Two Hand Band

awesome....i was looking to buy an mpc. I mistook them for drum machines....

mpc is the hip hop guitar! long live the mpc!

Showcases the machine and much of its' versatility -- though i would like to have seen someone representing breakcore/drum and bass invovled too, as it is an indispensable tool for anything involving breaks, whether the name of the genre exists yet or not.

best sampler ever i love my mpc

much love

DAMU!!!

nice pod man, really feeling it, nice to get a history of akai. the mpc is a staple in hip hop and its importance will never die

tora1, buy one asap, its the best hobby I have found so far

this was a great pod.... i like how it showed a good diversity of musicians that use this. hip-hop made the MPC huge but all types of people use it now.

however, i was somewhat amazed there wasn't even the smallest mention of DJ Shadow!? the only person to have an album in the guiness book of records for most samples... guess how he made those samples? yup the MPC. obviously, mention of premier & dilla is a must, but i feel like Shadow is right up there with them.... especially the way he gets down with it live!

Nice mini-documentary about the MPC. I never had one 'cause I couldn't afford it -- I had the lowly rack-mounted S01 sampler, and just a couple years ago I got an S2000 with SCSI for next to nothing. Sweet machines.

AKAI should buy the rights to this video to promote their sweet hardware in these days of software MPCs running on Macs and PCs.

Are the days of dedicated hardware like this numbered when a $20 iPhone app can do most of the same stuff?

the first real sampler that people used in hip hop was
the sp1200 then the popular piece was the ensoniq asr 10 then came the akai mpc
get it straight

the reason why the akai became more popular was that the touch pads were touch sensitive and it had a lot more sample time

I have it straight. Damu says "machines like these," and he meant samplers, not specifically MPCs. In an early cut, which was longer, I had the bite about the touch sensitive pads -- I would have loved to dive deeper, but you know which way attention spans are going,

MIDI* production center

I've got another word for sampling: stealing. Plagiarism at best. If you can't learn to play an instrument, sit in the audience.

Its not necessarily "stealing". You could put it that way, but the beauty of hip hop is taking something, reprocessing it and rearranging it. Its just as creative a task as writing a melody, plus the hip hop tracks (like Damus for instance) are usually more interesting pieces of music than the tracks from which they are sampled from.

Two thumbs up!

Hi Gage-
Great piece. You hit the nail on the head in seeing the MPC as a musical instrument as opposed to a recording/editing product. I think the MPC and other contemporary hardware and software music products are emerging species in the evolution of new musical instruments. And some might say that the 4x4 pad matrix is an example of a new human interface for music. Again, great story.
- Roger Linn

Wow! Thanks for the compliments, Roger. I am deeply honored.

Gabe