Akai MPK25 – Battery Powered Beats!

By Paul Dakeyne

July 15, 2009 | Posted in Music Technology

Back in the 90′s, the management company who ran the studio’s I spent most of my time in, started to represent a few notable American DJ/Producers. Although I was a seasoned advocate of Akai S1000 samplers at the time, when these guys walked in with their MPC‘s under their arms and started to lay down some beats, I watched and listened.. and was impressed with what I heard. This was my introduction to the ‘feel’ and flexibility of MPC beats.

The Akai MPK25 keyboard controller is a recent portable solution that brings that genuine MPC vibe to today’s Producers and beat makers. By building in what could be termed an ‘expressive engine’ into this unit, Akai have incorporated two classic note modifying MPC features, ‘Note Repeat’ and ‘Swing’.

• MPC Note Repeat: this enables the MPK to automatically play a rhythm pattern, such as a 16th notes hi-hat, or a specific snare fill, for accuracy and speed of entry.
• MPC Swing: This is often referred to as “the heart and soul of hip hop” because it transforms rigidly aligned note sequences into ‘human feel’ time alignments. The  degree and timing of swing that’s applied can of course be user specified to fit the track requirements.

Now add the above capability to one of the best drum sample libraries and software around, and you’ve got another summer madness offer that’s gonna expand your beat making repertoire ten-fold – the Akai MPK25/Battery 3 bundle. Battery 3′s had it’s praises sung earlier here at ‘Musical Notes‘, so check that post out to get the full low down on Native Instruments percussion gem.

Back to the MPK25, and of course its feature set ticks all the boxes for a fully capable midi controller with 25 note keys (semi-weighted with aftertouch), 12 authentic (pressure and velocity sensitive) MPC pads and easy reach transport controls. Another important addition is the replication of the MPC series ‘Q-Link’ control. The MPK offers up twelve virtual knobs and four virtual buttons, assignable to control just about any software parameter. Two different parameters per Q-Link can be controlled by engaging the knobs’ dual-bank selection. Rounding this off with an in-built funky arpeggiator feature, this is one tasty keyboard/controller solution..

About Paul Dakeyne

Paul Dakeyne has written 589 post in this blog.

Paul Dakeyne is a DJ/Producer who has dedicated the past two decades of his life to dance music production and DJ'ing. For six years, he toured globally for the world famous Ministry of Sound and has played DJ sets for the likes of U2 and for the legendary, Kraftwerk, Although remixing around 250 records in his career, as an artist in his own right, Paul landed one of dance music's seminal crossover moments with his "18 Strings' monster hit by Tinman - scoring a UK top ten in 1994. He also co-wrote and produced the music for BBC's Watchdog and Crimewatch when they were both revamped in 2001 and '06 respectively. His other career highlights have included an A&R stint for Mercury Records, lecturing in 'DJ culture and music technology' and creating mash-up mixes for Radio 1's, Chris Moyles. Paul joined the DV group in 2003 leading to his role as blog and feature author here at the DV Mag.

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Tags: akai, Akai S1000, battery 3, Controller, keyboard, MPK25, Sampler

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