MPC Live II Review

hello youtube attack again back with another video from the home studio and today i want to talk about the new mpc live 2. [Music] all right so the mpc live 2 replaces the older embassy live that came out in 2017 and as you can see the form factor is pretty much the same but they've added this rather chunky speaker on the bottom of the unit so judging from the leaks that came out earlier this year a lot of people thought this was supposed to be an armrest with just a small speaker on the left side but that's not the case at all in fact the entire grille here is a stereo speaker so that's new and they've also repositioned and added a few hardware buttons on the faceplate itself and they moved the master volume knob from the weird position in the back to right over here the mpc live 2 now has the same cv gate connections as you can find on the mpc one and the same goes for the ethernet connection over here that gives you ableton link functionality other than that the mpc live 2 and the older mpc live are really really similar to one another we're talking the same building materials the same build quality and i think the overall feel of actually using them to make beats is kind of the same as well sure the mpc live 2 is a new embassy but i don't really think it's fair personally to view it as this new groundbreaking embassy and expect something amazingly new coming out of it it's an upgrade kind of similar to how an iphone 11 is an upgrade from iphone 10. it's new and it's better and it's cool but it's an iphone and the mpc live 2 is an mpc live it's just newer better and cooler but it's not really a new product in the same way as this one the mpc one that was new when it first came out that was a new mpc new to the market and new in akai's product range they hadn't had anything like this before the mpc live on the other hand has been around for a while and this is just the new upgraded better version of it however i feel like the overall workflow has been improved a little bit now with the new rendition of the mpc live compared to the old one just by adding a few more dedicated buttons and rearranging them to make it make more sense just makes it easier to navigate through the software which comes in really nicely now with the new 2.8 update as well and that update is actually kind of a big deal in itself for anyone who wants to use their mpc as their main device in the studio it now handles multiple channels of midi over the usb connection so that together with the cv and gate outputs found on the live 2 actually kind of makes that a sequencing powerhouse of sorts really the only big thing now that holds back the mpc live 2 is the fact that we don't see any additional audio ins or outputs in this version compared to the older embassy live we still have two line level inputs and two funnel level inputs and the switch to go between them five and six three and four and main left and right outputs of course that could be used in some cool and creative way if you just think about how to route stuff but i plan to make at least one jam video of using the embassy live 2 in standalone mode and hook it up to my dallas corner in the studio over here and i'm going to have the mpc sequence stuff like the minibrute 2s over cv and maybe my jupiter xm or the wavestate maybe a drumroll drum machine and stuff over midi so the mpc doesn't really have a good way to handle all of those audio sources and sample it or record it at once so i'm gonna have to use an audio mixer for that but still i don't have to involve a computer other than the mpc itself and to me it's kind of cool to be able to do all that from the mpc live tool now before we get into the specifics of the hardware of the live 2 to check out the buttons and the layout and what's new about it let's first of all have a listen to the built-in speaker and compare that to the built-in speaker on my 2018 15-inch macbook pro that actually sounds kind of decent for a laptop and maybe some other bluetooth speaker that i have here around the house and of course it's kind of difficult to give them any sort of justice on a video like this but i'm just running my camera with my rode videomic pro plus on top of it so hopefully that gives you something [Applause] [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] so i guess it doesn't come off too well in that video clip but you be the judge of the audio quality yourself all i can say for now is that i get way more volume and definitely way more bass out of the mpc live 2 than i first expected of course i wouldn't trust it enough to make any important mixing decisions on anything but it's definitely good for some you know normal beat making casual use okay so let's dive in just a little bit deeper into the mpc live 2 and the hardware specifications so here we are with the npc live on the left hand side and the live 2 on the right [Music] all right as i've already mentioned these two devices does have a lot of things in common that is the 16 velocity sensitive drum pads it still has a 7-inch multi-touch screen and the total of five knobs and the q link button over here are identical to the previous version and the same goes for the inside the internals of the mpc live 2. it still has 2 gigabytes of ram and 16 gigs of internal storage now maybe that's not exactly what you would expect from an update like this but that's what you get and i for one have never ran into any issues with the specifications of the hardware what's also kind of good to know about the live 2 is that it of course comes with the same removable plate at the bottom where you can insert an ssd drive to expand the storage of your embassy heavily i haven't done that myself yet but i'm definitely about to so let's zoom in a little bit and take a look at what's actually new and different about this one first of all the older mpc live has 22 buttons on the unit where the new one has 27 and i'm not counting the 16 drum pads of course i know that i talk a lot about having buttons and dedicated