The tediousness of the MPC seq is why I first moved to the RS7000 that clips based then to Pyramid & the Force/Pyramid (sounds like something from a video game). The act the same as the MPC but its was more easier & faster to move clips around since you can you use the 64 pads & the Copy/Delete buttons. I still wish that there was a parent/child clip setting so any child clip follows the edits of the Parent clip it was copied from. Or let us copy & paste sections of clips.
Lucky they finally gave the Force the Track reorder feature a while back. A Track Exchange option like on RS7000 would nice. Come on Akai, bless the MPC with these great workflow feature!
Good suggestion if you dont have a stylus, but yeah, I had one the whole time. It helped a bit with responsiveness and precision but the main issue I had with it was the clunky and convoluted UI design, to the point where composing in the piano roll just wasnât feasible. So many iPad apps do it so much better - itâs like it was designed by someone whoâs never used a tablet before.
Also worth noting thereâs a little more flexibility in that each audio track has a pool of five minutes of audio, not a five minute hard limit - so you can have a 20m audio track, but it canât use more than five minutes of recorded audio. For example if you had a 30s section that you copied and pasted three times, youâd have a 2m audio track but would still have 4m30s of recording time left. You can move stuff around on the timeline to collage the track as you please, so it might not be as restrictive as you initially think.
The limit is there, I expect, to ensure that new projects always support eight audio tracks in RAM. As noted above, the Force can do more with audio tracks because it can stream to/from disk (and audio tracks can sit alongside MIDI in the arranger view).
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And do not forget the onscreen keyboard, which skips âkeysâ sometimes. You see visual feedback of the key you pressed, but it just sometimes is not popping up in the input field.
This has been like so since the first release and is so utterly annoying. </complain-mode>
Itâs interesting you point out the 70âs thing. As a kid born in the 70s I grew up soaking up good 70âs music in subliminal way riding around in my parents car but then chose to get into punk rock and 80s crap when I was old enough to drive my own radio⌠Fast forward to âold fart statusâ and goofing with synths, I make techno and noise because thatâs sorta what I can pull off! Using samples to me feels like a way to bring that good stuff in. Lucky for me itâs just a hobby so the whole legal side does not impact me as much.
Side note or rather back to topic⌠The more I research MPC the more I realize I just want some things from the MPC inside my Digitakt! Makes me sick, but I wonder if an Octatrack would be better for me. Im sure if I purchased one today they would drop an epic MK3 update.
If I believed it would work Iâd order a MK2 now, put it on the shelf and then order the MK3!
I honestly should just grab an Octatrack and see if I an crack the code. If I could run it somewhat like a âbig Digitaktâ with better slices and start to learn just the stuff that interests me (fader, mixer, looper) Iâd be happy.
Back in the day I would have killed to get that âcrappyâ piano roll in my mpc⌠try doing that kind of work in the list editor and you will know true pain, and how much we had to want it back then⌠compared to the old school this piano editor is basically witchery.
If thatâs what youâre after - and you can conjure up the discipline to not want to use it all right away and get overwhelmed - the Octatrack will be fantastic for you! Itâs my favourite piece of kit, and I have plenty.
Note though: nothing slices samples as easily as an MPC, and the Digitaktâs immediacy is partially due to its limitationsâŚif you donât expect the OT to be either but allow it to be its own thing that does similar things, youâll be golden.
Funny, I would kill to get it out of my modern MPCs
Personally never missed a piano roll on my old 2000 and 1000, though JJOSXL gave us something akin to a piano roll on the MPC1000/2500, which I personally found better/more useful than what my MPC X & Live have to offer in that department. Of course their piano roll is more powerful by miles, but the handling of it (no pinch n zoom, imprecise touchscreen, awkward workflow squences etc) to me kills the rollâs value. Then again, I donât use piano rolls outside of my daw much anyway, so itâs not a big loss for me personally. Plenty else to enjoy in that package
The difference is, I donât really have a daw to compare⌠I guess ignorance is bliss because I love this thing⌠you CAN pinch and zoom though, not sure what you mean there.
I agree with this⌠I hope Akai have made note of the Push 3âs function of note selection too, where you can scroll through the notes to highlight them, thatâs been really helpful in speeding up the workflow.
You can but only with the âzoom toolâ selected. so drawing a note, selecting a note, zooming in / out etcâŚthose steps require constant switching between tools, which is unnecessary and somewhat annoying.
