An Akai MPK49 Review
Through the recommendations of Adam Adamson Alexander and the sellage of ol’ Danny Dan Wilcox I have received a mighty fine Akai MPK49. It is tip top. The build quality is through the roof, it feels like I have a workstation synth sitting on my tiny desk. All the buttons, the faders, FADERS, and knobs all feel gorgeous to use.
The keyboard range is awesome, the keys themselves being semi-weighted feel far more ‘instrumenty’ than my previous keyboards, in fact ALL MIDI surfaces I’ve used. They offer more resistance, so are easier to play expressively.
The pads are sweet, the same as on the MPC500, but having come from and still using a Korg padKontrol, I have to say they’re rather blocky and require quite a bit of initial force to ‘register’. The Korg pads can be activated with a feather touch… allowing very subtle and expressive cymbal-brushing, or whathaveyou. I can achieve the same roll and velocity wailing effects on the MPK (using Note Repeat, time division/tap tempo, and pressure sensitivty) as on the PK, though this is not as intuitive as the PK’s programmable XY touch pad — so easy to pull off dynamic drum rolls, or other more CRAZY effects.
Speaking of the pressure sensitivity of the pads, I enquired to Akai by email of their programmability (they default as continuous pad velocity controllers), and was promptly told this is not currently possible.
But the suggestion would be forwarded to the engineers. What a bunch of sweet dudes!:)
An arpeggiator built into a MIDI controller? I was skeptical of its depth, having used a few hardware arps, and comparing them to Ableton Live’s fantastic software arpeggiator, they just fall short as gimmicks. Reading the manual told of hidden glories in the edit mode of the arp: it contains multiple patterns, a swing and gate setting — combined with the velocity-sensitivty of the arp in general use, and time division settings, this can create some truly wonderful sounds.
And it has a MIDI clock.
Oh yes.
Syncing to Ableton… tapping in a new tempo… firing off some independant percussion from the pads along with arpeggiation… sweeeet!
Trucks Reversing In Love
The original, a year ago, the remix, a few months ago, and it’s finally found its way to my website.
Trucks Reversing in Love in Levels [05.09 MB] — A remix of Sgt Nick’s “Trucks Reversing in Love”. This track is all about melodic wildness and blistering sonic shenanigans. Phase cancellation. Compression-muting. And above all else, bore-drum.
This guy is ‘loud’, in the sense that it ‘sounds’ ‘loud’, but its loudness really depends on your volume setting. I’ve mixed it so it peaks at about 50% of available headroom, so if you’re listening to other things, and then this comes on, it doesn’t destroy your ears. If if you’re in the position to do so, you can play it on loudspeakers, and turn the volume WAY UP. I imagine this is it in its most glorious format.
The original is by Nick. The original contained ‘secrets’. And utilised some instruments I designed in Ableton Live. So its a pretty sweet collab.
Yow!
Exotica?
Martin Denny and his line-up created an imaginary musical landscape of luscious tropical delights: damp, foreboding jungles, vibrantly plumed birds in full flight, grimly silent Tiki gods in clearings overgrown by creepers, sleepy fishing villages on bamboo stilts, volcanoes erupting with molten orange lava, alluringly smiling little brown nymphs in grass skirts – the land of lotus blossoms – in a word: Exotica
From Essay Recordings
Scenes from the wonderworlds of Ghibli come to mind: Spirited Away, Laputa, the jungles of Mononoke. Delights for the mind!
Reverb?
Right now, I’m inside a wachine machine with some west african drums. Just a few seconds ago, dropping nails and sheets of glass to 200ft in the Howes Cavern, Albany, NY. Adam suggests I park a boeing aircraft in the cavern, and move the cavern to a forest, which will be approached by a fire truck.
Peachy Melba!
I’m off to Melbourne for a week come Thursday morn’, staying with Becca, it’s going to be GLORIOUS :D Much photo to come!
LiarLiar of Melbs: Clover Glory!
Bee in Melbourne writes:
I have seen the glory of the clover in LiarLiar in Melbourne! I was, perhaps, a little too excited to hear about it. I have long missed the good ol’ Filter/Kona coffee. It seems like a traitorous thing to think after making espresso for so long, but so few places do it well.. and there was something wonderful about being able to taste the coffee without the incompetencies of the barista making a black coffee something to be endured rather than enjoyed. Although I haven’t tryed it yet (LiarLiar’s espresso is delicious), I am very excited that filter coffee is making a comeback, and being taken to a whole new level.
AWESOME :D
Roastey training
Weeks into my training on the Probat 5KG and the Probat UG22 at People’s Coffee Roastery in Newtown my head is full with lots of information but little feel for the roast process. Rene and Matt have skills to the heavens that quietly go unnoticed it seems! The wonderful smells continue and seem to linger in the mind days after. I can smell bits of the roast in the beans in the hopper at the cafe, and in the extraction itself, awesome!
I’ve learnt that our Timor Maubesse and Ethiopian Yirgacheffe beans are roasted to a plunger or filter profile, slightly less into the 2nd, exothermic ‘crack’ right at the end of the roast than they would be for use in espresso, or espresso blending. This is to give more of the origin taste — the particular flavour of that bean, and less the ‘coffee’ taste — the general ‘roast bean’ flavour that can sometimes make it hard to differentiate between coffees after they’ve been brewed. This is exciting, at home on my new plunger I can taste the difference it makes, from the Nicaraguan, Colombian Excelso, Mexican Chiapas, to the Eth and Timor.
People’s will be opening a new store on Garret Street, just off Cuba Street in town very soon now, and we’ll soonafter have a Clover machine for cupping-quality, espresso-prep-speed single origin glory. People will be able to walk in off the street and order ‘a colombian’, or ‘an ethiopian’ and savour the incredibly fruity, bitter-free black coffee as it should be enjoyed! It’s going to change the way coffee is appreciated and thought of in New Zealand, from a Starbucks ‘flavouring’ in their milkshakes, to the origin-specific, complex beverage it is.
Roasting Coffee!
Dear Internet,
roasting coffee on a Probat machine is awesome. Roasting coffee is flat-out sweetness. The science! The smell! The temporal wonder! Hooray!
Gumbo Beats in the Dew
Dan G and I converse:
I like the gumbo music myself
Gumbo and bass
Fishing beats
Gumbo sooop
Yellow jacket
steamy brew
drinking tea to keep warm
wearing galoshes
listening to the birds as they pump out the bass
Watching squirrels as they bury kickdrums in the soggy earth
Lush layers of dewHue fall down over the valley, thickening up the air, till it reaches a sog of its own
Desaturated rainbows form over every sheen
Sweat beads form, the humidy thick in the dewHue air, all filled a skanky-sweet aroma, seeping and oozing through the pores, the molten honey flows
A Truckload of Tune
Much recent music to come
More in the series of extremely short compositions!