Interesting and believe it or not, I was out this morning walking the dog and coming to the same conclusions and I found it quite liberating from all the negative thoughts of having to come up with all these workarounds to accomodate the old ways.
Think of mpc3 as a new product, but one where you have the advantage of already knowing the majority of features already. Don't focus on wotkarounds and fixes, try to think how you would approach this product if there was no previous baggage to deal with.
Imagine you've switched on an MPC and were never aware that previously had the option of changing the program assigned to an existing track. A kit gets loaded to a track and that track is always that kit in all sequences. Makes sense really.
Okay, so how do I completely change up the kit sound halfway through the song? Automation is an option. Or maybe I want a completely different kit - okay, can we somehow program a drum kit change on a track (no we can't), hmmm, so it would just make sense to create a new track and load the new kit to that, we'll just copy over the drum events from track 1 just for this portion of the song.
The thing to remember is that Akai said back in 2019 that implementing disk streaming would require unified tracks. People really wanted disk streaming, they got disk streaming and the new way of structuring project tracks that comes with it.
But I do feel for those that don't want to change, they like their existing workflows. This feels like something they didn't ask for and probably think disk streaming is not worth the trade off. They can stick with mpc2 but never get any more bug fixes or new plugins.
I also agree in general with his takes on song mode and the arranger. The arranger is quite underwleming as even back when the Force got ii, in my head I expected something where you can 'arrange' your song by dragging around blocks of sequences. The arranger is really just a more visual way of viewing your tracks together, with direct links to existing editing options (pop up dialogs, split screen editor).
It's fine but I do think it's overhyped as a feature and once people use it they soon realise it doesn't really add much to any workflow, be it song mode or any of the 'anti-song mode' style workflows (e.g. 'single seq > keep doubling length' or just starting with a really long seq and record a track at a time etc). For example to insert some bars into your sequence via the arranger you still have to open the 'sequence edit' options and use the normal 'insert bars' dialogue.
And yes, I agree, the arranger should be in song mode, drag those seqs around, build your song. And like the MPC5000, drop/record your audio tracks across song mode. Unified tracks and programs ensure it all works nicely together. No need to 'convert song to sequence' because unifed tracks mean this 'song mode-arranger' is already good to go for stem exports.
jpeg wrote:
I use MPC for orchestral style music all the time, and any additions to the keygroup engine would be very welcome. Thats why I brought up making multi-timbral string patches with different articulations on the Modwheel like Sampletank.
