RAVE RAVE, TECHNO TECHNO!

Akai released the new MPC1000 OS today. :)

YAY! Just in time for the weekend!

A friend of mine, who calls himself "Mander" online, has as his .sig a quote from a commercial: "McCain! What have you done with my fries!".

I kinda feel that way: "Akai! What have you done with my MPC1000 2.0 OS!".

Seriously. It was announced in like November, with the caveat "will be available in a week or two". I turned down a New Years Eve gig thinking "well, the new OS will be out mid-December, and I won't really have time to take advantage of all the new features before the gig...".

The new features look *insane*, btw. The top three that I'm looking forward to:

- Sample reverse. OMG, why was this missing in the first place?!? To take, say, a basskick and reverse it, which is a SUPER standard techno trick (like, drop out the kick for four beats, then play a reverse kick and drop back into the standard 4/4 kick pattern), is SO simple a trick... but on the current MPC1000 OS, you have to basically flip the sample using something like Soundforge and load it as an entirely different sample. Seriously, how hard is it to play the sample backwards?

- Start and end loop points using the "Q-Link" sliders. Alright, another one that should have been obvious from the get-go. The "Q-Link" sliders are pretty much useless - in the current iteration of the MPC1k OS, they're used for tuning samples, but ONLY if 1.) you're currently recording the pattern (ie, playing the beats on the pads), or 2.) you have that sample's "program" selected in the "MAIN" screen. Live, this is almost impossible. Like, in a given live set, I have a good 20-30 "programs" loaded (one for the SDS-800 samples, one for 909 samples, one for vocal samples PER TRACK, etc). In my dream world, I could arbitrarily assign a MIDI CC# to the Q-Link sliders and use them as MIDI controllers - say, one maps to the filter cutoff of my bassline? Now *that* would be useful.

- TIMESTRETCH. Holy crap. About frickin' time. "Yeah, Akai, I like to work with loops, but I think it's better if we think like it's 1995 and loops can't possibly change BPM without changing pitch...". Seriously.. wtf? Apparently the new OS, you can feed it a loop, tell it the BPM, and then tell it a new BPM and it'll just stretch the loop for you without (too many) audible artifacts. This was such a problem before, that I personally REFUSED to use any audio loops in my live rig, just because it was such a pain to change the tempo of a track (ie, you'd have to take every audio loop out of the sampler, into the computer, change the tempo, and reload it into the sampler).

God. Please. GIVE ME THE NEW MPC1000 OS OR KILL ME!#@$!

Well, that month went by a little too quickly...

I had this fantastic plan of spending every day of my week-long Christmas holiday in the studio, hammering out new techno. That failed, almost completely - I doubt I spent more than 10 hours total in the studio. At least I got a bunch of new basslines written.

I'm exploring a new route for bass... before, I was always sequencing my basslines using MIDI on the MPC1000, driving my Waldorf Pulse Plus. The Pulse plugged into the mixer, which had one channel of my DBX166XL compressor inserted into that channel's insert jack, and the kick was sidechained into the DBX, so the bassline ducked out of the way to allow the kick through.

Now, since I've faded the mixer and replaced it with a laptop running Plogue Bidule, I've decided to also fade the Pulse, and replace it with sampled bassline loops (sampled from the Pulse). The tricky bit I've been playing with is sampling the loops as one and a half bars, instead of just one bar... one beat before the bar, one beat after the bar. Whenever Akai releases the new OS, which supposedly allows setting the start and endpoints of a sample loop using the MPC's "q-link" sliders, I should be able to dial the bassline and kick in to get a supremely tight low end. :) I tried playing with software compression, but just wasn't able to find any software compressors that had the options and good sound of my DBX, so my bass and kick compression is staying hardware. I'd like to try switching it out for a Drawmer or something, we'll see in a few months.

Seven new basslines written, all stompy as fuck. I'm still nowhere *near* being able to play a set, and it's almost February... combined with the fact that GI Jody and I are putting together a massive techno party on February 18th, I don't foresee myself being able to play live until at least March, maybe later. :(

Oh well, this time off is good; it gives me a chance to rethink my sound, regroup and move forward with the techno... I can't keep playing the same songs over and over!