J.O.BEATS wrote:Then just get a laptop and a daw…
I just don’t get the DAWless DAW crowd.
So many people seem to have convinced themselves that just cramming a full desktop DAW into a dedicated hardware will get them past whatever blocks they have. As if the laptop is the problem, as opposed to having the patience and perseverance to learn the tools and do the difficult part that comes between having the idea and finishing a track. It’s always going to be a worse experience than using a proper DAW unless it comes down to attaching a mouse, keyboard and 19” monitor to your MPC at which point I’m not seeing how it’s different to just using a laptop. And people who want this will never be happy, because fundamentally what they think they need is a contradiction in terms that will never work in reality.
I do understand from a commercial point of view why Akai are going in this direction - every tech company wants the Apple App Store model and pandering to “beginners” is definitely gonna sell more plugins. But they’re blowing up the things that make the MPC good in the first place to get there. I was just reading
this book, and it jumped out how perfectly calibrated the MPC is for audio collage:
You have to begin somewhere . . . so you put something down. Then you put something else with it, and then you see how that works, and maybe you try something else and so on, and the picture grows in that way. One thing leads to another, and you take the options as they come, or as you are able to perceive them as you proceed. . . .
Once you get going . . . all sorts of things begin to open up.
Sometimes something just falls into place, like piano keys that every now and then just seem to be right where your fingers happen to come down. But there are also all those times you have to keep trying something over and over, and then when you finally get it right you wonder what took you so long. And of course there are also times when you have to give it up and try something else— which sometimes turns out just great as the beginning of another, totally different picture. By the way, this sort of thing is much more likely to have to do with how something fits into the design or ornamental structure of the painting than with its suitability as subject matter
3.0 looks like it will still work fine in cases where it all drops into place one block after another, but for the more usual experimentation it’s a massive step backwards. Aside from also killing live performance and a bunch of other basic techniques. Breaking fundamentals that were working just fine to please people who can’t be pleased.
Not much point to this post other than venting, but I needed to get it off my chest.
); having invested so much time in the 2.0 workflow, moving to 3.0 could be a chore. I'd probably feel the same if I spent eons learning Elektron's alchemic workflow only for them to do something else. But I hardly spent time with 2.0, so diving straight into 3.0 isn't too painful. After watching several early users, I think 3.0 seems quite similar to most of the 2.0 workflow and is an improvement—just IMHO.
