MPC Sample plays back most MPC3 params including FX

Saw this video from Raul, he discovered how to load MPC3 kits into the MPC Sample and in his example it retained his cycle kit settings. I just tested this and it appears that the MPC Sample can play back pretty much all underlying MPC3 drum track settings, including FX (I assume just factory FX)

So far I've tested the following, all working:

LFO
Mod MAtrix
FX (delays, reverb, filters, eq, phaser, flanger etc). Flavor did not work.
Cycle Layers
Velocity switching
layering samples
Randomise
Velocity sensitive pitch
Sample chains
loop points, but only FWD loop

So, open MPC3 Software, create a single track project. Save, copy to MPC Sample disk. Don\'t load the project, just hit the B3 button on the load project screen and this loads the kit. Project won't load.

Seems to save fine - load back as a full project, everything still retained, no errors. YMMV!

That's great news. Since it seemed like the Sample was running the same OS as the regular MPCs, I had assumed those settings would probably work on the Sample as well.

Great find! Shout out to Raul! Dude is a real one

That's good to know. So basically, the Sample OS is 3.0-lite.

Okay, little follow up to this as it's not all good I'm afraid. So I've been converting one of my expansions to MPC Sample format, there's 25 construction kits which in the original had some pad FX on maybe 2 or 3 pads per kit, beyond that, just single sample per pad, nothing fancy beyond that.

I mentioned previously that there's two ways to get these kits into the MPC Sample. The 'recommended' way is to use the official 'MPC Sample' export which is part of the forthcoming MPC 3.8 (it contains the track and sequence data). This flattens each pad, hence removes all trace of MPC3 exclusive parameters. These load and play without a hitch (a little tweaking required but hopefully this is just beta stuff). However as they are flattened these are obviously less flexible.

the other way is to navigate to the original MPC3 project and select 'Load Kit' which will load that MPC3 kit with all the MPC3 features still intact, e.g. FX, round robins, velocity switching etc. Now, these do work, almost all params are supported, BUT a small percentage of these kits are quite unstable, especially if you start adding knob FX and increased polyphony. These kits eventually start to 'break down', first they crackle, then slow down and eventually sound like they are being run through a 1 bit sampler played at 1/10th speed. Seems like CPU shut down.

Most MPC3 kits do load and perform fine (so far, and I've given them a good stress testing), perhaps there is something unique contained in those that are failing but so far I cannot see what that is as the only FX I'm using in those problematic kits are also used in stable others.

So perhaps this will eventually work, but I suspect given the existence of the dedicated MPC Sample export option, it's likely that Akai know that full MPC3 kits use too much CPU to work predictably.

But the 'flattened' versions work well for simple kits, you'll have to either bake in FX or use knob FX if you can.

Yes, this seems to be working reasonably well (using the 'load kit' option, for me). Your 1977 kits seem to work fine for example!

One thing though - because of the bug with chopped/cycle kits (where the first slice on some pads needs to have the end point reset on the Sample to avoid playing the whole thing when it's triggered), the kits need to be re-saved. I couldn't find a way to overwrite the kit/project file that I had used to import the kit.

Probably this is because this is a workaround, I expect it will change as and when Akai officially support this kind of feature.

More generally, working with the 'one track/kit' limit of the Sample, I think I need to prep a handful of 'best of' ones that give me a reasonable selection of startup drum and percussion sound from various kits, but leave plenty of space for new samples. This seems easy enough to do with the MPC3 desktop software via merge pads (and prob with standalone MPC3 units too).

Little update. I’ve managed to convert an MPC3 project into an XPJ that can load without issue into an MPC Sample, as far as I can tell the XPJ incompatibility mostly stems from MPC3 projects having a different track structure (MPC Sample only has 1 drum, 1 submix, outputs 1/2 and 3/4 only, no returns), once references to incompatible track are removed it seems to load fine including sequence data.

Track FX ignored but pad FX do load, but can quickly overload the CPU so best to avoid; that said I inadvertently left two pads with spring reverb and Diff delay and had no issues whatsoever, even when building busy sequences and using plenty of polyphony. So currently not sure exactly what causes the MPC Sample to occasionally melt down, it might even be unrelated, or a combination of things.

Should be able to extend this to export multi-sequence projects and also do all manner of other stuff that most people probably couldn't care less about!

Another update. I was wrong on track FX they are working fine and so far I've not had any CPU issues.

However I've realised that even if track fx are working, they are ultimately a bad idea. This is because they are 'hidden', hence you are unable to edit or disable them, plus they will affect every pad in your project equally. So if your drum kit in bank A has a load of reverb and lofi FX on the track inserts, then every other sound across every pad bank in your project will also have these FX and there's nothing you can do about it.

Similarly with features that use multiple pad layers like cycles and velocity switching, these are fine until you decide you want to change the tuning of that snare on pad A02 as the 'semi' parameter in the MPC Sample only affects layer 1 - all other layers will remain at the original pitch.

All in all, a little unsatisfying so there has to be some acceptance of the limitations here. You can work around the lack of FX to a certain degree by using the forthcoming 'export to MPC Sample' option as this will flatten the pad with all the FX, but you lose all the other hidden MPC3 goodies. Flattening pads with delays or other time based FX will be problematic, so best left to knob fx in the MPC Sample project. A combination of the two methods is likely the way forward (flattening in the FX and then using those flattened samples the MPC3 kit). TIme consuming though.

Interesting stuff. Although still hidden it is possible to assign FX in a more "traditional" way. Would be great to be able set up a bus with 1 or 2 basic FX like the 500/1000/ 2500 in the near future.

Menco wrote:Interesting stuff. Although still hidden it is possible to assign FX in a more "traditional" way. Would be great to be able set up a bus with 1 or 2 basic FX like the 500/1000/ 2500 in the near future.

You can assign 'knob FX', but only 1; you need to re-sample if you want to 'stack'. It will however load any track FX and pad FX present in the MPC3 kit, but CPU can suffer, and you cannot edit or disable these FX once loaded. MPC3 track FX will also affect the entire track, so all sounds in your project will be stuck with them. I doubt Akai are ever going to implement official support for these FX, in fact they are more likely to completely disable support IMO.

I use Knob FX and latched Pad FX a lot. I am trying to squeeze as much MPC500 workflow into the Sample as possible. In that regard it’s the laziest way having a second Knob FX to achieve this. Resampling will give me the same results indeed, but again, I tend to be a bit lazy when updating/ converting workflows