The toughest reviews to approach without bias are those of a new generation of gear that you have long championed. In my case, any new MPC is something I race to preview and take great delight in pushing and prodding around my studio space, hammering away neatly on rubber pads and stressing the poor sequencer out. The MPC you see, loves this kind of treatment and in most cases, visits you in your sleep at night, daring you to push it more, hammer it longer and stress it out with increasingly more rocking sequences. Honestly, it’s not just me.Introducing the Akai MPC… 1000We will avoid the usual MPC history lesson for once. What we have here in its simplest form is a phrase sampler and a sequencer in a neat little package. 16 rubber pads grace its top exterior along with volume and gain pots, a host of interfacing buttons, and the start-stop, song-position transport controls one would expect of any sequencer. Minus the tilting LCD screen it does appear at first to be just another MPC revision, at a size that is as useful as it is potentially annoying. I for one have loved the solid dependability of the MPC2000XL whilst pounding pads onstage under the guise of triggering samples and making music. From all accounts the MPC1000 has gotten past the slightly wobbly nature of the first build models, and my review model certainly shows evidence of this improvement.Mummie already has a laptop, what’s this thing then?The MPC concept is a simple one. Load it up wave files or sample sounds yourself, choose a bpm to record at, hit record and start tapping pads. The speed of the workflow and streamlined interface make writing music a joy for those who find themselves getting tied down on computer interfaces. For beat programming there is little else to compete for feel and fun, hence the almost ubiquitous devices now out by competitor manufactures with rubber pads crammed onto the top. The MPC sequencer is notoriously simple to use yet allows for in depth editing of midi CC and PC messages and all manner of Sysex debauchery. Add to this list FX and re-sampling and you have a compelling little unit for both the studio and stage. The midi capabilities of the unit are not to be ignored, with two midi ins and two midi outs, all independent yet accessed with a flick of the cursor buttons. It is a trial of the written word to convey the simplicity of working with an MPC, the single reason the range has enjoyed the success it has. Alongside a laptop with an audio interface and some softsynth or sampling programs the MPC1000 is something to behold. It is impossible to “tinker around with” the unit and not be creatively inspired or come up with beat or sequence programming simply by virtue of the hands on ease. It must be stated however that this unit does excel at sample manipulations and beat programming so for those inclined to pay four octave synth parts, a synth or controller is still needed, albeit a natural extension of the mpc1000 once plugged into the midi port.Without boring with numbers and statistics it pays to note that the MPC is a 100,000 note sequencer with 99 Sequences and 64 Tracks per Sequence. You can program a whole drum groove on one “Track” and use the Tracks as song parts, or split it with kick drum on Track 1, snare on Track 2, hi hats on Track 3 and so on. Whilst there are endless ways to put a song together one generally does as above, and uses the mute functions to flesh out a rough groove with variations, then copies that to another Sequence and edits that. Sequences can then be dumped together as another whole Sequence or pieced together as you see fit in song mode. In short… flexible, and without the god-awful eye strain of Roland Groovebox sequencers or old MMT-8s.What’s so new on the 1000?Without getting lost in a comparisons list the MPC1000 is not only now roughly the size of an a4 piece of paper, but acts as a USB slave drive for dumping samples. This works out of the box though it ‘locks’ the unit and needs a restart to get back into writing music. The CF media makes for backing up data a lot quicker then the legacy formats of floppy and zip of previous models. The USB port is slave only, meaning USB hard-drives and CD burners can’t be used. I’m not sure wether this is a firmware issue or not, but it is clearly something that would add value to the unit. Another great new addition is the positioning of the headphone socket at the front of the unit, along with two footswitch jacks. Sadly they still refuse to follow common sense and print the names of the jacks on the top of the unit, thus creating the common annoyance of leaning over racks to see which jack to patch into, something not enjoyed when setting up onstage. Speaking of onstage, the Autoload folder is a godsend. As may seem obvious, it automatically loads programs and samples and makes for a simple “turn on and play scenario”. As any musician who has had a clumsy stage-hand pull out the power can tell you, this is a great function and can save precious time and effort juggling disks. Power up! Power up! POWER UP!!!I’ve long since discovered that the best test of gear is in the kind of use where some pressure is involved. As a talented saxophonist was visiting our house I ushered him into the recording booth (read: converted bedroom) whilst I got ready in the control room (read: adjoining converted bedroom) and deciding to tempt fate, chose the MPC1000 as tool of choice to lead the recording session with. At first I was bemused with the retirement of the trusty SHIFT key and multifunction buttons… in a completely opposite move to the MPC4000 the