MPC Thread : MPC Live - MPC X - MPC One (Part 1)

I only had 20 mins with 2.4 on a track I was working on and those were 20 happy minutes.
Now that clips don’t stop once you move the another track, the Live works exactly how I wanted it to when it launched. Really nice to bounce loops and use them as clips and record stuff in the looper for later clip usage.
I pretty much see myself using the AIR Channel strip all the time, the new reverbs are nice (only tried as inserts so far) and the Motherducker is really well implemented.

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Yeh, I too was an early adopter, and with the 2.4 update we are almost where I hoped we would end up. All I want now is graphical automation editing and multitimbral MIDI input and I’m happy. If the MPC live happens to also be compatible with the upcoming MPC 3.0, I know the live will even exceed my expectations (arrange mode and clip recording matrix!!!)

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MPC 3.0? Another update already on the horizon?

MPC 3.0 is apparently the next major release and will bring it in-line with what you can see on the Force. Not exactly the same though.

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Your positivity makes me want to give it another chance. I will take it out of the box and check this upgrade out. :yum:

Looking forward to checking out the effects, especially the motherducker. Wishful thinking, but I’m hoping the reverb will sound really good. Im setting my sights high and hoping it will compare favourably to something like Valhalla

We are on the same page. I was really baffled when I saw those features weren’t there at launch, it seemed to me like a big omission.

My first tests yesterday made me happy, I think the Air FX collection is of a much higher quality that the original MPC ones. Haven’t tested the MotherDucker yet though.

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First strange thing I’ve hit: looks like insert effects can’t be added after one (at least) of the synths tubesynth.

Can you be more specific please ? I am still able to add insert FX from the main screen after any of the plugin synths, TubeSynth included.

First few minutes in with 2.4 and I’m already quite pleased! The new air fx was a wonderful addition and I feel like I can get a much better mix ITMPC with them now.

Not really feeling the plugin instruments, sound like VSTs to me, but I guess they’ll make decent placeholder sounds which I can retrack with hardware sounds later.

you need to be in channel mixer, not pad mixer, to add FX to plugin instruments

Is quantized sampling (capturing say, exactly 4 bars on the fly) possible/fluent by now?

My initial feeling was the same. For example, I find the filter in TubeSynth pretty much useless (definitely cheap VST material), but I’m starting to think I might be used to a more wild/creative use of filters because of Elektron’s awesome filters, so it might be also up to me to adapt to another way of doing things and dial in less extreme settings ? Something about being used to “luxury”, I guess.

What I mean is those instruments are in fact VSTs, so maybe we should not expect the same capabilities than from hardware units or even more powerful software like Serum or Massive, as frustrating as this statement may sound :slight_smile: . I did that for the first MPC effects, sounded so bad to me that as a rule of thumb, I never used more than 25% wet signal. That made things way better.

I plan to challenge myself with using at least one instance of an MPC plugin in my next tracks, to make me practice using them, and maybe I’ll find gems :wink:

This was actually on the software MPC, running on my Mac (Live being used as controller).

rcmusic - it was the channel mixer. Options for inserts was greyed-out.

Don’t have access at the minute, but can try again when I do.

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to be fair, I tend to lump all VSTs into the same category when it comes to sound… Its just me, I’ve always had trouble coaxing sounds from VSTs that would really wow me. So in that regard, I dont consider the MPC air instruments to be any worse than most of the stuff out there.

uhe ACE is probably my favourite VSTi as far as sound is concerned. That one has something in its tone that I quite like

The synths sound pretty darn good. Even next to my analog synths these definitely hold their own. The built in effects on the synth pages are also very useful for a polished sound…

I also tried hybrid synth in the mpc software and although it looks awful, it’s sounds really nice too. Wavetable osc’s and filters are good and a killer filter drive section.

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For what it’s worth I had a short time with the new effects last night and I’m really happy so far. The reverbs sound much better to me, the spring and reverse verb are definitely going to get a ton of use from me!
The spring is miles ahead of that OT spring, but I guess that isn’t saying too much :ecstatic:

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automation lanes, especially if they use curves, would be nice but graphical automation isn’t a particularly mainstream thing in MPC history.

So I did the upgrade. The synths sound ok to me, no worse or better than your average plugin. I noticed an issue with the SD card, sometimes the Live wouldn’t boot properly and give an error message that wifi and storage wasn’t initialized properly. I’ve put an SSD in instead, loaded with Samples from Mars (there are .pgm files one can load straight in) and I had a bunch of fun. The OS is really coming along nicely.

Touch screen grid editing is still a pain, sometimes needing 4-5 taps to delete a single note. Having to change tools to zoom in and then back to add/delete stuff makes me try to avoid it altogether.

They have never existed before, true, but I think that getting automation lanes represented exactly like how velocity is already shown in the step sequencer would be killer. IIRC the automation is visible and editable in MPC desktop, so if the standalones are “running the same software”, it shouldn’t be impossible to include it.

I’m surprised just how much I like the new motherducker. This kind of “sidechain bus” paradigm would work well in ableton as well, its opening up new mixing strategies for me :diddly: I wish there was an easy way to filter the ducker input freqs, but already I’m digging the results! I might have finally found a way to utilize compression in my mixes in a way that pleases me (aside from basic LA2A -style leveling or enhancing transients with long atk/medium release)

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