Akai Mpc 2500

[Prince Aboubakar]

MPC2500 has set the industry benchmark for beat production. It features a 32-voice drum/phrase sampler with up to 128MB RAM and extensive editing capabilities. Designed for professional music-production environments as well as DJs and other live performers, MPC2500 features a time-tested drum-pad surface, twin on-board effects processors, four Q-Link controllers for real-time control, 10 analog outputs, and a S/PDIF digital output.

MPC2500 sports a 100,000-note, 64-track sequencer that can be assigned to four different MIDI outputs for a total of 64 independently addressable MIDI channels. Internal sounds reside in flash memory and can easily be swapped out via Compact Flash cards, an optional hard drive, or an optional CD-ROM drive. A CF card with preloaded sounds is included to get you started.

I doubt, however, that Akai are too concerned by these apparent handicaps, because the MPC2500, like illustrious forebears such as the MPC60 and MPC3000, is sure to be welcomed with open arms by producers of hip-hop, the most lucrative musical style on the planet. This is a genre where weeks can be spent digging through old vinyl for just the right source material, but where spontaneity and speed are the rule of the studio. In this context the MPC becomes a beautifully adapted production tool, providing just what's required to get the job done at high speed.

Now, load some of your own personal stash of drum hits from disk (most hip-hop producers will have their own hand compiled collection) into some of the other pads and tap in your drum parts, letting the sequencer's input quantisation take care of any timing inaccuracies. Another five minutes later and your main beat's done, the sequencer never having left record mode.

Twenty minutes from when you started you have a four-bar pattern which can act as the basis for a complete backing track. You can then create variations in the arrangement by muting and unmuting tracks at different points in the track, either using facilities built into the MPC, or by farming the MPC's 10 outputs to an automated mixer or multitrack recorder. After half an hour, you're ready for the MC to walk in and lay down vocals alongside the backing track.

Now I'm not saying that the process is always as simple as this, because you'll often want to edit, say, a sample's start/end points or tuning, or its playback filter settings or envelope times. Crucially, however, the simplicity of the sampler and the elegance of the operating system mean that such adjustments don't actually slow down the track-creation process at all.

Heading up the improvements to the MPC2500 sequencing experience is the new Grid Edit page, which provides a graphical display of the track data from up to 16 pads simultaneously. Delete, Copy and Paste functions are easy, and I'm sure I won't be the only one to find this mode more friendly than Step Edit for basic sequencing tasks.

Given that track muting has such an important role in hip-hop track arrangement, it was only a matter of time before Akai made it possible to record Track Mute Events alongside all the other sequence data. Fortunately, the sequencer's track solo function is independent of these events, rather than being implemented through the track mute switches.

Live musicians using the MPC's pads as mute switches to arrange tracks on the fly will be pleased to know that you can now also group tracks so that their mute switches toggle together. Things can go a bit amiss if you have Track Mute Events on some grouped tracks and not on others, because these events operate their respective tracks independently of their mute grouping, but I don't imagine this will cause too many problems in practice.

In addition to the card slot, you can install both an internal hard disk (five different models are currently supported, with capacities of 20-80GB) and an internal CD-RW drive. (Neither were shipped with the review unit, though, so I couldn't test these out.) If you install the CD burner, you can apparently use it to load CD-ROM sample libraries and back up your Sequence, Program, and Sample data to cheap CD-R or CD-RW blanks, as well as to burn audio CDs one track at a time.

Until recently, these kinds of optional onboard drives would have been pretty much essential for serious users, but I imagine that the appearance of a USB socket on the MPC2500's rear panel will now make them something of an irrelevance for most users. After all, if you have a computer with spare hard drive space and/or a CD/DVD-RW drive, it probably still makes sense to use it for non-real-time file-management tasks, even if you prefer to use dedicated hardware for your actual music-making.

