"Akai seems to have ignored the synth side of samplers with the MPC500 (and possibly this extends across the MPC line), which is a little unfortunate. At the very least for OS updates, I hope they enhance the filter with highpass and bandpass modes, and possibly some modulators (for which there are at least some alternatives with the Q-Link slider). On the Q-link slider, it seems a shame that it can only be mapped to pitch, filter cutoff and volume. Be nice to at least be able to map to start/end points of a sample, to do some glitch cut-up stuff. Which is a concern that crops up all over this thing -- the designers have trimmed out anything that might lend itself to making music differently, i.e. not in the hip hop/dance loop/phrase kind of way."Title link takes you to the full review.
Bear in mind though, the full review is actually fairly positive, I really like the MPC500.
ReplyDeleteI just pointed out where I think there is room for improvement. I think its OS limitations are fairly minor in comparison to the gains of having a really good portable sampler, which is somewhat unprecedented.