Apologies in advance for the lengthy post. The tl;dr is that the MPC is different and that I clearly see the value of both the MPC and the Elektrons. I thought my initial impressions may be useful to anyone choosing between an MPC and an Elektron device.
Just got my MPC One yesterday and some things stood out right away:
-
This is one complex machine! I had to read the manual again and again and still couldn’t figure some things out. For example, in order to autosample, you apparently need to first create a new midi program (not a keygroup program, which would make more sense), or it won’t let you set which midi channel to communicate with the external synth when triggering notes. This wasn’t even mentioned in the manual, but happily a YouTuber was able to point this out. As a result, the workflow feels a little slower, at least for me initially. I remember that the first evening with the Digitone resulted in a pretty good song embryo that managed to impress my friends. With the MPC, I wasn’t even close to getting into the groove, but was rather tinkering with settings and trying to understand how things work. To be fair, the Elektron workflow is similarly non-obvious until you read the manual and learn the shortcuts. After that though, it’s insanely fast. I like to compare it with Street Fighter II - if you hand over a gamepad to someone who has never played the game, they will do nothing but press buttons and hope to deliver a punch here and there. But if you tell them to press “down-forward and then Y” quickly to throw a fire ball, that knowledge suddenly opens up a door to learn how to play 5-6 other characters. And from there on, you realize that all those key combos are the same/similar across the entire video game. It’s the same thing with the Digitakt: once you learn how easy it is to copy a trig in the step sequencer, you have automatically learned how to copy a sound, a pattern, a track, and so on.
-
Saving a project takes ages if you have a few autosampled keygroups loaded. Not sure if it overwrites all samples every time you hit save, or what is going on. Saving can take up to a minute. The Digitakt saves all the time and writes a project in a few seconds. It’s a shame, because in theory, the autosamper is an excellent feature that can really open up your sound palette. I wish there was a way to create the full autosampled keygroup, but then to only really load/use the keygroup parts that are in use in the song. So, if I have a keygroup spanning 8 octaves but only use it for a bass sound, it would dynamically offload all the other octaves and ignore those when loading/saving the project. The MPC autosave feature is also really in your face with a progress bar that goes on forever and blocks you from using it, sometimes in the middle of a performance. I went from setting to autosave every five minutes, through every ten minutes, to ultimately turning the feature off completely because it became a weird reminder of how fast the clock was ticking as I was diving into the depths of the MPC workflow. I wish they would make the autosave feature smarter (do it silently in the background, only overwrite files that have been modified).
-
The Odyssey and Hype synths sound great, but weirdly enough not all parameters can be tweaked in the Hype synth. There are built-in parameters in the presets that are inaccessible from the interface. Given the complexity of all the other things in this machine, I’m surprised that they attempted to dumb this particular synth down. This makes the Hype synth feel less authentic, for lack of a better term. The Odyssey synth seems to reveal all settings, making it much more fun to use.
-
Coming from the Digitakt/Digitone, this thing feels slow to start and I definitely miss the autosave/load feature that doesn’t get in the way. The ability to pick up exactly where you left the Digitone after just 7 seconds of startup time is fantastic, and you don’t need to worry about accidentally unplugging the power cable since everything is still there in memory. In comparison, the MPC needs a good 30 seconds of startup time before it’s ready to be used - and then you have to manually load the latest project on top of that startup time. If you accidentally pull the power plug, your edits since the last save is simply gone forever.
-
I was surprised that the autosamper didn’t make better use of the tail of the samples. I’d expect the MPC to set a pad release decay point on a sample that plays from the end point of the sample loop to the very end of the sample. Sampling in general felt more clunky than I’d expect from a machine that was built for sampling. I’ll need to read up on the manual a few more times to understand how it all works. For example, I sampled a longer series of individual drum sounds from the Digitakt in one swoop, but I couldn’t find a way to automatically chop that long sample up automatically based on transients. I had to manually chop it up instead. Another sampling problem I ran into was when sampling a 132 bpm loop of 8 bars from the Digitakt and then trying to chop it up by bpm. I’m guessing that it picks the master bpm of the MPC (there’s no way to specify anything else in the sample editor), and I had that set to 132 bpm too. However, the sample was chopped up with a lot of drifting from the first pad that started right on the beat. You’d think that 132 bpm on a Digitakt is the same thing as 132 bpm on an MPC One… Back to more RTFM.
-
The q-link feature is excellent for live performances, I like the ability to hard lock them on the project and use that for live performances. You then have 4 sets of 4 knobs that can be hard-coded to specific parameters of that particular project, and you can still switch to other modes with a simple key press. And the best part is that it can all be recorded and saved for later playback. I’m going to try to record some of it as automations too and see how that works for me as a way to finalize a song.
What makes the Elektron boxes problematic for me has to do with the fact that there is no song mode, they were clearly meant for live performances. I’m not a live performer, I like to finish songs and tweak the details of it to perfection. So, I’m more of a DAW kind of person, except I love hardware and love excuses to not sit in front of my computer more than when at my daytime work.
At first, I read comments from other people about a lack of a song mode on the DT/DN and thought that people were just a bit lazy. I mean, how hard is it to just write down the pattern chain somewhere? However, after using the DT/DN for a couple of months, I’ve come to realize that there’s a LOT more to remember than that. You have to remember every parameter you want to gradually change during a pattern playback, you have to remember when to use the fills, when to mute tracks, etc. A complex performance feels quite stressful for me when I have an audience listening, and it’s too easy to mess up. When I do a really good performance, I keep thinking I’d love to save those exact knob movements as automations while still having the ability to tweak mixing and other stuff afterwards.
This was the main reason for buying an MPC, to be able to record and play back a live performance rather than having to perform it every time. While the constant live performance over and over is a lot of fun on the DT/DN, I feel it stops me from progressing to the next part of the song. I keep having fun, but I never finish the song.
Anyway, this is the feedback after just a few hours of usage. I’m sure the story will change as I get more familiar with the workflow. If anyone is interested in hearing the next chapter, I’m happy to share more when I have spent a bit more time using it. 
