Akai MPX8 SD Sample Pad Controller

2023-07-02T17:11:21

The Akai MPX8SD is a very useful sample player for live performance. I never was drawn to using it in the studio but if you wanted to load samples and record a performance live with the pads that might be cool. My use for the MPX8SD was playing back looping vocal snippets, playing them rhythmically in time with my sequencers and drum machine for my live set. I was streaming my sets on Twitch and got positive feedback explicitly for the use of the MPX8SD. Playback of samples is basic and I opted to set my pad triggering to the latching mode. This way I could hit a pad on the downbeat and it would sustain, USUALLY looping in time, until I hit the pad again. I say usually looping in time because occasionally the samples would be altered and the sample lengths would get wonky. This happened infrequently. The pads can also be set to gate or just trigger. So all bases are covered. At least once I triggered the samples from an external MIDI device and some of the successive MIDI notes were ignored. For my uses, I actually enjoyed this because it gave an uncertain element of probability to the sample playback, which I found very pleasing. For the money performance sample playback has never been easier.

Tom N.