Akai MPK MIni Play

The Lounge Other Gear
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When I ordered my Digitakt II a couple of weeks ago I threw one of these in the order for a laugh. I saw a lot of people gushing over it on Youtube and I figured I could always sell it on if I didn’t like it.

Turns out it’s really, really cool. I’m definitely keeping it.

It’s only 2 octaves, which is a limitation, but it means it has a tiny footprint and it’s very cute.

As a keyboard

The keys are OK to use. Maybe not Arturia Keystep good certainly good enough to noodle around and input notes into an Elektron box.

The drum pads are insensitive and useless for drumming but they’re used to select presets (combinations of MIDI channel, CC mappings of the knobs, etc.) so that makes them useful. I can switch to MIDI channel 14/10 (for Syntakt/Digitakt) with two buttons.

ARP is easy/powerful to use.

There’s no half baked sequencer to clutter things up, yay!

I used to own the bigger three-octave brother of this but I hated it and eventually sold it. It was clunky, overloaded and menu-divey because they tried to include a ton of features that nobody would ever use. The ‘mini’ is an order of magnitude more joyful.

You need a PC to edit the eight MIDI/CC presets but it’s worth it.

As a synth

It’s general MIDI, 8-note polyphonic.

You have some controls for attack/decay/filter but that’s about it.

It has chorus/reverb - nice!

A ‘piano’ sound is always welcome and this has a decent selection of them.

There’s a lot of junk sounds but easily enough usable ones to fill your drum pads with 8 ‘favorites’, especially if you tweak them a bit.

There’s some background noise on the audio output.

You probably wouldn’t want to use this as a serious synth though, it’s a toy…

As a toy

As a toy for noodling, this is one of the best!

It runs on batteries and you can just grab it and make noises anywhere!

The internal speaker suits it perfectly. It’s a bit ‘off to one side’ if you know what I mean but ignore the youtubers, the sound it makes is exactly right for what this is.

(nb. I have the MK3 and apparently the speaker was worse on previous versions)

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PS: Akai … you need to make a little VA-synth version of this. It’s just a $5 DSP and a few extra knobs*. Make it 4-note polyphonic.

(*) If you’re interested I have a design for a minimal-knob VA synth that I’ve been working on, but that’s another thread…

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I’ve had one of these for about 6 or 7 years (so probably a mk i), and have been thinking about upgrading to a current version. It’s good to know the onboard speaker has gotten better. I also wish mine had some sort of MIDI I/O.

If nothing else, it’s perfect for having it in a bin under the couch, ready to pull out when I want to work out a melody or progression that’s been in my head. Or just bashing the pads to make little beats can be fun.

If they made it into a little synth I would definitely get one.

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Yeah, you need a MIDI host. :-1:

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It’s GM yes, BUT 32 notes of polyphony, not 8. Also, it has a hidden Snake game:

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