If, like me, you've been kept awake at night wondering why Turnkey are selling those old Akai MPD16 MIDI drum pads for £79.99, here's your answer... The MPD24 is a new Akai midi box with 16 MPC-style drum pads, 6 faders, 8 knobs, MPC-style (i.e small) transport controls and a CD of classic drum machine samples. No price yet, but I'd love to see how this works with the wonderful Guru software beatbox. But what's up with the horrible shiny silver cheapo plastic finish? You don't see them using that on a £500 hardware drum machine, but they seem to think it's OK for something plugged into your computer. Product page (in German)
Posted by Tom Whitwell.
Comments:
Not quite an on-topic question here, but ... Isn't the appeal w/ the MPC series half about the pads and half how an MPC supposedly adds extra oomph/compression to the samples?
I've actually never spent more than a few minutes playing an MPC (farewell, my hip-hop cred), but that's the mythology.
Yeah I think the MPC "mystique" comes from it's timing correct and swing. But sample coming out of hardware samplers like the mpc's, S950, SP1200 and ASR-10's do have something speical.
IMO re: an MPC 2000 adding compression or oomphness to samples, now that is complete rubbish. the MPC2000 has the same audio engine and converters as the S2000 which is a real turkey (have you tried to max the resonance setting, yuk, awful filters)...
however, if we're talking 12 bits samplers like the 60 or the 1200, that's another story..
The only thing I like about this product is the dig Akai have at M-Audio on there home page... "At Akai, We set the standards for drum pad controllers, while others just gave you the finger"