For Crimbo I got a new toy and that was an Akai MPC studio black edition, see what I found out and learned.
So I basically wanted this new piece of studio equipment which I've been eyeing up for many years, no actually what I was eyeing up was a Korg Electribe sampler and drum machine. The electribe was a pretty cool piece of kit, for around £400 you got a box covered with buttons, which you could sample sound on, carry it around with you (but you needed a power adapter so it was hardly portable), but you could do a load of cool things with it excluding hooking it up to a computer and interfacing it with your DAW or sequencing software, which I kind of needed this functionality (I found out you can run it in Cubase (my DAW of choice), but only by MIDI with reduced functionality. This is whe I dropped the idea of getting an Electribe and getting something which A.) could sample or run WAV or MP3 files on it, B.) be able to assign the said samples to a pad so you could play in your samples live, C.) it couldn't break the bank (any way my parents had agreed to spending up to £300 on me if I sacrificed my B'day present, so that was fine with me), D.) it had to possibly hook up to and interface with my DAW as a VST or controller. I had the choice of the Native Instruments Machine, which was a cool interface with coloured pads which kind of reminded me of some corny 80's disco floor, there was the Akai Professional MPC Touch which was a sampler and drum machine with a touch screen. Little known to me there was a cheaper alternative called the Akai Professional MPC Studio Black which suddenly appeared in my email box one day from a advert from a company I had purchased studio equipment from before called GAK music. I didn't see it when it arrived and very nearly got my parents to buy a Korg Electribe from the previous generation. which on ebay for about the same value as they were brand new nearly ten years before! I was fortunately asked by my parents "is that your final answer" wait a minute I'll wait a day before I get them to order this unit. during the next morning I was about to message my mother on Facebook to seal the deal, when I came across the email from GAK, I opened it and discovered the MPC Black, which came with software, so the only question was raising the money for the difference which might have been £40 ut my finances being as precarious as they had been for the last six months it was a lot of money, and anyway my girlfriend was watching my bank account like a hawk! did however manage to slip the money to my parents and the rest of the story was between me and the excruciatingly long wait until christmas (which was a couple of weeks).
I guess I could have got the native instruments machine but I already had all the software that it came with and it was about £500! with the controller and the software package which I didn't need and at that point of time they didn't sell the controller separately, which is a bummer as they do now as they launched a new pad after christmas! bugger Oh well as the Akai MPC came with 9GB of samples, two soft synths and three drum machines which was well worth the money.
I received it, got it home, opened the wrapping paper and opened the box, plugged it in then downloaded everything required which was a pain in the backside as the only setting in the installation was installing everything on C:\ drive! and my C drive is made up of a partitioned SSD PCIe card which is rated at 126 GB, and I run windows 10 which takes up most of the C:\ drive and then there is Cubase as again the only place you can install that is on the C:\ drive and that's Cubase 8.5 ad that takes up an obscene amount of space so now I'm in the position that I have to dump my documents folder every ten cubase or MPC projects as they again can only be saved on....yes you guessed it! C:\ drive which is a royal pain in the bum! and no I can't do anything about it, unless I buy a new HDD and reinstall everything!
So bow I talk about the learning curve which as I've never used a MPC, pretty difficult. I've used hardware samplers in the past so I know how to sample things, chop them up and process them into something I can use, but the MPC is a slightly different ball game and its taken me about a week or so to get around the controls while there's still a load of buttons on the controller which I don't have a clue what they do and I've only learned so far how chop the samples up[ assign them to a pad and apply some effects. I will promise I will read the manual some day but eve that is slightly daunting as its several hundred pages of pretty mean text...on the computer! Don't get me wrong if I had a paper manual I would have read by now as bedtime reading material, computer manuals are different as I don't want to sit at the computer each night and read a paragraph or two, as it would just prevent normal sleep!
I'm most effectively using my MPC Studio as what's called a VSTi which is a integrated software instrument which works in a DAW (which stands for Digital Audio Workstation), I'm mainly doing this as the software it comes with, even though it is technically a DAW, it#s not a very good as its buggy, crashes regularly and is obviously not written very well! The VST functionality is fine which is weird as it effectively the same software, just running inside cubase (which you would have thought would have made it even more unstable. weird really, but as a VSTi it works really well).
I've used the MPC in most of my projects now since Christmas, I've divided the major ones out on Youtube and created a playlist of the MPC titles which I will post below, I am getting better at writing MPC based material, but I've still got a lot more to learn! I've got to come up with some decent patterns so it doesn't feel choppy which a few of the songs I've written kind of sound slightly, I've got to try to create more seamless mixes, but only time will tell!
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