Akai Force Review and Demo

hello and welcome to the video today I'm gonna be giving you a detailed look at the brand new Akai professional force that's just been released today I should say that I've been using it for the last couple of months because I've been preparing some videos to go on the Akai Pro YouTube there's 10 tutorials over there for if you already own the device and you want to know how to use it but this video is for people that maybe don't own the device and you want to know what it's actually like what's the touchscreen like how are the pads the buttons what is it like working standalone I also wanted to briefly say that this is an unspotted video so I'm not being paid to say any of this I Pro isn't paying me to make this video however I did get given this device when I was preparing the tutorials for Akai Pro so I haven't bought this with my own money but I have been using it almost every single day for the last 3 or 4 months to make music so I do think that I have a very balanced view of what it's like to use it there's plenty of pros and cons in this video but I just wanted to mention that at the start so first of all what actually is it well it's a standalone music production studio which means you don't have to connect it to a computer the only thing plugged into this is a power cord and then some headphones or you can plug it into your studio monitors and you're good to go it really is important to stress that standalone aspect this has a computer inside it no need to connect it to a computer there's no other da W being used it truly doesn't have to be tethered to your setup besides the fact that you need a power cord it features some really solid hardware a great touchscreen and some powerful software and it has the capability to record instruments and guitars you can plug microphones right into this you can plug bass guitars electric guitars you can sequence and perform drums it has 4 onboard plug-in synthesizers and you can perform using these and arrange your MIDI and you can also drag in audio clips and edit these audio clips in very fine detail I think this is a first of a kind device I don't think anything like this has really been done before but it does mark a bit of a circle for Akai in coming back to the kind of standalone market which they were known for which is their true heritage with the MPC range and I think it's quite nice that they kind of come full circle and really modernized this standalone workflow so anyway let's get right in and take a really detailed look at the hardware so I'm just going to start with the seven-inch full-color touchscreen so this feels great and it's where you're going to be producing mixing adding effects programming now it feels really good but it's not quite as high-quality as like a high-end tablet or smartphone it's very close but it's not quite there it is very responsive however and the colors look great it's multi-touch enabled which means that you can use gestures to zoom in and out up and down swipe sideways and whatnots and it just makes the user experience a lot nicer as you'd expect for the touchscreen it's pretty much a fingerprint magnet so you're gonna spend a lot of time wiping this down I'm gonna come back to that touch screen in a minute but the front of the device features some force branding and then your headphone jack and an SD card to load your samples now the headphone jack is super loud I can't even turn it above a quarter loads and loads again there so I promise I'll only say this one more time but this is a standalone device so the computer is inside there which is why there's these vents on the side it's a really high quality build construction and this helps keep the device nice and cool the back of the device features a space to mount a hard drive and this is all made of metal like this is a really really solid construction and there's these rubber feet here the stop is sliding on your desk this is a pretty heavy machine now there are loads and loads of connections here so I'm going to try and cover them quickly to get sound out of it you can plug in quarter inch TRS jacks into the left and right outputs there's also CV gate and MIDI inputs and outputs so there's so much expandability here if you want to connect microphones just grab an XLR cable plug it into the back of one of the two combi inputs you can set the gain really easily there's tons of gain on this again very clean gain there's a switch for phantom power and a switch for a line and instrument so if you're connecting a dynamic or a condenser microphone you could do either you can also plug an instrument or synth cable straight into here so you just plug them in select line or instrument and you're good to go the USB ports on the back can be used to expand the internal 16 gigabytes of storage and connect your own hard drives you can also connect MIDI controllers and you can connect using Ableton link I felt that the power button could have been a little bit better it doesn't really have the positive click that I want it to and the cables a little bit cheap but this is not really a big problem so back to the functions everything you can do on the touch screen is usually backed up by a button which is really nice you've got buttons for so mute record copy edit backlighting is done really well and they have this really nice click so you know when you've selected them the matte black looks fantastic but in dusty environments it's going to show up everything so what I like to do is like once a week I take a bit of tape and I just run this along and it just gets rid of almost all of the dust the combination of the touchscreen and all of these tactile buttons is really good in my opinion and they've all got written on or underneath them what they do so it only took me a couple of sessions before I felt really comfortable with the device if you don't want to use the touchscreen as much you can use the oversized rotary encoder to change parameters browse menus this thing's really well built and the crossfader underneath can be removed and replaced with whatever you like it's really really light action I prefer to be a little bit heavier but this is pretty perfect for DJing so the pad Bank consists of 64 soft touch RGB pads they're really nice and when you sort of wobble them it doesn't wobble the ones around it which is usually good in the care of quality a Kai's had a long heritage of getting pads on their devices right think of the MPC range for instance so how it works is that your project displaying the tracks which are these vertical columns which could be instruments or drums and then individual clips you launch clips by just pressing the pads or you launch a whole scene by pressing the launch button to the right this is launch mode that shows your whole project however there's loads of different modes note mode lets you control the instrument you have selected in this case of drum care now you could record this directly or you can use the step sequence mode to arrange these drums you can select the pad on the left the velocity on the right and it's just as simple as that however we're not limited to just drums there's fantastic internal plugins and in note mode you can have the pads configured so that you can play progressions chords melodies scales however you like this is progressions mode using hype synth however I'm just gonna change it to scales mode the great thing about this is that you can get it to lock to the key or scale that you're reducing in so you can't really hit wrong now so I talked about the internal plugins and these really surprised me because they were far better than I thought there would be an electric is a great Keys plugin and another favorite of mine is the hypeeeee synth each of the plugins has an extensive range of presets some of which are really great a lot of which you'll never find it use for all the plugins have a really nice user interface there's usually one page that's really simple and then multiple other pages that show all the parameters you'd ever need there's also mix plugins so you can load four plugins on a mixer track EQ compression delay distortion reverb just about anything you can think of and while you can load four plugins you can only see one at a time I wish you could see more than one on the same screen but I hope that this is just a few software updates away an example of great design is this angled strip in front of the rotary encoders so you can see what they say touching the tops gives you more detail and then rotating them adjust the parameter these feel really good they're really solid they're not wobbling or cheap and they can be configured to control any parameter in this case the mixer I want to finish by just showing the recording quality so I'm going to record some acoustic guitar with a microphone and then plug an electric guitar into [Music] [Music] I just want to thank you for watching this video getting this far into it oh please do let me know in the comments down below whether you'd like to see more videos about force or whether you'd like some more in-depth tutorials thanks again for watching bye for now

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 220,890

Keywords: Akai Force, review, first look, in the mix, product review, akai apc live, akai force review, new release, namm 2019, standalone, akai pro, honest, full review, demo, akai firce demo, akai force ableton, touch screen, standalone music, music production, tutorial, NAMM

Id: d16IwmNXT3o

Length: 9min 36sec (576 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 17 2019