The MPC One Blew My Mind (2021 Review)

when i first got my mpc one i didn't quite know how to feel about it it was a slow burn but at this point i can confidently say the mpc one blew my mind [Music] what's up my name is gabe miller and this is my review of the akai mpc one i've been putting an emphasis on self-contained music production devices on this channel for a while now and this is by far the most requested device and for good reason the mpc one can do a lot of cool stuff [Music] the mpc one is a completely self-contained music production device with synth engines built in and an exhaustive sampler capable of polyphonic stereo sampling and the capacity for a ton of layers drum kit tracks can be broken down even further into a bunch of individual little tracks let me show you what i mean i've got a drum program loaded up right now with a bunch of one shots loaded up onto the pads and right now this is acting as one track so far pretty straightforward but let me select a one shot i can go into what's called 16 levels and play it chromatically for 16 levels it is only chromatic but i'll show you key group programs that let you set specific scales in a second i've got access to that for every track and if i select a pad and go into program edit it gives me a ton of parameters to edit for each individual pad including effects and mixing tools so you can have up to four effects on each individual pad same goes for each individual track so this is what i mean by it has levels and you're not just limited to what's going on in these specific pads you've got these extra banks over here that in a key group program will send you up and down octaves in a drum program will allow you to have even more slots to fill up with samples in this case i haven't bothered with that because i've got everything i need for this track just in here but hopefully you get the idea and can see how powerful that is if you wanted you could just build up a song using nothing but one singular drum program because really each of these pads is an individual track the one thing to be aware of is that in this mode specifically chromatic samples are monophonic once again i will get to key group programs in a second where that is not the case but before i get to that there's one more thing i want to show you about drum programs you can layer multiple sounds onto one pad so for instance let's take this clap which is a single layer i can load in another sound i've got this hi-hat or this base it's a bit much and i've got up to four layers and i have quite a bit of control over how each of those samples behave plus stuff like full adsr which is super nice to have so that was a super quick oversimplified look at drum programs i should also mention that you can export those individual pad tracks as well for mixing in your daw if you want to do that this is a look as promised at key group programs you can load in a sample and then map it to a keyboard and that can be polyphonic i don't have that turned on in this case but i'll show you that in a second and you can set your key if i go to notes you've got a ton of options here for setting what key you're in and playing things like one finger chords once again i'll show you that in a second as well much like the drum programs you have the ability to layer multiple samples on top of each other in this case i've just got this one base sample but i could layer multiple other samples on top of it to create one gigantic sound and then i can shape that by tweaking their volumes and how they interact with each other uh envelopes and filter envelopes to really turn this into more of a synth than just a sample playback machine lfo stuff and of course like i mentioned before effects this is incredibly powerful and i haven't even gotten into the dedicated plug-ins yet which i will in a second but first like i mentioned here's a quick demonstration of the polyphony of key group programs and i can also go in and select chords [Music] once again these are samples you can also set the samples to swap out depending on what region of the keyboard you're in or how hard you hit a pad this might sound a little complicated to set up but the mpc one has a feature called auto sampler built in that can do a lot of this stuff automatically you can plug in a synth with midi and audio cables and the mpc will automatically trigger notes at regular intervals then map them to the keyboard i did a dedicated video on that topic that i'll link at the end of this video so far i've been putting a lot of focus on samples but there are also full plugins that we get to work with these range in quality a bit for instance the electric piano while fairly specific does sound quite nice and there's also the tube synth which sounds okay i'm not a synth snob but something about it just doesn't quite do it for me all the time it's a little hit or miss and there's a dedicated base synth in here as well which is fairly simple but quite useful and my favorite the drum synth and this is gabe from the future not long after i filmed the initial stuff for this video akai released a gigantic update for their line of standalone npcs including multiple new synth plugins with a few emulations of some vintage synths as well as the flagship synth from the akai force hype which has multiple engines wavetable stuff fm stuff some virtual analog stuff uh it's definitely my favorite synth plugin on this although i still like the drum synth even more so i spent some time whipping up a few quick audio examples using some presets and self-made sounds this one uses sampled drums but all of the actual synths are the built-in plugins these other two are created with 100 synth plugins including the drums [Music] while i'm on the topic of the update akai also added a bunch of new effects including some dedicated stuff for vocals so here's the original vocal keep on going without looking back we've got a doubler keep on going without looking back a harmonizer keep on going without looking back and an auto tune but i think it would be heresy to use it on this vocal so i'm not gonna do that and one more thing they added in the update that i want to quickly mention is the new ability to connect an audio interface or a mixer to expand the ins and outs and this is as good a time as i need to just show you the ins and outs that you've got access to there