Support and discussion for all of Akai’s modern standalone MPCs including the MPC X / X SE, MPC Live 1, 2 & 3, MPC One / One+, MPC Key 37/61.
By moonlake Fri Jan 17, 2025 8:51 pm
Today I got an old small used mechanism of a music box ( I assume) from a thrift store / antiques store.

It looks like nothing, like from the trash actually, not shiny like these small gears you can buy,
but industrial, dull grey pressed metal cast.
It sounds quite nice though, once was Swiss made and has astonishingly precise tuning.
Quite well tuned harmonic overtones also.

I sampled a single high pitched note (A#6) with a 5 Euro guitar tuner contact mic, oversampled it 8 times and ran this through a magnetic pickup simulation I wrote, in two different amp settings, and made a simple Key Group instrument that blends both synthtic samples with velocity ( and some lowpass filtering and plenty of fx).

The result is in between a music box, an e-piano and an oldfashioned 1960s China toy piano.
The playable range of that sample is quite large, like 5- 6 octaves or so.
Not great like a Rhodes, but not bad either, in its own right.

I plan to do more stuff like this, lofi, from toys and stuff, but high brow in a way, with some dsp and physics tricks added, but no elaborate multisamples, as simple as can be.. small homegrown stuff.
and I would like to share the results, just I dont know where and how.

Putting this on some sample sharing site is pointless (and I hate these sites) especially since its made for MPC. I dont expect many people to be interested in this, like 5 or 10, but those who are might dig it.

Is there an MPC specific place for something this? Maybe here? Or elsewhere?
By moonlake Fri Jan 17, 2025 9:26 pm
You are probably right, I just dont like these sites like dropbox cause they take hostage of your files and in addition grab all the user data and in most cases you need to install their apps.

But since I dont have webspace anymore its probably the way to go.
By B-Wise Sat Jan 18, 2025 12:06 am
moonlake wrote:You are probably right, I just dont like these sites like dropbox cause they take hostage of your files and in addition grab all the user data and in most cases you need to install their apps.

But since I dont have webspace anymore its probably the way to go.

You can keep it ghetto & use Google Docs.
By moonlake Sat Jan 18, 2025 1:37 am
that would be kind of a logical place to put stuff.
Just that it makes me angsty I incedentially upload personal stuff to Google, dont find their universe much user friendly...
I did have a website for decades which was popular back in the day, and people knew ny name and stuff, which can be ennerving, nowadays I prefer to do everything anonymously just with artist names on random places.

I was thinking if I just should make a free demo on bandcamp and include the files as ziped bonus material. Or a free blog but usually its not possible to host files there.

Btw for anybody who is interested in similar things I recommend the writings of Bart Hopkins,
look for his site or books, he is an experimental instrument builder since decades,
You can learn a lot there and get tons of inspiration for diy instruments.
Hes basically my source of inspiration at the moment for such things.

Another thing I just discovered the other day is ConvertWithMoss, its an open source sample converter that can also map samples to basic MPC Keygroups from various other formats and vice versa. Its also handy to make a keygroup from a series of properly named .wavs, though that part is a bit cryptic.