Akai Force Unbox & Quick Take

what's up guys it's another music gear monday i'm carl carrell and today we're having a quick look at the akai force this really really cool all-in-one standalone music production studio we're gonna have a quick look what comes in the box compare it to the ableton push 2 talk a little bit more about my experience with this guy so far let's get into it [Music] real quick just want to shout out analog cases for making this amazing case for my akai force that i'm going to be taking on the road with me very soon here cool premium case i did a video with them a little while ago go check that out in the description below if you'd like to see more of that but this case holds my akai force the akai force all the cables everything analog cases check them out what comes in the box the akai force itself comes wrapped up in plastic premium i still have the plastic on this coating this rubberized coating that they put on the kai force attracts a ton of dust and just gets really printed up and everything so that kind of bugs me but that's just how it is you have the cable you have a usb cable and you have a power adapter as well so this guy is not battery powered or anything like that but there are some ways to make it battery powered i'll put a link in the description below for that company called my vaults does some pretty cool stuff for controllers and things so you got power you got usb you have instructions and quick start guide which will kind of give you a way to get this guy rolling and then you have these midi adapters that'll allow you to plug in your midi devices external midi devices and keyboards or controllers or different things like that which is pretty cool so looking at this guy you have your master outs you also have a three and four out so you can do click tracks you could do different monitors you have two xlr slash quarter in inputs and then you have one and two usb which will allow you to connect either a midi controller so another midi controller keyboard or hard drives or usb drives you have a usb connector here which will allow you to connect to your computer to do updates and driver updates and different things like that you could also run ableton by being plugged in via usb you could also use your network on here to connect to things like splice or be able to control your ableton session you have power here and you do have a ground input in case you want to run some samples from a turntable on the front side you have a headphone and a q volume so you can run your click tracks again you run the full session volume there your headphone adapter here and then you have an sd card slot here to pop your sd cards in on the bottom you have the option to install a sata drive so you can put that drive in there and store all of your sessions or splice samples or what have you very very cool all all-in-one device akai force so now the question is will this replace your ableton push because it looks very similar to an ableton push with the 64 pads here you have your launch clip view here you could play instruments on it very very similar to the ableton push again shout out to analog cases for the ableton push case so ableton push versus your akai force so two totally different beasts here this guy doesn't allow you to control ableton instruments it allows you to launch clips in ableton control some effects but that's pretty much it the main premise of this is for you to take those ableton sessions export them and pull them into this guy and play it standalone now that was the whole reason i had bought this guy there are some limits because you're not going to have all the same effects and plug-ins but you do have some really cool effects and plug-ins built into this guy or that you could download from akai's website so that's kind of cool obviously you guys probably know the ableton push is built for ableton so you can only use this guy when you're running ableton you can control ableton instruments effects full nine you could do so much stuff with this guy in ableton while you're running ableton but it is not a standalone unit you do have to have that computer with you and that's kind of the difference there so you don't have to use ableton in order to use a kai force just a great feature to have for somebody like me who loves using ableton so if we plug this guy in this guy is going to launch leds popping up you have these little lcd screens at the bottom here that you'll see illuminate you have a and b this is just like on your apc-40 have that a b and switch crossfader here to go between tracks i'm just gonna pull up a demo we don't have audio running so you can't really hear the demo of what's going on but i want to show you what this guy looks like here are all your clips and if you're familiar with ableton then you know you have your tracks or your instruments below that you have your loops and as you could see you can launch straight in a row all your different clips or you can launch them individually between scenes typically when you are doing a song in this clip view you are building a track in progressions if you go into menu you do have all these different options as far as what you could see and how you can see it if you click on track editor this is going to take you into each instrument loop or sample that you have as far as tracks go down here at the bottom you can either click on each track you have here or you can hold the shift button down and you have other options so right now i have this track selected and in this track is a synth you can play the synth so i could go over here to the left side and i can hit notes and it's going to allow me to just like on my ableton push if you're familiar with the ableton player gonna allow me to play that instrument and also control the parameters of that instrument which right now this instrument is a synth so i have all these different parameters that i can control either by touching them or by using the the jog wheel over here so which is kind of a cool feature the knobs feature actually allows you to have all these different knobs control different things on your track so like your track volume you know each parameter in the effect so if i go to mixer i can see each track here and i can go and change what these knobs are doing by holding down the knobs button i can go volume now i can see each volume of each track and you can see in the mixer like track volume is going up and down on this guy as well so tons of different ways to control your tracks control the features control the instruments bunch of different control over what you're doing in here using this akai force you can go down the rabbit hole there's so much different things that you could do you have a sampler so this sampler i can i could plug a microphone in i could plug a turntable in i could record something straight from my phone into the inputs in the back here you have control over the gain of that and then you have a little record button that you hit once you record that that recording it becomes a sample that you can actually trigger and play which is really really cool so you have an xy pad if you're playing the full track you can do effects if you're wanting to play your track out live clip view is basically going to show you your clip mixer is obviously going to show you mixer and the matrix is going to show you the full matrix if you hit navigate it'll show you where you're at in this matrix and you could slide the screen around to get to different parts of your clip view or you can use handy dandy little navigation just like on your push so far i've only messed around with the demo tracks i created maybe one or two little demo beats on this guy i haven't had a ton of time in between gigs to go crazy but i was trying to import an ableton session into this guy but for some reason it's not allowing me to do so and i think it's because the thumb drive i was trying to use wasn't formatted correctly i didn't have time to retry but i assume that's what it was i think between this guy and the mpc live that came out there's a lot of really really great innovations going on with the technology of these all-in-one systems you also have native instruments machine standalone which is another one i'll be looking at here shortly and as i push myself away from using so much computers live all the time those are some of the controllers that i'll be looking into in the next coming year so that's a quick look at the akai force what's in the box how i've been using it we'll be talking more about this as i dive deeper if you have any questions about the akai force or features you want to know put it in the comments below we'll be making some more videos about this guy very shortly that's gonna be music gear monday for today we'll catch you here next week peace [Music]

Channel: MusicGearMondays

Views: 794

Keywords: Akai force, Akai Force 2021, Akai Force vs Ableton Push 2, Akai Force Tutorial, Akai Force Unbox, Akai Force Demo, What is the Akai Force, Best Stand Alone Beat Machine, Stand Alone Beat Machine, All in one Studio, Portable Beat machine, Akai Force & Ableton, Akai Force Ableton Cnotroller, Akai Force Midi Controller, how to use the akai force

Id: o_y9bw2zoEs

Length: 9min 16sec (556 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 13 2021