Right. No that’s not my workflow and I can def see where that would be rage worthy indeed.
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Can we start or stop recording a clip in the clip launcher via an external MIDI controller, like a footswitch, to use it like a loop station?
EDIT: With the Live III and/or the new MPC 3.6 Pro Pack on older devices
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I think I’d be interested if they make a (not red) One with a battery
It used to have more buttons than Live but now I wonder if it will be the opposite ;D
I don’t think we’ll ever see it with a battery personally - too much dilution in the range and would increase the price significantly, which is one of its big selling points.
I like this box, but with this amount of crammed functionality I think a ‘dummy’ mode for MPC streamlining the interface just focussing on the essential (create tracks, record, mix) would be useful. Whenever I see a demo people are clicking on 200 menu options and little actions just to get one basic 3 or 4 track pattern going (and nothing very good anyways). The bells and whistles I would only use sporadically so for that I could revert to the full interface mode.
Goes in the direction of a mini mpc as some have suggested.
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Yeah probably not. Maybe if it was the equivalent of a Plus model.
I kind of think that the need for a “mini” would decrease pretty much if they’d do that
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Yeah, I’m pretty bummed currently. It is really close to being perfect for me, apart from the three “none live” issues…
I don’t want to create an other VS topic but really this month is a bit distrubing with all these great new gears.
I was close to buy a Push 3 (not the SA one) after having a love experience with the Move.
But this Live III looks very promising. I already had an MPC One. I didn’t like the sound of that machine compared to VSTs. I don’t know if the Live III offers a different experience.
Not interested by the Tonverk which is not the machine I waited from Elektron.
And the TR-1000 is way too expansive for my amateur use.
Well and the TR is just a drum machine. No comparison, in my book.
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Think that’s unlikely - they’re consolidating rather than diversifying their OS. 2.x pretty much had this because of how siloed functions were, but they’ve definitively ripped up that template. After this week I’m in a weird situation where it’s looking like Roland are far more likely to deliver the music production centre I’d want before Akai does, although less sure I’d want to pay for it if it does arrive.
I installed OS 3.6 on my Live 1 (without the pro pack) so I could mess around with the new features like drum articulations and the drum program mod matrix, and
I already liked the the mod matrix on the OPx4 and on the keygroups - but I admit I had not gone too wild with it besides making huge pads or weird alien textures. But doing it on drum programs is just insane. INSANE.
First the drum articulations. It’s basically a collection of rudimentary drum strokes, rolls, paradiddles and so on, about 100 of them with lots of dotted and triplet variations, and quite a few of them loop. You can easily tweak the speed, dynamics (velocity variation), and panning as well as switching between half, normal, and double speed. These are built into the drum program itself, so they won’t turn into multiple MIDI notes on the timeline, they just play as long as you have the pad held down (or un full if you are in oneshot mode). Your timeline will just show pads held down for shorter or longer notes.
The articulations make it possible to build up drum tracks in new and interesting ways, like you could put a repeating 4-on-the-floor pattern on your kick, a ghost note ‘echo’ on your snare, and some sort of weird flimflampatadoodle thing on your hihat, then just go into record mode and jam out a performance with these patterns.
What’s even more fun (and I think this will become very popular) is putting one sound on multiple pads or a whole pad bank, and then assigning a whole bunch of different articulation patterns. You could build up your own breaks and unique patterns very quickly this way - it’s kinda like working with a bunch of short performance samples, except that you can edit the drum sounds completely independently of the rhythmic performance.
You would probably want to figure out your sounds first and then copy those across multiple pads before choosing your articulation variations, and for sanity’s sake you might want to either just do one kind of drum (kick, snare, hat) per track or be very disciplined about your kit layouts. Remember you won’t be able to see the articulation pattern in the grid editor! I think this is a pretty big deal because it’s so easy to get bogged down trying to edit complex drum patterns or fancy rolls in a grid editor, make the velocity found natural etc etc. That sort of editing is time-consuming even if you know what you’re doing, and realistically very few of us are experienced drummers who know all those rhythmic building blocks. I was amazed at how great the results was, the same sort of excitement I felt when I first discovered editing breakbeats.
The only ‘bad’ point is the articulations are buried in page 2 of the pad effects menu, so it’s sorta easy to lose them; they’re so useful they should be on the global page. Neat point is that even if you are not in possession of a Live 3, you can still edit the pad corner assignments and start editing things on your older hardware.
Other cool things in 3.6 are up to 8 samples per pad with a lot of extra velocity switching options for tuning, offset, sample start etc. and 8 parallel inserts per drum page as well as the usual 4 serial inserts per pad. But I didn’t play with either of those because I didn’t yet want to build up huge layered or round-robin performances.
But what I did play with was the drum program modulation matrix amd they are just wild. Besides the obvious inputs like velocity, aftertouch, and envelopes, you now have 2 LFOs (tempo syncable if you want), 2 ramps (like very simple attack-sustain envelopes), and 2 note counters. These are particularly interesting, you can set the counter to values from 2 to 64, and each successive note played on that pad advances the counter by one. So if you set the counter to 5 and assign that to modulate the filter cutoff, it will step through the modulation range like 1/2/3/4/5/1/2/3/4/5/1/2/3 etc.