are a lot of them so if you're trying to record instruments into this thing or use this to sequence your modular or just standard synths they've got you covered but all of this cool stuff does come at a cost because the workflow is kinda clunky [Music] when i put out my first week with the mpc one video i saw a range of opinions on the user interface from those who swear by it to those who think it's complete garbage these days i'm hesitant to trash talk a ui too quickly after all i am the guy who said i hated the mc101 interface in front of 10 000 people and lived to regret it so i made sure i spent a lot of time with the mpc one and here's what i found it's actually not too bad although i probably wouldn't recommend it to beginners i would describe the learning curve as artificially steep which i'll get back to in a second but once i got over that i was able to pretty quickly get into the flow of making music part of it is just the fact that akai is trying to cram a daw interface into a box and that gives you all this wonderful flexibility and all these features but also pretty much inevitably creates more complexity it's growing pains there are also often multiple ways to do the same thing which can be nice but can also lead to confusion or people missing out on features or shortcuts entirely for instance you can change the track you're on by going to the main window and scrolling to it which you will need to do if you're assigning a virtual instrument to a track or you can just hold down main and select it directly that shortcut was added in a firmware update another example is pad mixing there's a dedicated window that you can get to that has all of your pads shown at once which is nice if you want to do like a full mix down but a lot of us like to mix as we go which you can do if you go into program edit but it's easy to miss it's a double-edged sword you've got more options but also more complexity one piece of advice that a viewer gave me that was super helpful was to cram everything onto one track with a bunch of one shots and ignore all of the other features until i happened to need them this helped me figure out exactly how i wanted to approach this thing and work up to more complexity that's not the only reason for the learning curve though the other reason and the reason i say it's artificially complex is that i think the ui could have used just one more pass by the designers before it was shipped out there were a bunch of little road blocks or limitations that i ran into that turned out to be totally solvable but the solutions were needlessly hard to find for instance some features in sample chopping are just kind of buried in multiple windows and then once you have chopped a sample you have to hit shift to convert that to a bunch of individual slices that you can actually work with not a huge deal but it is a decent example of stuff being kind of buried beneath multiple menus or multiple different views or multiple different shift commands you also have to check or uncheck the link slices button before you export those chops or else you might have the start and end points be interlinked in a way that you might not want that's a great example of the complexity that cramming so much functionality into this thing adds it's nice that you can choose whether or not sample chops are allowed to overlap you have that choice but it's hard to find especially if like me you tend to just dive into devices and figure stuff out as you go there are also just some weird little quirks like the fact that changing your note repeat timing also changes the quantization settings unless you remember to change it back and if you toggle on automation and start just automating parameters it will automate anything you touch until you remember to turn automation off again which can absolutely wreak havoc on your mix if you don't remember to turn that off when you're done with it these are small gripes but they can bring a learning or even beat making session to a grinding halt i always approach devices with the mindset that everything is figure-out-able and i'm fine with taking the extra time to really make sure i get something but at the same time i believe that a good user interface should be somewhat self-explanatory but that being said once you get over that initial hump the mpc one workflow is pretty good it's not machine level but it's close and i wouldn't necessarily recommend it for people who are sight impaired but if you don't mind working with a touch screen to a degree it's pretty good once i had gotten to the point that using this thing was fairly automatic i still felt like something was missing there was still some friction associated with just diving in and making beats and eventually i realized that was because i was taking the approach of loading in individual sounds when i needed them every single time just one by one so to get around this i built up some kits of a bunch of my favorite sounds so i could just load those into any project and have them ready to go at my fingertips i also found a piece of software kit maker not a sponsor that can automatically take folders full of samples or even machine kits and convert them to mpc kits which is lovely with that gripe out of the way there's pretty much nothing stopping me from just using the mpc all the time other than the portability i have considered upgrading to the live but i think i'm going to stick with the mpc one for now partially because i like the more spread out design that keeps me from over relying on the touch screen and i like feeling like i'm using a device that is worth more than i paid for it which is definitely the case with the one i'm a little bit of a contrarian so i was kind of reluctant to buy into the hype surrounding the mpc one but it's just too damn good for me not to my name is gabe miller this has been my mpc one review thank you so much for [Music] watching [Music] you

Channel: Gabe Miller Music

Views: 76,352

Keywords: gabemiller1, Gabe Miller, Gabe Miller Music, EDM, Electronic music, electronic dance music, electro, house music, mpc one, akai mpc one, mpc 2.10 update, mpc 2.10 firmware, mpc 2.10 synth, standalone mpc, mpc one 2021, mpc one review, mpc one demo, mpc one workflow, mpc one synths, mpc one drums, groovebox

Id: bUHe5G-Y7RI

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 29 2021