If people can play the violin, learn to juggle, do handstand on a chair while balancing on a tightrope, or use a fork and knife to eat peas; surely one can get to grips with the placement of the Q-Links, left or right handed, if only for the sake of smoother editing…
To that end, if you own an MPC, I would hope it’s for the pads, not the piano roll or grid editor. Just because it’s there, doesn’t mean that’s how it’s done.
Cheers!
I don’t know, circuit…
In my experience, if the DAW is calling, only the DAW will do. Whereas, if I’m using the MPC, it’s for what it does best.
From where I’m standing anyway, they have nothing in common, and no need to be in the same room together.
Cheers!
P.S. I’ve seen the future… We never get to the bottom of this.
Therefore a mouse would be awesome
I’d say the newest Mpc live, one etc is certainly a touch screen machine though it does have its shortcuts to avoid the screen. After all it’s pretty much a standalone Mpc touch which came before it and the name was in the fact it utilised the touch screen
I like the arms because I can pull either the DT or tablet in closer if I want to just concentrate on that or stand and pull them up to a comfortable standing height. I’ve also used elevated laptop stands just behind the Keys for gear and it works great as well. I can also take the iPad elsewhere and work on midi piano roll apps, do sound design, more sampling and chopping, etc away from the desk or travelling and continue to be productive on whatever project I’m working on.
Other gear can be added in for sampling, I have a Bluebox as well if I ever felt the need to hookup more. Or you could go the USB audio interface route to the MPC.
I like to keep it to 2-3 main pieces with others stepping in just for recording.
I love my MPC. But yea, I can’t enter melodic notes on the grid without touching the screen. I do play notes in. But if I’m getting detailed about it, I haven’t found another way to do it without touching the screen.
I find it way easier to edit notes than enter them… but usually the flow is quite fast for selecting and using the jog wheel.
It’s the qwerty keyboard for naming/renaming things that drives me mad… that’s when I notice the screen.
If I’m doing a lot of sampling and sample naming I always plug in a usb qwerty keyboard.
Also, my MPCKeys screen is much more responsive than my Force. Not sure why.
Which is why I love to remain curious 
I hope I’m still an explorer when it’s time to set sail to oceans beyond the ones in this world 
Right now, tho, Logic on iPad with an Apple Pencil is in my sight before I try the MPC again. Considering I already got one, it’s a cheap experiment 
I think having Grid Edit on a hardware device like this is pretty cool. For sure I’d rather have it than not.
I don’t get all this drama. It’s almost like you’re looking for all the reasons to hate it.
Of course it’s not like using a mouse. But also the MPC is not a PC.
I’m right handed, and I’m using LH to zoom (pinch up/down for vertical zoom, pinch L/R for horizontal).
RH is mostly for Q Links action.
Regarding the tools, I almost exclusively use Zoom and Select.
If I want to punch in some new notes I’d rather play them (even incorrectly) and then fix them afterwards. If I use the pencil tool I make sure to zoom vertically first, so I can work at a way higher precision level (almost never miss a note If I remember to do that).
If I need to erase something, I use the Erase (physical) button or the Cut soft function (pressing Shift).
Both hands are used for touch buttons at the bottom of the screen. Most used functions here are, Nudge, to change the rhythmic position of the selected notes, and Transpose, to change the pitch of the selected notes. I find Edit Start and End pretty useful too.
Any mistake I make, due to my “fat fingers”, I just use the Undo button.
And c’mon… You can’t really blame the MPC if the guy in the video is showing the worst posture ever, independently of the gear he’s using. Poor guy probably has bad vision, if he needs to get so close/on top to the screen…
Word. The touch screen on the MPC60 sounded way better than the one on modern MPCs.
I believe that a combination of a touchscreen and buttons/knobs is the fastest workflow.
The Mpc touch had a touch screen. Feel free to Google it
I am obviously referring to the Mpc one which is what we are discussing. Not the entire Mpc range ever lol
*I have kindly edited my post in case anyone didn’t grasp I’m talking about the machine being discussed in the numerous posts before it 
*
In akais description they even compare it to a tablet
First of its Kind
In creating the MPC Touch, we have once again established the iconic MPC series as the thought leader in music production technology. Combining the might of a pro-level piece of production gear truly fit to carry the MPC shield with the tactile ease of use found on smartphones and tablets, the Touch is truly a workflow revolution. How producers interact with all aspects of their sound has been forever changed.
Stop being reasonable…
First session yesterday with the newly repurchased Live 2. My friend and I were really exhausted after full days of work and just goofed around. Sampled a fart, yes literally, and tried to make a song out of it. Made a metallic arp with lots of reverb and suddenly we got lost in a mysterious beat with interesting percussions and a deep bass all made by a fart. Sampling at its least dignified best. 
As soon as we got hooked on that, we started to replace the really shitty sounds with better samples and now have a proper embryo to build on. Interesting how the creative process works sometimes. 
One thing I had sort of forgotten about the MPC workflow is that you start with a short 1 or 2 bar loop to quickly lay down the foundations of a beat, but as soon as you want to make a chord progression at around 8 bars, you have to commit to a longer sequence and any additional percussions after that need to be programmed across all 8 bars or you have to use the clunky copy features. It would be nice if it was somehow possible to keep individual lengths and time scales per drum pad ‘lane’ somehow.
Again I’m also reminded of how much I love dub rec. You just sit there and feel the groove and add small percussive syncopation until you can’t really sit still. It’s such a transparent process from hearing it to programming it. No need to worry about the piano roll, just feel it. If you got it wrong, hold Erase and the pad whole playing and start over. Again, it gets a bit more tedious the longer the sequence becomes though, but it still works.
The best way to do it AFAIC: if you for example have a drum pattern that you jammed in and like, create a new track for each sound/group > assign the same program to each track > separate the midi
Now you can have individual track lengths for each existing and new sound, or group
You can set a track to any length you want. (Track row > Length)
Really? Thanks for the clarification 
What I don’t understand is how this makes the current gen MPCs a “touch screen machine”?
It’s everything the MPC ever was, plus modern features on top of it, including a touch screen.
People didn’t have a touch screen with a piano roll back then, but somehow they still managed to change music forever. I wonder how…? Hmm maybe they actually played the pads?
I usually start with a short drum loop, let’s say 1 bar, and then when it’s time to program a longer bass line or chord sequence, I double the length of the sequence as many times as needed.
Also I think it’s super cool that each track can have n independent length in beats, different to the main sequence length. Changing individual track length in real time can create pretty cool poly rhythmic effects.
To have different lengths on a per pad basis just explode the drum program track so each pad gets its own track.
You can loop shorter parts of the sequence and keep going with overdubs