little MPC1000 has pushed all editing functions, letters and numerals onto the rubber pads themselves. The MPC400 rather oddly shoved things all over the place which sure makes entering file names difficult on the fly.Getting used to the new compact operating system didn’t take long, as all essential functions are basically the same. Some things such as creating and editing Programs (Akai speak for groups of samples) are even easier, plus allow a simple method of layering up to four samples per pad. Within minutes id routed a simple beat to the assignable outputs to act as a rough headphone mix for the saxophonist in the other room, and the mains outs to my laptop to record, with the front headphones for monitoring. As the unit passed that test with flying colours, I took it to bed with me and fell asleep that night dicing up a vocal take by a friend singer and putting her words back together again over a little electro funk beat and then re-sampled the whole thing and saved it to CF card. I dreamt that night about a battery powered model… which I can tell you is a very sexy dream to have indeed.Akai must have screwed something up… right?Straight away I bemoan the death of the mighty “16 Slice” function. Put simply, it chopped a loop up in 16 bits and assigned them to the 16 pads for you whilst creating a new Program. You could sit and adjust the cutting points if you wanted to, assisted via a waveform representation on the screen, but half the fun of random drum sample chopping was, well, the randomness. Think prefuse73 and Squarepusher because, well, that’s exactly what they did. Also missing are a whole host of sample editing functions, things which many argue are now commonly done on computer but I for one like to have the option of time-stretching on a sampler. It actually feels a bit odd to be using an Akai sampler without the odd artifacting time-stretch algorithms. Some industry boffins I’ve talked to suggest that this will all appear in good time, but typical of Akai I wouldn’t hold my breath, lest I pass out with all the Z8 owners awaiting crucial or positive updates.The 8 outputs options of the 2000xl range is missing, this time being a 4 output set of ¼ inch jacks alongside as the main left/right outputs as standard. Digital in and out still remains for all your SPDIF freaks although SMPTE is missing, perhaps not much of an issue in this day an age, but the curious omission of MTC as a midi synchronisation protocol has many heads scratching. I refuse to believe that this and other DSP based functions are removed for good reason (“cost cutting” as Akai claims), and would hazard a guess that we will see familiar functions in future updates.Worth selling your MPC2000xl?I’ve been asked this a lot and it bares inclusion. A lot of discussion regarding the MPC1000 revolves around wether it kills the MPC2000xl. It’s a hard fight to call actually. With the MPC1000 losing some pretty standard sample manipulation functions there is certainly a price to pay for moving across. Likewise without those functions most Programs made on other MPC’s are rendered useless, and simply reflect pad assignment. The MPC2000xl has certainly dropped in price, especially on the second hand market, so may be a viable choice for those looking for a more robust live sequencer and sampler in terms of its metal build. The MPC1000 as-is isn’t in my opinion much of an upgrade over the old grey faithful, excepting perhaps the larger ram capacity and USB connectivity, which is hardly worth the expense for we of ye olde 2megs RAM and floppy disk lineage. I do have a feeling that a few new functions and options will be available soon, including an internal hard-drive, as evidenced by mounting brackets already internally fixed… so perhaps wait and see. For the time being, its too close a race to call in terms of the two units side by side. Wrap it up man…One word. Lust. Okay maybe another… useful. I’m feeling pretty guilty neglecting my old grey 2000XL but perhaps, like many older MPC owners, I’m left feeling vindicated upon discovering the flaws of the MPC1000. As mentioned I sincerely doubt that these flaws will remain for too long, as sales for the units have been phenomenal and the user base is quite vocal in its demands, as shown even on the Akai mailing list. The truth is the MPC1000 simply works, as any MPC does, and quite happily takes all the programming punishment one can serve in a caffeine drenched night’s music writing. Whilst I deliberately avoided commenting on the quality of the onboard effects (you cant expect a Lexicon reverb can you?) I cant speak highly enough of sound quality. It sounds great without a hint of distortion even when screaming away with some obscene drum’n’bass sequence, even more-so with the tweaking of the filters, finally more useful then the boring low pass filter of older models.There will always be a use and a need for hardware units such as this, where specialised functions and dedicated controls cut through the mouse-clicks and waiting of computer based systems. The MPC1000 is a great sign that Akai are indeed awake and paying attention, and a welcome addition to the MPC range. Offering ease of use, great sound and a transparent interface that welcomes you to make music, it’s pretty hard to refrain from adding one to the studio, especially at the current miniscule prices. For electronic musicians playing live, with or without laptops, its damn near essential, and looks to sustain the MPC dominance of the reliable sequencer market for many years to come.Thanks to Musiclab for the loan of the review unit.