MPC Key Instrument Sampler

I'm interested in a new board and the mpc seems really interesting.
Having never owned or used anything on the mpc ecosystem I'm having two specific questions which I haven't found an answer to. Hope you guys can help me out.
I do intend to use it in a live situation on stage, and for that i need the following:

1, Does the MPC has a sampler in a kinda traditional sense like kontakt? Samples that can be mapped on keys as a multisample with multiple velocity layer switching and key off options.

2. Can i map audio loops on the pads as clips that i can shoot in realtime kind of like ableton,
important would be that i can change tempo and still sound decent.

Thank you

Yes you can make multi-velocity instruments, although nowhere near as powerful as Kontakt.

Yes, launch audio loops , warping will change tempo in real time, but quality is variable.

Yes, there are velocity layers and note-off samples. But.

Some limitations you may not find easily in Akai's marketing material:
- There are only 4 velocity layers, or 4 round-robins. A "keygroup" can have 4 different samples and you can switch between the 4 samples either by velocity, round-robin cycling, or randomly. You can have more velocity layers per MIDI note by placing many "keygroups" on the same MIDI note, but you can't have more than 4 round-robins for the same velocity. With two keygroups sharing the same MIDI notes you can have 8 velocity layers, or 12 with three.
- Note-off (release) samples will need their own keygroups.
- But all of that will eat up your total number of keygroups which is 128. For an instrument with 8 velocity layers and separate note-off samples, you'll need 2+1 separate keygroups handling each MIDI note, and 128/3 means that you can have at most 42 separately sampled pitches. Not quite enough for e.g. all white keys of a grand piano, but I think it's quite OK. If you reach that limit on an actual hardware MPC, hats off to you. However, if you try to convert a piano sample library from somewhere else, it won't fit, you'll have to cut it down.
- Making sustain loops is painful in Akai's sample editor. Finding, adjusting, pre-listening, it's painful. You'll maybe do it for a few samples, but if you have dozens or hundreds, it becomes evident that you're using the wrong tool.
- Sustain loops cannot be tuned separately from the rest of the sample, so single-cycle or very short loops may be out of tune compared to the beginning of the sample. If you've sampled A=440Hz with 44100 Hz rate and want a single-cycle sustain loop, 100 samples is higher than the beginning of the sample and 101 samples is lower, and you won't be able to fix it with any setting on the MPC. (There are settings for this in the sample file format, but they don't do anything even if you hack the XML)
- There's no "scripting" like in Kontakt, or any kind of switching between articulations or anything like that. (That I know of)
- There's no disk streaming on MPCs. Everything has to be fully loaded in RAM before you can play.
- There's no real legato for solo synth stuff. Even with "legato" on and monophonic, every new note will re-trig your sample AND envelopes. A new note cannot just continue playing with a different pitch.
- I don't know if it's the same on MPCs, but on the Force, saving a project will not save and/or load the WHEEL>LFO modulation setting for keygroup instruments, so whenever you load back your project you MOD WHEEL DOES NOT WORK anymore.

All in all, it seems that Akai don't WANT the sampler to be very useful, certainly not a competitor for any "synth" sort of thing. They make money by selling you plugins and presets for the plugins. If you make keygroup instruments, Akai don't make any money.

There's a lot of interesting sampling-based things you can do with the sampler. But.

wow thank you so much for clarifying!

Yeah I was hoping to get off laptop and ableton with this.
For my specific purpose i would be using the MPC as a kind of backing keyboard toggling multiple loops with a clicktrack and playing bass sample patch on the keyboard, which has 7 velocity layers fully sustained each with 2 round robin and keyoff release sounds, which I'd say is pretty rudimentary programming.
So if i understood you correctly, because round robin is involved that would require 7 + 1 channels for that one sound. 128 channels would be more than sufficient with the channels for the loops.

can you change velocity values for the keygroups with round robin settings, or does it strictly have to be in velocity switching mode for that to do that?

No monophonic legato is a real bummer! That is actually important for slides.

FYI the mpc does not support a mix of round robins and velocity switching in any one keygroup, it’s one or the other, so each velocity layer can only consist of a single sample

What's the bass sample, sample of a bass guitar/upright or a synth?

For live use I'm not sure you'll need 7 velocity layers and note-off samples, you'll probably be fine with a basic single velocity with a few round robins and some velocity sensitive filtering/envelopes etc. Akai's plugins also do not have this kind of detail, but I'm not really sure you would need it, you can achieve some fairly realistic sounding stuff even with only 2 round robins, especially with bass.

But ultimately if you really need all that stuff along with the proper legato, articulation switching etc, then the MPC may not really the solution for you. You might be better looking at using a laptop running Kontakt.

I think you can have velocity switching and round-robins and note-offs, if you stack many keygroups i.e. Instruments "vertically" on the same MIDI notes.

In the XML file, a "keygroup" in a "keygroup program" is represented by an <Instrument> element, and each such instrument has 4 <Layer> elements.

<Program>
- has between 1 to 128 Instruments

<Instrument>
- has a MIDI note range, like C-2 to D-4
- has 4 Layers (but not all of them have to be active)
- has a TriggerMode, like Note-On or Note-Off
- has a ZonePlay mode ("Layer Play" in the GUI), which is either (0) round-robin, (1) velocity switching, or (2) random

<Layer>
- has a velocity range like 0-127
- points to a slice of audio data in a WAV file
- (depending on the SliceIndex element's value, the start/end/loop points of the slice of audio can be specified either in Slice something elements of the Layer (SliceIndex=129), or baked in the WAV file in Akai's custom "atem" chunk (SliceIndex 0-127), or it can use "All" of the WAV file or a default slice, I haven't tested if the default slice is actually used)





I haven't tested it, but I don't see anything that would prevent stacking, let's say, 8 such Instruments i.e. keygroups, on the same MIDI note range, 7 of them being Note-On triggered with CYClically switched Layers, and 1 being Note-Off triggered.

