Don’t worry, it was intended to have midi in, keyboards included.
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oh good grief you know what I mean. I don’t want to sit on the sofa balancing two rectangular objects on both my knees
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More power to you if the pads are enough for you.
that micro looks awesome though, I wonder if it is lighter weight than the reface cp, looks like it might be
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I think it is, although it has not occurred to me to do a side-by-side (I have a Reface DX). The genius is in the price point, build quality, and portability. I have no qualms about throwing it in my backpack studio, ha!
I guess they did not call it a micro keystep due to the lack of sequencer and aftertouch, but it feels like a micro-Keystep
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Thank you. It was quite painful to get here. I most certainly haven’t found the MPC flow yet.
I’m a lot into free-running, asynchronous stuff with sometimes beats to anchor it. This, the MPC does not do well.
Or maybe it does but I haven’t figured out how yet.
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Mastered it after a week? Pretty bold statement.
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I don’t think I made this statement 
Not that you said that I did.
I guess it’s not always about me 
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Yeah MPC always (for me) directed me into a boxy looped pattern.This tho was its strong point for making dance music.Breaking out of this feeling with the 16 pads ect……could be a bit painful.Maybe just a different approach. I mean,all these kinda boxes work the same way so…I would not say it’s designed with ambient style music production in mind but no real reason why not.When loading up a drum kit programme the LFO defaults to free running LFO.While not very deep it certainly livens up a sequence.
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For that I turn to the BlackBox. The MPC offers a generous number of neat repositories for collections of tracks that go well together. Some of the best ‘amorphous’ results I’ve had involved triggering several external synths with long envelopes and using very low probabilties.
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I no longer consider this the MPC thread. This is now the ‘hurry up with your next episodic update, I must read eagerly to see how you crack its code and integrate it into your musical style’ thread.
So yes. In my mind it is all about you. This is fun! Please make another song stat!
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My workflow with the MPC keeps evolving and it just speaks to the versatility of the MPC. We just finished another song embryo on the MPC in standalone and this was the process in a nutshell:
- My friend shared a 16-bar loop he made on FL Studio Mobile that contained two melodic lines, pretty much an arp and a lead.
- We then exported a midi file with the notes from FLSM and dropped that onto the MPC.
- Then we started to create the basic beat with some drums and Jura synth sounds. We were already working on another song so we took a shortcut and just reused those sounds initially.
- Later on, I sat down with the MPC on my own to change up some sounds and more importantly to create a few variations of the sequence.
- At this phase, I normally switch q-links to Project mode and assign some of the key parameters to the first four knobs so I can jam freely over the loop(s) and explore transitions and other variations.
- At some point I made a quick “song” using Song Mode by stiching together a few sequences into a longer one. This formed sort of a “verse + break” part of a potential song structure and I added some extra things on top of it to create more seamless transitions.
- I then started to resample some of the melodic lines and used them to create background textures and glitches to further spice up the embryo.
- After some back and forth feedback with my friend over the phone, I then started some new sections (by copying previous sequences and altering them). What I do is to add some automation for the parameters I want to change on bar 1 to ensure that each sequence “jumps” to the correct parameter settings. I can always change that later when stitching things together but I want an approximation of what the final song will sound like and resemble the Elektron pattern paradigm as much as I can.
- With the new sections ready, I went back to Song Mode to stitch together the previous “embryo01” with some intro and drop sections before and after it. Suddenly it’s starting to sound like a proper song.
- If I like the overall structure but want to change a few bars in the middle, the easiest way is just to make a few copies of the sequence and trim up to the bars I want to change. It’s easy enough to just change the end bar of a sequence, but to trim bars you use the Erase Bar feature. Then stitch things together again into one song structure like above.
The rest is just tweaking, adding more textures and sample glitches, polishing the transitions, etc.
I thought I’d share in case it’s helpful to those still trying to get the hang of the MPC workflow. There’s clearly not just one workflow, it’s about finding what works for you.
Here’s the song embryo so far, rendered straight out of the MPC. I have yet to drop the MPC plugin into Ableton and re-route all tracks to separate Ableton tracks and mix it properly, that would be step 11 in the workflow and is probably subject to another post. 
Honestly, I’m loving the MPC workflow and what it does to our creative process so much that I’m considering selling a lot of my other hardware. There’s no way something like this could be made on the Digitakt, or Polyend Tracker Mini for example. And the Push 3 is just collecting dust because it’s no fun to use (in my humble opinion). The MPC on the other hand just invites me to jam with it.
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The last couple of days on this thread have been really interesting reading to me.
