By e-Brainz
Thu Nov 11, 2021 11:42 am
Brand new MPC One user here, coming into it after playing around with MPC Beats for a while (with a controller with pads) and after having rejected Ableton Live. Basic DAW experience before that, nothing fancy, no previous MPC experience at all. As you might already suspect, I am one of those guys who use the MPC less as a traditional sampler and more for everything else it can do - at least for now. All opinions are personal and yours might differ 
I am thinking of the word "consistency". Soon I realized that anything I wanted to do was two or three clicks (taps, touches) away at any time. I mean this in a good way: almost every function is accessed in the same way, go to the right screen and select an area - boom, you are working on what you needed.
Another aspect of it is that no matter what you are doing, the machine remains globally consistent. Mute a pad, it is muted everywhere. Hit play, whatever was set to play will play, no matter where you are.
The few exceptions that are there, like the looper, break - or rather, complement - this paradigm in a way that makes sense. The looper feels completely decoupled from the rest of the MPC in a way that allows you to use it for its intended purpose and forget about it when you are not using it, while nothing changes in the rest of the machine. The "Export" button is aptly named - a single seamless communication point between the looper and the rest of the MPC.
All this does take some brain rewiring, and I am still adapting and discovering some things. But I think I am starting to see what this is all about and hope to attain that elusive flow state soon! The key moment, and the trigger for this post, was when I realized that I had switched from thinking "there is a workaround for anything I would want to do in a DAW that doesn't have a direct counterpart in the MPC" to "anything I want to do is no more than two clicks away" - tap tap.
For a brief time, I wondered: is the MPC workflow the equivalent of having multiple small windows open on a large screen? I don't think so. To the extent that I have done that in DAWs, it doesn't feel the same at all. Focusing on one thing at a time while having everything at your fingertips feels to me like its own thing. Maybe a bit too soon to say this, but it feels more enabling than demanding. This is purely from a UI and workflow perspective, independent from the fact that I prefer making music on hardware rather than a computer (the modern MPCs stretch either definition anyway).
The one thing that I would change so far (and couldn't find a way to): I would strongly prefer that track rather than sequence was selected by default on the main screen. There is a q-link for that but since I want to change tracks a lot more than I want to change sequences, the main encoder would feel more natural. Unless the MPC starts changing the way I work, of course!
The one tip I would give to complete newbies like me: make sure to adjust the pads to your liking in the hardware settings for comfortable playing and avoiding double triggers (very common from what I read).
So far, so good, feel free to comment.
I am thinking of the word "consistency". Soon I realized that anything I wanted to do was two or three clicks (taps, touches) away at any time. I mean this in a good way: almost every function is accessed in the same way, go to the right screen and select an area - boom, you are working on what you needed.
Another aspect of it is that no matter what you are doing, the machine remains globally consistent. Mute a pad, it is muted everywhere. Hit play, whatever was set to play will play, no matter where you are.
The few exceptions that are there, like the looper, break - or rather, complement - this paradigm in a way that makes sense. The looper feels completely decoupled from the rest of the MPC in a way that allows you to use it for its intended purpose and forget about it when you are not using it, while nothing changes in the rest of the machine. The "Export" button is aptly named - a single seamless communication point between the looper and the rest of the MPC.
All this does take some brain rewiring, and I am still adapting and discovering some things. But I think I am starting to see what this is all about and hope to attain that elusive flow state soon! The key moment, and the trigger for this post, was when I realized that I had switched from thinking "there is a workaround for anything I would want to do in a DAW that doesn't have a direct counterpart in the MPC" to "anything I want to do is no more than two clicks away" - tap tap.
For a brief time, I wondered: is the MPC workflow the equivalent of having multiple small windows open on a large screen? I don't think so. To the extent that I have done that in DAWs, it doesn't feel the same at all. Focusing on one thing at a time while having everything at your fingertips feels to me like its own thing. Maybe a bit too soon to say this, but it feels more enabling than demanding. This is purely from a UI and workflow perspective, independent from the fact that I prefer making music on hardware rather than a computer (the modern MPCs stretch either definition anyway).
The one thing that I would change so far (and couldn't find a way to): I would strongly prefer that track rather than sequence was selected by default on the main screen. There is a q-link for that but since I want to change tracks a lot more than I want to change sequences, the main encoder would feel more natural. Unless the MPC starts changing the way I work, of course!
The one tip I would give to complete newbies like me: make sure to adjust the pads to your liking in the hardware settings for comfortable playing and avoiding double triggers (very common from what I read).
So far, so good, feel free to comment.
