BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. My name is Bill Holland, and this is the MPK49 from Akai Professional. You'll notice here on the rigth I have my sliders which allow me to bring the levels p and down, my pads are here from the MPCs that Akai is so famous for, and a keyboard for playability.

[BILL DEMONSTRATES USING THE MPK49]

Now, the way I arm a track is I go over here and I can just hit this and it'l arm the actual track. You'll notice right now I have no drums, so I have to hit it again [BILL HITS A PAD] and now my track is armed, bring this level down a little bit, and I have a guide track that I just made out of a basic hi-hat. I'm going to hit Record>Play [BILL RECORDS A BASS DRUM TRACK USING A PAD], hit Stop and go back and keep adding to it [BILL OVERDUBS A SNARE TRACK].

The real beauty of this is even though right now I'm a little bit off beat, I can play this back and go into Ableton Live, and I can set record quantizing to be 16th beats, so if I'm a little bit off it will correct that for me.

[BILL PLAYS TRACK QUANTIZED]

Now, if the velocities are off, I can go back into Ableton Live Lite and control the velocities just by editing those values. I can also set sensitivity up here by going over to Global and just setting pad sensitivity to either lower or higher [BILL ADJUSTS AND TRIES OUT PAD SENSITIVITY SETTINGS].

Now also keep in mind that every parameter is editable, so if I were to go to pitch wheel, for example, and hit edit, it will actually bring up the pitch wheel/pitch bend values right here that I can then set however I want; same with mod wheel.

Now, if you look on the left, there is a pad bank control; this allows you to switch between four different banks of pads, allowing you to have a much bigger drum kit than if you only had 12 of these, so it's a really easy way to navigate your patches. Also, this is very similar to the 500 series MPCs from Akai which you may have used.

Also, you'll see there's an arpeggiator here which is not on the MPCs. I can turn it on or off and also hit latch, so if I ever bring up the keyboard for example [BILL DEMONSTRATES ARPEGGIATOR], I can just let it keep playing [BILL DEMONSTRATES LATCH FUNCTION]. Now, if I don't like the pattern the arp is playing, I can go hold it down here and hit Edit and it will ask me what type of arp control I want to have. In this case, I could be go down [BILL DEMONSTRATES DOWN PATTERN], up [BILL DEMONSTRATES UP PATTERN], or even random [BILL DEMONSTRATES RANDOM PATTERN], and then I can set the octaves by using the arrow keys here [BILL ADJUSTS ARPEGGIATOR OCTAVE SETTINGS].

Notice as well that these knobs up here are assignable to any parameter, so in this case this particular synthesizer I have release, attack, decay, and sustain set [BILL DEMONSTRATES ASSIGNABLE KNOBS].

Now, a lot of people may be worried about the keys. These are very good keys, really good action, really solid. They actually, if you feel down here, a lot of times keys will be hollowed out underneath. These are actually solid here and then they connect solid at the back here so there's not a lot of room there for them to play in a negative way so they feel very, very solid.

Something else to keep in mind is that you also have an A and B control bank here which allows you to either go A control, B control, or AB at the same time, very useful for switching up banks and for navigating between more than eight channels of recording. Here you'll see time division control. We also have a tap tempo that can automatically tap the tempo of your song that you are playing along with and, of course, octave control. [BILL DEMONSTRATES OCTAVE CONTROL]

Alright, so I'm going to show you really quickly how to make a track in here. I've lined up my drums here and my synth here, and I've hit arm, and I'm going to hit Play>Record and we're going to record a line [BILL RECORDS A SYNTH TRACK], and hit stop. You'll notice it overrode a little bit but I can fix that by grabbing my clip and dragging it back.

Now, we’re going to bring the sub-bass. I've armed the sub-bass [BILL AUDITIONS SUB-BASS], I'm going to take the octave down [BILL AUDITIONS SUB-BASS AGAIN], and we will hit record [BILL RECORDS SUB-BASS TRACK], and stop and play it back and now you have a track. [BILL PLAYS BACK RECORDED TRACKS].

Well, it's pretty simple, really easy to get started with and probably one of the more fun controllers I've had in my hands in the last year. This is the Akai Professional MPK49 and you're watching Gearwire.Com.