Pulled the MPC out from the studio and onto the dining table for my son and I to jam a little for fun. We made Lambada just for laughs and to annoy his mommy, but then I sat for another hour myself and created a new beat. It’s funny how a small thing like just having it there on the table (vs hidden in the studio) makes you want to use it more.
Anyway, just wanted to share my enthusiasm over the randomization feature in drum programs because they’re so useful. On the fourth Sample sub page of Program Edit, you have access to lots of parameters that can be randomized during playback, such as panning, pitch, amplitude, attack, decay etc. It can really change up a simple hi hat and/or shaker rhythm quite a bit, making it feel much more alive and dynamic. You can randomize these things per pad and even per pad layer, throughout the entire drum kit if you want.
In less than an hour, I was able to get a really cool drum beat going, along with a thick pad and a bassline and a really time stretched dark effect pumping in the background using Mother Ducker. It’s already sounding like a proper song and I haven’t even started to think about where I’ll take it, but it already makes it hard to sit still on the chair. That’s typically a good sign. 
This is the kind of thing I love about the MPC: it’s so quick to go from a simple idea to something that starts to sound good “for real”. On the MC-101, I feel it stays in the “could sound good if done right” territory, but actually doing it right is so hard. And, to anyone following my other GAS thread, these kinds of things (randomization) is just not easy to do in Reason 10. I know now how I’d do it, but it would involve lots of virtual wiring and automation lanes, whereas on the MPC, these things are just built right into the pad/sample settings.
