Posing a question to those of you currently exploring Tonverk and may have had experience with Akai’s multi-sampling hardware (or other hardware multi-samplers)
With all things equal (sound source, amount of samples, velocity layers), which sampling engine do you prefer?
I ask this as I am in the midst of preparing Tonverk for slew of shows this month (first is tonight!) and I am relying on it heavily to reproduce my Prophet 5 patches
I have been gigging with a P5 + Blackbox for the past two years and Tonverk seems to thus far save me from damaging my P5 and covering what I have been using the Blackbox for though with some limitations and difficulty that I do not know I will overcome with time and practice
I am considering picking up an MPC Key 61 (prices dropping on the market at the moment )to experiment with and I am curious how everyone feels about the quality of its sampling engine and the “feel” of its envelopes
The Tonverk has lovely envelopes and it does and absolute amazing job at capturing the essence of my P5 (envelopes are crucial to this, especially how note releases)
The Akai promises to save me from brining a midi controller, save me some $$$, will offer me more channels of audio and more I/0 that may be helpful in the long run but that does not matter if the sampling engine does not sound as good as the Tonverk
And yes I know the Blackbox multi-samples - I have A/B’d it to the Tonverk and the Tonverk sounds vastly superior (no fx) its crazy and it made me curious about Akai’s offerings
I know it may be too early for this question as Tonverk is very new but I thought I’d ask - plllleeeeeeeaseee only offer insight if you have experience with at least one of these devices
Gear I know and/or which is more efficient for my workflow. IMO the sound of most samplers should be very similar if the A/D and D/A-converters and re-pitch and sound-manipulation tools are of similar quality.
If we want to recreate an instrument as close as possible with typical complex articulations, we should check out sampler instruments, which consist of many more samples of sounds and articulations than a MPC or TW may support. For me this would be NI-Kontakt Instruments as an example, or workstations like the KRONOS.
DIY at a comparable level should be possible with support of apps like “SampleRobot” and then transfer the data to a sample player.
IIRC MPC recording quality is at 24-bit and 44.1 kHz, which should be sufficient for many tracks. Re-pitching a sample too far away from its original pitch is prone to generate artefacts. Same goes for velocity dependencies or other modulation options. Artefacts may sound okay, but that’s a question of individual taste.
The automated creation of a multi-sample instrument using MPC is fun, easy, and delivers quickly something useful, even if we are not a sampling expert. I use it to capture an interesting patch sound of my modular gear to have it on my finger tips for different projects. Quick and dirty, but sometimes its just sufficient enough for the track, why working harder?
In my opinion the MPC envelopes are weird. (At least on OS 2.x they were, I haven’t tried 3 before.)
They seem very flexible because unlike Elektron they don’t have to be linear, but something about that never sounded right to me. Either the scale weird, or when the visual representation of the envelope was linear, it still wasn’t really linear, or something like that.
I found it really hard to get the sounds I wanted out of the MPC envelopes, in any case.
Keygroups on the MPCs are powerful, even more so with V3. Like ptomaselli said, the envelopes are weird, and take some time to master. They are powerful - each stage can be linear, exponential, or logarithmic (last 2 variable of course), but like he said, even linear seems to be slightly curved on the ends - for example the beginning of the attack stage and the very end of the release stage seem curved. So small parameter value adjustments can sound significantly different. So it takes some time to master, but worth it, IMO.
Sound - hmmm, that’s subjective, but I’m happy with the sound quality. The same sample on both the Akai and the Octatrack MKII - the Force sounds closer to the original sample playing back on my computer and audio interface.
I don’t have a Tonverk yet (will wait a year for updates) but have auto-sampled many HW synths on the Akai Force before selling those synths. Force and MPC Key 61 both use the same audio engine.
)to experiment with and I am curious how everyone feels about the quality of its sampling engine and the “feel” of its envelopes