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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!#@$!
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