@circuitghost - I have really enjoyed reading about your ongoing search for a workflow, as it in many ways mirrors my own, so hearing about your experiences with the MPC are really interesting. For what it’s worth I think the demo you posted above sounds great, and crucially also sounds like ‘you’ (to me at least). I love the way you’ve managed so quickly to break the MPC out of the ‘loop’ driven world and make a really interesting piece. I get it may not ‘feel’ great to work with (yet), and that may be what kills it for you, but the output already sounds wonderful to me (clearly a large part of that is the skill of the composer/artist and your piano kills shine though)
I am also really enjoying reading about @djst experiences since taking the live 2 back off the shelf. Again I’ve enjoyed reading about your workflow quest and your MPC workflow is inspiring-again the way you make compositions rather than ‘loops’ is the key to me.
I’ve owned one of the new MPCs a few times and always end up moving them on, but then wanting to come back to it again (I’m in that stage now). The biggest block for me is getting stuck in a 4 or 8 bar loop, so reading about and listening to the ways you counter that has been fascinating.
I recently got an octatrack and that has been good, I’ve enjoyed using it, and despite a few frustrations, I’ve found it easier than I had anticipated to get going with. I am finding challenges working with it standalone though. I don’t think I like working solely with samples as it just doesn’t feel ‘fast’ enough and I miss the ability to dial in a synth sound, pull up drum kit and just jam out a loop. I do like the way the octatrack can take a loop and mangle it/take it in a new direction however, something I struggled with on the MPC.
So I’m now thinking of going back down the MPC (or Force) path again, potentially combined with the OT. Can’t decide between the One + for size and price, the Keys 37 for the keyboard form factor or the Force for the extra stuff (better step sequencing, 8 macros, better mixer view and clip launching) though!
Currently thinking my best workflow might be MPC or Force into OT, out into SP404mk2 for recording and live FX. It may be that the OT is redundant though if I can just push myself further with the MPC platform. Listening to @djst and @circuitghost today have shown me it’s possible!!!
Sorry long post-just wanted to ramble on!
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Thanks for this incite to your work flow…
What are you referring to when describing ‘switch q-links to Project mode’ Is there a project mode?
Subscribe to his YouTube channel! 
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I appreciate that, and I’m glad that my ramblings are sometimes useful. 
Honestly, I think the MPC is one of the best tools for breaking out of the loop, but I also fundamentally believe that the “art” of breaking out of loops is more of a mindset/focus challenge than an issue with the tools used. For sure, keeping things within one or at least few units provably helps a great deal because with more gear, things get more complex and messy, making the friction even higher.
But the concept of breaking out of loops, to me, is at the technical level as simple as duplicating a sequence and then making changes to it. Usually the bass changes first because typically our music evolves from more monotone bass lines to more evolving ones. Then the rest follows (melodies, etc). More copies of the same sequence also allows for easier track mute transitions, just jump between different sequences to try different combos.
The trick isn’t to “know” in my head where the song should go next, but rather to force myself to explore that path by working on copies of the original sequence. Eventually ideas start to flow assuming the original sequence is interesting enough to my ears.
I’ve found all of the grooveboxes I’ve used to be pretty straightforward to work with from this point of view of copying patterns to explore new sections of songs. What the MPC does particularly well is allowing for the small tweaks to be stored within each sequence. If I want the bass to be filtered down in a break and then gradually open up before a drop, I can just tap the Automation button and twist a q link while the transition sequence is playing and it prints those automation live. I can then jump to the next section and do the same.
More often than not, I realize after a while that what I thought was going to be the drop of the song was just the first part of it because as I’m listening to it, I get new ideas and the song evolves. It’s never a linear process to me and I almost never have a clear idea how a song will begin or end when starting to work on it. I tend to start with a pattern that eventually ends up being somewhere in the middle of the final song. The good thing with the MPC sequence paradigm is that you can move them around and try different song structures before committing to a final one. And as I wrote earlier, even if you did commit to convert a song to a sequence, it’s easy enough to split that sequence into separate parts again, with all the automation retained.
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Haha! Well, please do, I’d appreciate it. And you’ve convinced me to do a video tutorial of my workflow at some point. 
@Bcharlie simply hold down the Q Link button to access the menu where you can change the mode of the knobs to Project. Then you can assign just about any parameter across any Program to be controlled by the encoders. This makes a massive difference when you’re at the early exploration phase because you can quickly get a feel for where you want to take the song, for example which filters should open when, or what combinations of timbre fits the best. More often than not, simple knob twists like this lead to a clearer idea of where to take the song next.
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Yeah I think Force is gonna be my next purchase.More open ended,arranger,macros,8 knobs,vol knob on top,pre amps built in,mix and match patterns.OT again is very tempting tho….
Edit-Force
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The OT is great, it just feels like it needs other things to ‘play with’ to get the best out of it, but once sounds are in it, it almost always inspires new, different sounding stuff.
The MPCs (or Force) feel different as they are ‘complete’ as is and work perfectly well standalone, but with those I feel I have to work harder myself to break out of the same loops.
Maybe together they are perfect?