AKAI Force

Awesome. Been looking to replace my machinedrum as brain of my tiny setup - looks like this will prolly do it. I had been waiting for maybe midi implementation on another elektron device but I am giving up hope on that.

Thanks

https://www.akaipro.com/2019/08/05/akai-professional-announces-force-beta-program/
New in Force Beta:

Live Control - Control Ableton Live using your Force.

ā€¢ Wireless control and launching of Ableton clips in Session View simultaneously with Force standalone over WiFi.
ā€¢ Instantly switch between Force in standalone mode and Live Control mode without ever stopping playback.
ā€¢ Control the Ableton Live mixer, effects, instruments and VSTs using Forceā€™s Touchscreen and knobs.

The Arranger ā€“ A fully featured linear sequencer. You can now:

ā€¢ Create an arrangement of a song against a linear timeline.
ā€¢ Record your clip performance or live input (MIDI or Audio) into a linear timeline.
ā€¢ Edit and arrange your song using Forceā€™s powerful Arrange Edit commands.
ā€¢ Mixdown your song to a stereo audio file or stem it as separate tracks.
ā€¢ Experiment with different song ideas by launching clips against your linear arrangement.
ā€¢ Edit a single track from your arrangement in the Grid and List editors.

Undo History ā€“ Quickly backtrack and reverse up to nine actions.

Dan Gill, Senior Product Manager for Akai Professional said, ā€œForce is a transcendent music compostition and performance tool. On itā€™s own, it provides more intuitive creative ability than any product weā€™ve ever created. With the addition of the Arranger and Ableton Live Control weā€™ve again opened up an even greater world of possibilities, making our greatest stride to advance music creation for everyone.ā€

To be eligible, users are asked to sign an NDA, join the forum by creating a user profile and downloading the Beta build to a qualified computer system. Force Beta is closed to the general public. All users interested in joining the beta team can apply here.

Akai Professional will also offer an MPC Beta program for Ableton Live Control integration. Those applying for that program will be notified once it is opened.

For more information, visit akaipro.com.

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thinking about the force and iā€™m having trouble coming up with the terminology to properly answer this question for myself and forgive me if this hella obvious one way or another but:

on a single track, is it possible to ā€˜lockā€™ a different patch/preset, clip to clip (on the Hype synth for instance, but really on any track type)? iā€™m trying to understand how a live set is formatted on this, without scrolling thru a massive track count/cramming the cpu with redundant fx etc

There is no way to change patches when using the internal synths yet. But im pretty shure something like that is comming. You only have 8 plugin synth tracks. But with patch changing it would kinda work as you describe.

I guess the same thing could be applied to effects and such, but as of now i think you need to use automation parameters to make changes.

What i tried doing is making some clips between parts and automate different parts. Or just resample stuff and use audio clips. Can eat up the memory, but disk streaming is comming. But no one knows when.

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good to know, thanks!

I would reccomend trying it out if you have a chance. Despite some shortcommings, i really enjoy mine. Sounds good, and you can do alot with it. Some parts can seem ā€œbasicā€ if you compare it to elektron stuff, but the workflow is pretty impressive. Its very fast to get something going and feels like a good ā€œhubā€ for my other gear.

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how are you liking tubesynth/hype?

Havenā€™t spent that much time with the tubesynth. Seems ok but I have only browsed some presets.

Hype is cool. Even if you donā€™t have access to all oscillator parameters, you have enough to make something cool. You can start up with different synthesis init patches. Like wave table, fm, analog etc. and with the new automation possibilities you can get pretty crazy.

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not a big fan of the internal synths myself. They are ok at best. I only use them as placeholder stuff and retrack via hardware synths later.

Looking forward to the next few updates though! Some betatesters over @ GS seem really excited about upcoming stuff. Arranage mode and ableton mode are my big two points of interest.

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Arrangement is a nice addition i guess. But i didnt buy it because of that. What i like is how easy it is to jam out some ideas in clip mode. Itā€™s a very visual way of working compared to muting/unmuting tracks on other sequencers.

And it has some smart functions. Like setting knobs to momentary mode. I set up some effects on the master channel. Highpass filter, delay and reverb. Then i set up three knobs in ā€œproject modeā€ to control highpass, and wet/dry on the reverb and delay. Then i could tweak those parameters during a build up, and just release the knobs when i wanted everything back to ā€œdefaultā€. If only they enable macroā€™s for those knobs!

Its kind of ironic since ive never liked Ableton, but buys this as its essential a basic ableton in a box. hehe.

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Got my Force 5 days ago and really love it :worthy:
Being able to produce music standalone and all my samples on a SSD is really great. The quality of Force hardware is really top notch, in all aspects.
I can actually record solo and mute automation!!!

Coming from Maschine wich I still love (but am tired of waiting for crucial updates), I was afraid the ā€˜mpcā€™ workflow was going to be hard to understand, but it mostly seems logical and easy to use.

I am really looking forward to the new arranger update that will come on the Force as it looks really promising (not a part of the betatesting, yet).
Link: http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2019/08/05/akai-pro-announces-integration-of-force-ableton-live-control-seeks-beta-testers/

The arranger one of Machines biggest flaws and when it will come after so many years, I am afraid it will not be as some us want it to be.

