AKAI Force

Got my Force tonight. Thing is amazing. The Hype synth is mind blowing - 2k+ presets, plus 15 different inits with variations of wavetable, FM, subtractive, sample-based synth engines. It’s almost like a mini-Omnisphere. (Note I said "mini’).

Workflow is super dialed in - they even got the “capture and insert new scene” from Push down nicely.

Was able to take an audio clip, slice it at a few transients then set different BPMs on each region with time-stretch to get a Ableton-like warp mode.

Timestretch sounds better than MPC Live (with two algo selectable in settings).

Three different step sequencers (drum, melodic, lanes). More shortcuts on the touchscreen grid editor.

Haven’t dug into the effects just yet. Spent 2 hours just getting lost within Hype…(the synth)

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Hype is said to be coming to the MPC as well (will require a hard disk installed since the hype lib is apparently several gigs in size)

Curious about that timestretch though… does it not have that same RAZR board inside as the MPCs? Maybe thIs too will get ported at some point.

How is the audio recording to clips working? Is it the same as in ableton, ie. arm a track and press an empty slot to start quantized recording? This is what I’m most interested in… if the force ever got mature enough, it could even end up replacing ableton for me… And audio recording is the most used feature in my ableton sessions.

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I’m currently unemployed, please have some respect and keep this positive comments to yourself.

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Thanks for clearing that up. :slight_smile:

Any idea how much ram is left over for sampling / audio playback ?

Dont worry man, I’m sure the bug reports and issues will creep up to the WWW once enough posters get their hands on these. It was the same with MPC live & X, The “honeymoon” was brief, and Akai has a history of overpromising on initial launch

I hope I’m wrong but my wallet would like me to be right about this

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I suppose that will only be the track setup, midi notes etc… If you wanna continue mixing with the Force-Synth-Plugins and FX, Akai would need to publish them as vsts as well.

I agree it’s an eyesore

It’s like Push 2’s ugly brother

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The Electribe would bounce the synths to audio before exporting to all file, I would expect the same process

Same as push for recording to clip

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Does it have the mpc swing? Or does the swing feel different?

Same MPC swing

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I was wrong about predicting Force was going to be a flop --there seems to be a genuine buzz and excitement around this product

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Sometimes being wrong can be very good news. Then again, I’m wrong so often I have to find a way to put a positive spin on it :slight_smile:

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I think i will give it a shot, maybe its not perfect, but as long its stable and gets an arrangement mode, it could be a cool sequencer.

Its hard to say yet how its gonna go. If most of the codebase is from MPC standalones, critical bugs might already have been squashed as the codebase has been going on for over two years now… But I’d maybe wait a month or two to see how early adopters are getting along with it.

I’m sure the force will be great - just a matter of how long we need to wait for the OS to mature

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How is with sampling external sources and real-time sample playback?

I wonder why they havent coupled it with a DSP processor - that would have allowed internal synth with that sequencer /sampler combination + dsp fx, freeing the cpu from task. Ok, thats more development to do. Maybe novation comes up with something like advanced circuit coupled with peak.

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expect some latency. also dan gill demoed it at akaiforce fb page, and did it through ableton link, so i wonder, if it works better this way than midi…
though he had some delay, while monitoring inputs, it recorded and looped mostly ok. surely this thing need to be more examined

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Is the top made of metal like MPC-X or Rubber like MPC-Live?

I don’t know if you find it, I haven’t so I contact Akai support and they give me a link :

USER MANUAL (English)
https://www.akaipro.com/amfile/file/download/file/738/product/7147/

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