I have it mostly on the table in the living room, and I occasionally plug in the Keystep 37 using the USB cable, and it’s such a simple, self-contained setup. What the MPC has done for me is to really turn music making into a daily activity. I now hear song ideas in my head again, in ways I did 25 years ago when I was 17 years old.įor me, the main conclusion here is that hardware makes me much more productive as a musician in general, and the MPC in particular is the sweet spot between performance-friendly synth hardware and song arrangement/groovebox capabilities.

But it’s indicative of how fun the experience is and also how productive it is. Why is that even relevant? Fair question.

All of them I’m proud of, the Digitone sounds so great! And before that, I spent the last 6 months producing merely 2 complete songs in Reason 10. Before that, I spent the last 2-3 months on the Digitone, where I made 3 song embryos similar to the MPC live performance songs above. So that’s my quantitative output in just a month: about 5 songs and several scrapped ideas. And then I’ve finalized one full song along with all the little automations recorded onto a full song sequence.

Then I’ve turned a few good ones into things I’m kind of proud of, about 4 “songs” (still just in the form of an 8-16 bar sequence that I perform live with track mutes, filter envelopes and pad mutes to turn it into an evolving song structure). I’ve produced a ton of short beats/ideas, some are bad, others are at least promising. I think the honeymoon is over, and I’m still having so much fun with it. 4-week update: the main point is that I’ve never been more productive.

Mpc one midi controller