just a little behind compared to some of today's technology, but I don't mind.

The portability is nice too.

Yessir... I love my 500! I'm getting the new 5000 soon, already pre ordered but I will still keep the 500 and use it often!

I have had a lot of issues with mine, I got my unit replaced but that didn't solve my problems (crashes, data corruption).

Akai support hasn't been too great, they don't seem to realize some problems are widespread and need to be treated seriously.

But still I think the 500 is a very nice little piece of kit. I'm still trying to use it without crashing all the time.

Snerg

question

how often do you use it

and

have you experienced any problems with the buttons aka the tact switches failing ??

i'm having post-mpc,sold my 2 xl's and 1000, withdrawals looking dotn have the money for a new 1000, rather not buy shit used anymore and this is in my price range

snerg wrote:I have had a lot of issues with mine, I got my unit replaced but that didn't solve my problems (crashes, data corruption).

Akai support hasn't been too great, they don't seem to realize some problems are widespread and need to be treated seriously.

But still I think the 500 is a very nice little piece of kit. I'm still trying to use it without crashing all the time.

Snerg

i know a lot of people have had problems with the 500 but i´ve been lucky enough to have minor issues(most notably polyphony,but not all the time)Right about now i can say that my unit is stable but Akai shoul fix all the problems with the 500.it´s shame that people pay for something that is not working like it should.mpc(all of them) are by no means cheaps so i can understand people frustation about the units not working perfectlly.anyway my experience to this day with akai products is real good(my xl has 5 years of compñlete abuse and never have had a problem with it)

Hi I keep getting error messages on my MPC500 and it keeps crashing. The problems tend to happen when loading and saving. Errors messages include:

CPU Addr (read)
PC(884b0660)


Inv. gen. inst
PC(a50184c4)


Finally, a question mark suddenly appears before all the samples whilst I am assigning them to pads. When this happens no sound can be heard.

Does anyone know what these mean?

It was a dream to own an MPC for me... All of them were too expensive, so I stopped looking...
About 9 months ago, decided to research again, and found a cheaper version, the MPC 500... shit, to me, it was just a chance to get SOMETHING with MPC in the name, I dind't care if it supposedly couldn't do EVERYTHING the other MPCs could... now, I love it, and it can do everything I try to do. I love love love it. I disregard people who underestimate it.

The 500 is just as capable a machine as any other MPC out there. The people who say you can't make anything on it either never tried or never gave it a chance. As with any other instrument you really need to learn it if you want to do anything with it.

Picked up my 500 used last week. At first I was frustrated with some problems.. but they all turned out to be user-error and/or settings in the machine that needed to be fixed. A STEEP learning curve for a newbie but VERY rewarding so far. So far I wouldn't call it "buggy" but i did run into a problem with the polyphony.. it seems that from time to time certain hits get shut off or on depending on how many samples are playing. This only seems to happen with stereo samples. So far it's worth the $300 I got it for.. changing my workflow quickly and it's great to not look at a computer.

- m

Are you using up all of your 32 notes of polyphony?

Sounds like you need to convert some of your samples to mono...

Yes - I think you are right (convert stereo samples to mono to fix the polyphony issue)

I have a few questions for you if you have a sec..

1. Is there a "mixer" mode in the mpc500 or do I set the sample level and pan individually for each pad?

I'm using MPC-Maid (very cool) to set up my programs.. works great so far.. but i'm wondering about 2 aspects of the program settings..

2. Sample level - I set to 100 to get maximum boom.. but are my samples now clipping I wonder? The sub-bass sample seems to get a little funky. Is there a good average setting for sample level? I think default was around 70 but sounded too low.

3. do i want to layer multiple hits on one pad as MPC maid allows me to do?

Thanks for the help!!!

- mike

1) Mixer mode on the 500? Off the top of my head I don't think so (but someone will probably correct me if I am wrong)... I use it on the MPC 1k all the time, but I think on the 500 one of the few options you have is to modify the amplitude settings of the sample.

2) Default is in fact 70. If you have everything at 100, then you aren't really giving yourself room to grow. Personally I'd use 70 as default, increase/decrease some samples as necessary to have them fit in the mix... but you do know you can change the Master db from say -12db/-6db (whatever it is set to) to 0db if you need more volume, but that is at the expense of headroom. Changing the master db to 0db and using 100 amplitude on samples will quite likely lead to audio clipping though... so beware.

3) I don't know... do you want this? It eats up more polyphony... I'd say it's a good way to thicken up a drum hit, but if you want to keep it you're much better off resampling the sound to conserve polyphony. So you have to decide between wanting the flexibility of having up to 4 samples that you can tweak individually until they are 'just right' and using less polyphony.

Good Luck!

Ok cool. You cleared up the missing-mixer issue.. and that makes sense with headroom and samples.. I'm gonna go back down on the hit amplitude and try changing levels from there... it WOULD be hard to mix-down with all samples LOUD.

Layering - yeah I didn't see the point, really. I usually want clean hits.. or I am using samples that are already processed.. i'm leaving that part alone.

Psyched. thanks!


Ps - last question for you.. when SAVING a project i am working on.. I read that it's best to create a new folder and project when you save. Say right now I go open the project I made yesterday and improve it somehow.. is there a way to just SAVE as you go.. or should I create a new folder and project for each revision? (when i tried to save into the same folder/file things seemed to get glitchy.) Thanks again for all the advice!

soundsdefygravity wrote:Ps - last question for you.. when SAVING a project i am working on.. I read that it's best to create a new folder and project when you save. Say right now I go open the project I made yesterday and improve it somehow.. is there a way to just SAVE as you go.. or should I create a new folder and project for each revision? (when i tried to save into the same folder/file things seemed to get glitchy.) Thanks again for all the advice!

Well... this will net you a different answer from different people.

Personally I'll save on top of the previous project many times, but this can lead to problems:
1) You might accidently save on top of the wrong project and make a big mess of things
2) The save may fail for some reason and you could corrupt what would have otherwise made a good backup.

Uhm... anyways, if I make significant changes I'll usually just make a .2/.3/.4 directory so I can go back if I want to, but can still move forward. For the most part I don't have things that I'd be too upset to lose either, but when something really starts flowing and I'd be upset to lose it, then I get more concerned about creating another new directory for the same project.

As long as you at least understand the saving/loading system though and know where things can go wrong and how to work around issues you should be all set.