buttons on a hardware device like this even if it's a sampler or a synth or drum machine or whatever it may be it just makes the workflow a little bit faster and makes it more fun to navigate through whatever you're working on that's why i'm still such a fan of the mpc one but in this case having more buttons on this one compared to the older live is definitely a step up so let's see what they've done here we have the tap tempo the wreck the overdub the stop the play and the play start button that's all the same from the old one and the new one which is really nice that's just something that i have programmed into my muscle memory by now and it's nice to have that the same as i'm used to moving on we have the shift the menu and then this weird spot that's empty on the mpc live that's now filled up by the main menu that's over there then we have a mix button that's new a mute and a next sequence here we have the undo and the copy and of course your plus and minus and going up here we have the pad banks that used to have a lot of space on the unit now it's a little bit more tight and i think that's kind of nicer under those we have note repeat full level 16 level arrays undo step sequence tc and copy compared to note repeat full level 16 level and erase that's it many of these buttons also has the secondary functions that you can access by double tap them or going shift and tap them same goes for this i can just go to my delete page by doing that or going to turn my time correction on or off by just fast tapping that that's nice you know the lesser i have to interact with the main menu and the touch screen for switching through pages like this the happier i am or the other option would be to hold down menu and hit one of these pads instead because they correspond to the 16 icons here but to me it's still just easier to have dedicated buttons for some stuff i'm not saying this has been a big issue of mine but i've definitely hit the undo button by mistake more than once or twice on the older embassy live so i like the fact that it's been moved up here now it's not the end of the world it's just a matter of holding shift and go back to undo and hit the redo function but in this case it just feels more like something i have to think about to actually access so if i record something and i mess up i need to undo i can just you know it's up here that's nice i am definitely gonna need a little bit of time to fully adjust to the new layout with the buttons here but i think most of them make sense in kind of a smart way say the 16 levels menu here for instance if i double tap it it goes to notes which is the pad performance menu and that makes sense 16 levels of pads or 16 levels of notes on the pads i can see how they are kind of cousins and belong together so that's cool also of course the next sequence button right here that i use a lot on my embassy one nice to have it here i can just do that and i'm playing the second sequence now my first one now my third one so again it's nothing too new or overwhelming at all it's just some small little improvements that helps out a lot now let's take a closer look at the connections on the back so going from right to left we first have our power switch and our power input followed by the ethernet port that supports ableton link now this one is just for locking down your mpc live if that's something you want to do that's the usb connection for the computer followed by two usb a's for hooking up midi keyboards or a midi hub if you want to use the multiple channels of midi over usb then we have our full size midi two in and two out and up here are cv gates one five two six three seven and four eight that's new that's good that's awesome thank you then we have our left and right line inputs left and right phono inputs and this screw for screwing down your ground cable if you're using a turntable the switch between line and phono level inputs the input volume or record volume over here then we have the outputs five six three four and main left and right as i've said before over here is a physical switch to turn your speaker on or off and last of all we have a phone's output on quarter inch jack instead of the small one that we had on the mpc live and that's about it so my final verdict on the new refresh of the mpc live that is the live 2 is that it makes sense in a lot of ways i think the addition of a speaker is fun even though it makes the mpc itself both bigger and heavier and of course less portable and i'm not sure myself how much use i'm gonna get out of that speaker because i normally tend to make my beats here in my home studio sometimes on the balcony it could come in handy for that but again everyone is not like me and people's setups are way different from mine so it's kind of cool however there's not too much to hate about the mpc live it's still an mpc live but it's better than before and i guess it didn't really make sense for them to have the cv gate outputs on the mpc1 but not having it on the live so now it has that as well and of course i can't complain about the fact that we now have more physical buttons on the unit that's always an upgrade honestly i think what we got here is just a solid update to a device that was already really powerful and good from the beginning now i'd like to see a proper linear song mode in the npc as well but i guess that's for another video i hope you found this video helpful in some way and if you did please don't be afraid to comment like subscribe and share the video with anyone stuff like that actually helps my channel quite a bit so i'd really appreciate it however thanks a lot for watching this one i hope to see you guys in the next video as well until then

Channel: Accurate Beats

Views: 115,563

Keywords:

Id: E1gSjkOBBW8

Length: 12min 41sec (761 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/younggundc]

This guys a legend! Love his videos!

[u/bullandbaron]

I am happy with my MPC live :)

[u/premacyman]

I’m not going to lie. That speaker does sound good tho.