I was looking for a transpose per clip in the clip edit regardless of track type. Did I miss it, or isnā€™t it a function per clip?

Otherwise, how can I do that in the easiest way?

Morgendugg sounds norwegian!

I havent found a clip transpose. But if you go to the ā€œedit clipā€ mode, hold shift and a ā€œselect allā€ parameter comes up. And then you can transpose all the notes in one go. Takes some button presses, but im not too bothered by it.

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Fair enough. I OTOH like ableton and use it as my main DAW, so Iā€™d really appreciate getting the arrangement mode for the force. Then itā€™d be almost as good as ableton itself (for the way I use it) for composing songs and making arrangements.

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Yeah, the arrangement will have some useful features. Specially for capturing live jamming. But for mixing and more heavy productions i would just import stems to Cubase.

Hopefully the new firmware gets out soon!

Ive been preparing a small live set the last couple of days. Its so easy to do. Just take loops of my audio clips, then chop them up on the Force, and ā€œconvertā€ to a drumtrack with events. Takes like 30 seconds, and i free up audio tracks. It is perfect for that. Ive never done a live set like this, so it helps me transition from song to song. On Elektron sequencers i never came out of the 4 bar loop.

Yup, norwegian :slightly_smiling_face:

Thank you for the tip!

3.0.4 drops

I hope plenty of bugfixes are onboard

EDIT: Yes, seems so! Hereā€™s the fixlog:

Stability and reliability

  • Audio Tracks

  • Phasing will no longer occur when copying a clip during playback

  • Automation

  • Trimming an audio clip with automation data will no longer cause a crash

  • A trackā€™s automation state is now kept when pressing REC and when a track is set to Write Automation (or null) and ā€˜Write Automation when recordingā€™ is switched off

  • When a loop is set to a portion of a clip, automation writing now works correctly

  • Keygroup automation is now displayed with the correct prefix

  • Automation Parameter field on the TUI Grid View now correctly displays current parameter

  • Clip Edit

  • Notes played during the count-in of a clip recording will now be added to the first beat of the clip

  • It is no longer possible to change clip selection whilst adding a sample

  • Nudging events that are outside the loop region into the loop region will now update correctly for each step

  • MIDI events no longer appear in the wrong note lanes when switching to a Drum Track

  • Text is no longer cut off when loading a sample within Audio Edit mode

  • It is now possible to zoom to playhead whenever the playhead is visible

  • Nudging notes inside a loop while Donā€™t Snap is On now moves them correctly inside the loop region

  • Generate Random Events no longer ignores Bars setting

  • Clip Matrix

  • Recorded audio clip no longer continues to play when another clip on the same track is launched

  • The first note of the next recorded MIDI clip now records correctly

  • Knobs

  • A Programā€™s knob assignment are now saved with it

  • Knob OLEDs now update correctly for CV tracks

  • Pad Mixer

  • Insert effects are now copied with pads

Playback

  • If Loop is disabled during playback, audio regions will now play to the correct length

  • Plugin Hosting - Effects

  • Default patch now loads correctly default for AIR Compressor

  • Preferences

  • Turning Wi-Fi off during connection no longer causes issues when trying to reconnect

Sample Edit

  • Changing current Slice very quickly via a Knob no longer jams the value
  • Assign Sampleā€™s Track field no longer appears empty when assigning a sample to a pad

Saving and Loading

  • User templates now load correctly

Timing Correct

  • Swing on Knob release setting now works correctly

Tracks - Keygroup

  • Copying MIDI events for Keygroup tracks now pastes to the selected note

Tracks - MIDI

  • Track Transpose no longer causes MIDI dropouts

Tracks - Plugin

  • User interfaces for Plugin tracks now load correctly

Undo/Redo

  • A crash no longer occurs when using Undo/Redo after copying a track and editing MIDI events during recording

  • Warping

  • Fast tempo changes are now registered correctly by the warp algorithm when receiving MIDI Clock

Great stuff! Iā€™ll install ASAP to check if my main gripe has now been fixed :loopy:

Nice update and some nice prices on the Force right now (Ā£899).

I miss my Live some times - any experience with how the Ableton set export works in practice? Thereā€™s definitely an appeal with some sort of hardware device that I can go off and play with and easily export into the DAW for further work.

I havenā€™t tried the ableton export yet. Iā€™m guessing it just exports either all MIDI clips or all audio clips, IIRC? Which is hardly ideal. Iā€™d have to export any hybrid session twice, and recombine two als files into one in ableton (I often work with both audio & MIDI).

Havenā€™t even powered up my force since the 3.0.4 update. There were still too many unfixed bugs and issues at that time.

I do remember loving the workflow, so it will be very exciting to get back to it! Maybe I can finally start making music with it.

The recent price drops are a bit hard to swallow TBH. I coulda saved over 500ā‚¬ by being a late adopter, grr!

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Perhaps - will need to look into it further. I think with Force it makes less sense but with Live it would be ideal to go off with the thing, have a play and come back and export it into Live. From the Force video I found, it looks like it creates a set that includes all the samples and midi data to drag into an Ableton project. Some food for thought though I should really not think about it too muchā€¦

Its a bit different on the MPC as you can open up the standalone projects straight with the desktop app. So force is still more handicapped wrt desktop integration.

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