So while you don’t have conditional trigs, you can get all kinds of weird an interesting interactions between the rhythmic patterns (input by hand or using the drum roll articulations) and the note count. But wait! there’s more! You get not one but two note counters, so you can do all sort of weird math ratio things, kinda like the Euclidean sequencing on the Rytm. Now, if all you could do in the modulation matrix was count up from minimum to maximum in somewhere between 2 and 64 Note On steps that would be kinda fun, but Akai’s mod matrix lets you take any modulation source, point it at huge list of targets, and then multiply it by another modulation source and apply a waveshaper to that second modulation source with 7 or 8 different wavesahpes available. You can adjust the strength of both the original modulation and the waveshaped multiplier so this gives you almost unlimited modulation shaping capability, similar to but more advanced that what used to be on Kurzweil K series… The reason I make such a big deal of the note counters is that you can get subtle or drastically different modulations for each new drum hit, and stepping through these cycles feels very different from tempo-synced LFOs. With two of these you can get very tight repetitive patterns, very long slow variations that don’t feel chained to tempo but also don’t feel random, or very mysterious-feeling organic patterns by choosing cycles that are prime numbers.
Did I mention that there are 32(!) modulation slots and that you can route modulations to any of the 8 sample layers and adjust the levels of any of the 8 parallel insert effects? And that you can do this separately for every one of the 128 pads in each drum kit? Think back to the modulation insanity that was possible on the Machinedrum by patching the 16 LFOs; this is a somewhat different architecture but with equal or probably greater potential. I loaded up the default acoustic drumkit from the MPC library, set up a simple 1-bar snare pattern and then added just 3 modulations targeting cutoff and resonance, and added a simple 4 on the floor kick pattern with one modulation to pitch - nothing fancy, right? But because of the modulation-shaping and note counting tools I described above it went straight into Warp Records territory.
I can’t really imagine yet where this is going to go with effects and feedback modulations targeting LFO rates. I was so blown away by a simple test pattern that I had to take an hour to write this long-ass post raving about how powerful it is… If you like generative drum sound programming, this thing is a nuclear weapon.
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Are you just GASSING for new gear or do you have an actual usecase to fulfil? Because all of these devices are very different.
If you didn’t like the ‘sound’ of the One then you’re not going to like the Live any more - it has the same VSTs, if that’s what you’re using. Although IMO the MPC plugins are pretty excellent - I use them in Ableton all the time…
Push3 = A physical interface for Ableton
MPC Live III = Standalone, portable production
Tonverk = Multisampler and sound design tool
TR-1000 = Drum machine
There is more cross over with your Move and the MPC than the other devices you’re talking about. If you’re loving the Move then maybe just stick with that? Or is there something it doesn’t do that you’re wanting from it?
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Well, I tried the q link stuff… dope and all but for the one thing I wanted to use it for is not working. I hope it does work on the 3 with the cpu it has…
I wanted to set up a dynamic eq. See, I don’t like ducking the whole signal, I like ducking just the shared frequencies, afaik mother ducker can’t do frequency dependent stuff, it ducks the whole thing, and that’s not cool for me. I set up the envelope follower to listen to the kick and on the visual eq cut out the low end. This, unfortunately on the live 2, results in lots of artifacts 
Other than that very happy with the rest of the pro pack and of course the whole update
Edit: it does work when using a different eq. I guess the visual eq is too cpu intensive. Tried using kill eq, works! Gotta do more testing but para eq seems to work as well and provide more freq control
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Yeah that’s why I still haven’t updated my Key37 to 3.x
I am tempted due to the NI instruments and all that, but haven’t really investigated the implications of updating. Since it was in a kind of limbo beta state for a while anyway…
Let’s see what happens when the dust settles. All this hype (Tonwerk, then TR, now this) is over the top, really. Especially the Roland thing.
Somehow I can’t find out the price of the pro pack? I’m wondering whether it could make sense to buy a used mpc one and the pro pack
A used OG MPC One is an absolute BARGAIN. Need to see this recommended more tbh - out of all the new MPC’s I have a sneaking suspicion that this is the one people will be trying to buy in 2035.
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Are you already using Ableton a lot?
I’m fortunate (or cursed?) to own and use both Push 3s and MPC since the launch of OG Live. I’ve been trying to decide on one platform but it’s difficult.
There are a million little differences, but I’ll try to make it short. From my pov the MPC is the better standalone groovebox/DAW. But for me MPC will always have a bit of a threshold for me when it comes to arrangement and final mix down (perhaps arrangement will be solved with the new OS). I already suck at finishing tracks, and having to export stems doesn’t help. Perhaps that step will be easier when the desktop software is finally “complete”…
Push feels more like a studio tool to me. Not as complete in standalone but it’s constantly improving, and it’s an awesome controller as well. Seamless transition between standalone and laptop. The modular environment makes possibilities pretty much endless if you only spend the time. Some of the buttons are a bit stiff but I’m used to it. The clip launcher feels best in class and I feel creative when using it.
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See Andertons UK sold out already - glad I bagged one (I think), gotta busy weekend of new gear learning, TR-1000 arrives today, should be ok as have experience with the TR line in past, and Live 3 arrives tomorrow (no mpc experience) steep learning curve me thinks 
TR-1000 not too bad (I got mine yesterday) but I never mastered my MPC Live II, its a moving target!
Yeah and I seemed to see yesterday that the Maschine is now 400 or so… would that be a bargain?