Yeah if this is just for playing bass live, it probably won't matter, but I'm just currently interested in finding out how exactly the keygroup instruments work.

HouseWithoutMouse wrote:I think you can have velocity switching and round-robins and note-offs, if you stack many keygroups i.e. Instruments "vertically" on the same MIDI notes.

The moment you set a keygroup to 'cycle' the entire keygroup is triggered at all velocities, you cannot limit the velocity range at all. So a pool of four round robins, but always triggered across the entire 0-127 range.

To my knowledge it isn't possible to configure a program to have multiple round robins per limited velocity range, no matter how many keygroups you point to the same note. It's 'either or'; velocity or cycle/rnd, and I don't see how having multiple keygroups targeting the same note would change this. That will allow you to create more velocity layers, but I cannot see how any of those layers can also trigger round robins.

Honestly, if you can actually make this work with a practical example then please let me know as I would use this in a heartbeat.

The only way I can see this ever working within the current framework is to have Akai introduce the concept of a 'random' sample slice. That way we can assign a sample chain to each velocity layer, with each chain consisting of up to 128 round robins. Then set 'Slice: Random'.

MPC-Tutor wrote:The moment you set a keygroup to 'cycle' the entire keygroup is triggered at all velocities, you cannot limit the velocity range at all. So a pool of four round robins, but always triggered across the entire 0-127 range.

Yes, I just tested it and that's what happens. I was putting together the pieces in my mind and thought that it could work with these elements, but no. The logic seems to be that the keygroup i.e. Instrument's LowNote and HighNote work as "instrument switch", and then ZonePlay decides what happens inside that instrument i.e. keygroup. And if ZonePlay is not 1 i.e. VEL, then the Layers' VelStart and VelEnd values are ignored completely. :/

I suppose that with more than 4 velocity layers created by stacking overlapping keygroups, the MPC/Force plays an incoming MIDI note on all keygroups that are mapped to that note, but because of VelStart/VelEnd settings being set appropriately, only one keygroup actually produces sound.

I really don't think Akai will ever address this. Just add it to my ever growing list of feature requests that have been consistently ignored for the past decade (I believe Akai have implemented exactly 'zero' of my feature requests over the years).

This is funny, or not?
A tutor sayin’ you cant when you can.
You can build instruments with both round robins and velocity at the same time with mpc keygroups. I did this a year ago. I have not seen anyone figure it out yet. Mabye i should try to make some money, as i have about 20 instruments with both rr and velocity.

In Track List you can set a Velocity range a Program responds to, so you can set Velocity there for your 7 Note On groups and get each to forward its notes to your Note Off triggered program track. I think this only works when playing from an external keyboard, like you said you want to do anyway.

organic wrote:This is funny, or not?
A tutor sayin’ you cant when you can.
You can build instruments with both round robins and velocity at the same time with mpc keygroups. I did this a year ago. I have not seen anyone figure it out yet. Mabye i should try to make some money, as i have about 20 instruments with both rr and velocity.

The whole point of this forum is about sharing knowledge. If you've solved this issue please share it.

So what we need is the ability to trigger different sets of round robins depending on the velocity you hit the pad, all contained within a single program. For example, if I hit a note at a velocity of 27 it plays a random sample from a pool of low velocity round robins. If I then trigger the same note at a velocity of 120 it will trigger a sample from a completely different pool of 'hard' round robins.

To my knowledge, any pad that is set to play a cycle/rand is triggered over the entire velocity range, any velocity ranges you set on those round robin keygroups are ignored. So how can we 'target' specific sets of round robins based purely on the velocity we trigger a note?

MPC-Tutor wrote:

organic wrote:This is funny, or not?
A tutor sayin’ you cant when you can.
You can build instruments with both round robins and velocity at the same time with mpc keygroups. I did this a year ago. I have not seen anyone figure it out yet. Mabye i should try to make some money, as i have about 20 instruments with both rr and velocity.

The whole point of this forum is about sharing knowledge. If you've solved this issue please share it.

So what we need is the ability to trigger different sets of round robins depending on the velocity you hit the pad, all contained within a single program. For example, if I hit a note at a velocity of 27 it plays a random sample from a pool of low velocity round robins. If I then trigger the same note at a velocity of 120 it will trigger a sample from a completely different pool of 'hard' round robins.

To my knowledge, any pad that is set to play a cycle/rand is triggered over the entire velocity range, any velocity ranges you set on those round robin keygroups are ignored. So how can we 'target' specific sets of round robins based purely on the velocity we trigger a note?

I've just checked and the Track MIDI Filter by Velocity setting also works for pads, so you can set these and the Send To field to get round robbin on multlayer keygroups.

(Rewriten with slightly more detailed instructions, it didn't let me edit previous post.)

In Track List MIDI Filter settings you can set a Velocity range a Track responds to, so you can set Velocity there for your 7 Note On groups and use Send To in Track Mixer section of Main to forward to all these layers plus your Note Off layer(s), all triggered from the initial track in the chain.