Sampler Recommendations?

there’s listings for the MPC1000 on reverb right now under $500.

If you’re down with manual chopping a used SP-404/SX/A would work.

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Barely, but you are right! OP better act fast lol ;-).

Crazy to think that they are more expensive now when we have the options of the X, One, and Live II than they were for nearly a decade when they were the only choice for a standalone MPC…

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even if you have to go over 500 the Mpc one is worth it, it’s a no brainer even if you don’t like Mpc’s… a beastly bang of a buck that you can take however far or not that you want, there is simply no better deal of this capability and quality… Use it as just a beat machine, or just a mangle machine, or a daw if you wanna take it that far…

I prefer to use it’s myriad export options to finish up elsewhere but you can do it all in the mpc if you want. It’s like a Swiss army knife that you didn’t know you needed until you didn’t know how you could not have needed it… It enhances anything you pair it with as well

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+1 for the MPC One, (or Live, Live 2, X) It’s my main beat making machine, and it’s great. It’s powerful enough that you can just focus on creativity/ideas without worrying about limitations. It technically is a DAW in a box, or pretty close to it, but that doesn’t mean you have to treat it like one.

Pros of the MPC One over the others in the lineup:

Price: it’s the cheapest by far, especially if bought used

Buttons: it has a ton of dedicated buttons for all the stuff you need, which means you don’t have to rely on the Touchscreen unless you want to

It has the smallest form factor of the bunch, and the shape makes it feel like an old MPC, as opposed to the Lives.

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Blackbox. My fav sampler ever…so easy to use.

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i mostly agree about Blackbox. for what I need a sampler to do (trigger pads as either one-shots or multisamples from my Pyramid) it’s about 90% perfect. dead easy to get samples into the pads and trimmed down/looped with some basic FX as needed.

but i’m also finding that it wants to be more of a groovebox than the classic samplers that you just mapped everything across a single keyboard – be it one voice or multiple samples – and that was a complete preset. Clip mode is great in theory but unless you’re creating perfect 4/4 loops and WAVs in a DAW (which kind of defeats the purpose of buying a DAWless sampler) getting Clips to actually work in practice is kind of a pain in the ass. and unlike MPC boxes, 1010 doesn’t have a native desktop app for sample management so if you want to do anything other than save your sample pads as a full Preset, getting WAVs in and out of Blackbox will require some third-party DAW or sample program (if there’s actually a way to do this without, i’m desperate to know)

as great as so many of these new boxes are compared to my 2MB Emax II, I would sacrifice first-born children for someone to make a hardware sampler that just. fucking. samples without also trying to be a fully self-contained production studio etc.

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Just guna leave this here to annoy the mpc fans:

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lol

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Another vote for the blackbox I don’t have one but looks cool and straightforward. I have a live 2 and it’s great but not really “simple” but like others have said, it can be if you just use it as a sampler. It would be worth it to look at an MPC 500- they’re really really small, sturdy, and straightforward no frills sampling. You can get them really cheap too and still have a couple hundred bucks left over.

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and their midi implementation is powerful

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That is a great deal. I think the ergonomics on the One are better and it has more buttons but otherwise the Live MK1 outflanks it.

I didn’t like the build of the one, had it for a day and returned it. The heavier duty build of the Live, plus the battery, was the winner for me.

Though in the end I sold it and stuck with the Force.

This. Dead simple. Does what OP wants and not too much more.

Oh and it’s not huge. Perfect for a desk!

That’s interesting about the One’s build quality. I could see that. You aren’t the first person I’ve heard of that has really clicked better with the Force. I’ve always wanted to try it.

I had the Force first, and sold it (because I can’t sit still, and can’t afford to just buy without selling). I regretted that, and glad to have it back. Same situation with the OT (which I’ll hopefully have tomorrow).

Hopefully I’ll be in a position career wise very soon where I don’t have to sell something I like to experience something new.

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I think I must be misunderstanding the two issues you’ve described here.

As far as clips I’ve never used a DAW to do that but I’ve made tons of music on other gear and it always works perfectly when sampled into the Blackbox and used as loops in clip mode. It’s been an integral part of my live setup because of this. The ‘timestretch’ or whatever you want to call it gets pretty iffy if you’re trying to sync a loop way outside of its original tempo but I think that’s to be expected.

I’m not sure what could be easier than managing the wavs? Pop out the card and dump 'em in a folder on the computer. From there just do whatever comes to mind?

Am I simply misunderstanding here?

so on Clips, which I’m only using for drum loops really, i find that i can get them to sync to Pyramid’s clock at a fixed BPM but only if i turn off Quant/Sync – if i leave it on, even when the loop’s original tempo is around the same BPM, Blackbox still applies some weird/bad timestretching to the Clip. it would be better (imo) if i could set a root pitch for a given Clip to have the pad’s starting point be higher/lower depending on the Pyramid’s BPM (i can manually tweak this with the pad’s Pitch knob but that’s also one more extra step i wasn’t expecting to have to use to make a Clip work as advertised). but leaving Quant/Sync off then seems to mean if i need to speed or slow down BPMs on Pyramid – soon to be Hapax, which will be important when two projects are running simultaneously – the Clip BPM is not going to adjust on the fly as it should. it’s still early days with BB for me and i could be totally missing something about how Clip mode works but my experience hasn’t matched the 1010 demo which just shows a Clip running at a given BPM/pitch and then maintaining the same pitch even as the BPM is increased on Blackbox.

with Presets, also could be totally missing something in the workflow but if I want to build up a library of drum loops in Blackbox to load up later individually on a per-Preset basis, it seems i could sample one loop per pad and have 16 loops but saving that as a Preset now locks me into only being able to reload all 16 at once across the full pad range. or if i had 16 drum machines that i wanted to multisample each individual sound chromatically, I could end up with a Preset that has each machine’s multisample on a given pad but recalling one machine to a single pad without managing this process in a DAW and saving them individually as raw WAV sets . . . i’m not seeing it. but always happy to be shown a better way of working!

Well damn. I’ve been using BB extensively for some time but in very different ways from you. I wish I could be of service but I think I’ve got nothing here :0(

You can load individual samples from another preset onto a single pad, and then use the repack option in the presets menu to save a copy of that sample in the current projects preset folder. Tap the pad, select load sample then navigate to the preset folder. Of course you can load a preset, do a save as, and then delete what you don’t want as well.

If you use the BB to create the multisample it will create a sub folder within the current preset. If you want to use that multi in a different project, go to load a sample to a pad, navigate to the folder and then from the menu there is a load all option. Then make sure you repack so it saves a copy of the multisample in the current project folder.

Of course you don’t have to repack the samples as long as you’re careful not to delete or move the original files.

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