Sunwarper

The Akai MPC Sample has just been released, and this latest iteration of the iconic MPC series takes a very different approach compared to the more “DAW-in-a-box” style of recent models. This is, first and foremost, a sampler—much closer in spirit to early MPCs like the MPC60. Like any new piece of gear, there are workflows, button combinations, and a UI to learn. But getting started doesn’t have to be complicated.

Getting into DAWless gear had a huge impact on my creativity. But there’s a problem that starts to creep in the deeper you go down the gear rabbit hole. Every piece of gear fixes a limitation in your previous setup, but it also introduces a new one. Before long, your setup starts to feel less like jamming and more like a hectic dance between menus, user interfaces, hardware, and cables. So I rebuilt my entire DAWless setup to fix that

It’s been about a month since Yamaha released one of the biggest updates yet for the Yamaha Seqtrak, and after spending real time with it, I wanted to share what’s actually changed. If you love the groovebox side of the Seqtrak, version 2.0 is a major improvement. If you were hoping for sampler upgrades… not so much.