With the MPC2500 switched into a special USB transfer mode, you can connect it up to your the computer. Mine recognised the Compact Flash card as an external storage drive, allowing me to drag files to and from it much as I would with any other drive. A variety of Akai sampler formats are supported, but 16-bit, 44.1kHz WAV files can also be read directly, which allows fairly easy access to practically every one-shot and phrase sample library you might want. When you're done whisking files back and forth, it's advisable to properly dismount the external drive before disconnecting the USB cable, although there's no need to power down either MPC or computer at any point.

The most useful of the additions are the new sampler features. Long overdue, in my opinion, was some improvement on the simple resonant low-pass filtering of the MPC2000XL, so I'm pleased to report that the MPC2500 now has two multi-mode filters in series for every sample, each filter offering high-pass, band-pass, and two flavours of low-pass. The resonance of all types is variable, although only the second type of low-pass response can self-oscillate. In addition, you can link the second filter's operation to the first, thereby exaggerating the default 12dB/octave filter responses to 24dB/octave. You do need to be a little careful here, though, as the filter has a fixed digital headroom, and it's easy to introduce a fairly nasty digital clipping if you crank up the resonance too far, even with the built-in filter attenuation at maximum.

The new filter options really make a difference when it comes to working with phrase samples for hip-hop and dance styles. The most obvious example is that drum breaks can now have the kick and/or snare filtered out of them so that they don't conflict with your drum programming. Some hip-hop producers like to chop their sampled music loops into frequency bands with crossover boxes so that they can have more control over the instrument balance, but this powerful technique is now possible within the MPC by triggering several copies of a sample with different filter settings. It would have been nice to have EQ-style peaking and shelving filters as other options here, but what there is already gives you ten times the sample-mangling power of the MPC2000XL.

It's great, too, that Akai have finally added in a tempo-sync'd LFO for every sample, and that its rate and onset delay settings are usefully expressed in beats and ticks. Triangle, sine, square, sawtooth (up and down) and random waveforms are available, and they can control a sample's pitch, filter cutoff, level and pan settings. This one addition effectively gives you vibrato, autowah, tremolo and autopan effects for every sample, which again expands the sonic options enormously.

A couple of other updates address some annoying problems you encounter if you use long phrase samples: firstly, when you stop the machine's transport, any long one-shot samples continue playing; and, secondly, if you don't start the transport at the beginning of the looped sequencer pattern, the likelihood is that the main sample around which your track is based won't be triggered until the next iteration of the loop. Both of these problems have now been addressed. One new option ensures that all one-shot samples are automatically muted when the transport is stopped, while another specifies any given sequencer track as a Continuous Sample Track, which means that samples triggered from the MPC's sampler should always play back correctly, no matter where you start playing from in the sequencer pattern. I did find that this latter function wasn't entirely foolproof when I had multiple MPC samples triggering from a single sequencer track, but for a single long phrase sample it seemed to work flawlessly.

Finally, there's an improvement on the MPC2000XL's Slice Sound option, which originally just chopped drum loops into 16 equal slices, leaving you to fine-tune the slices to match the audio beats. The MPC2500's new Chop Shop page still lets you do the same thing, but can also be set to automatically detect drum transients in the sample, in a similar way that something like Propellerheads' Recycle does. You get three different parameters with which to tweak the slicing algorithm, although I found it sliced up a drum loop pretty well even with the default values.

Once the slicing has been done, manually or automatically, you can edit any slice boundaries you wish and extract individual slices as new samples. In addition, you can convert the whole sliced loop in two different ways: as a series of individual samples assigned to different pads in a new sampler program, so that you can make your own patterns from the slices; or as a Patched Phrase (Chop Shop's equivalent of a REX file) which will automatically play the loop slices in sync with changes in the sequencer's tempo.

The Chop Shop is clearly a significant advance, but it's hamstrung slightly by the fact that automatic beat slicing can only be carried out on mono samples, or on one side of a stereo sample. This is a shame, because while beat-slicing is best suited to drum loops, I imagine most people are going to want to keep their drums in stereo. However, even if you don't use Chop Shop to slice up your main drum loop, it'll still make it much easier to pull out individual hits from mixed loops and vinyl recordings.

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