Akai Professional MPC One – Drum Machine, Sampler & MIDI Controller with Beat Pads, Synth Engines, Standalone Operation and Touch Display

I've been making music primarily on PC for at least two decades, mostly using Renoise as my DAW. Towards the end of March of this year, I decided to go ahead and get an MPC One in hopes to spice up my recording artistry. I bought the unit before Akai raised the retail price a hundred dollars. The new price is still totally worth it though. Especially after their massive 2.10 system upgrade which packs the MPC One with even more Synth and Effect plugins to choose from.The learning process has been super easy. What I quickly found out, is that when you become an owner of an Akai MPC, you're instantly accepted into the worldwide club of MPC enthusiasts...kind of like the phenomenon of owning a Harley or Corvette, all of a sudden you're 'in' and everyone is happy to help you out. The MPC enthusiasts make tons of helpful tutorial and tips videos on YouTube, and not only that, any of the videos that apply to the workflow of the X and Live models will also apply to learning the One as the One packs the same exact features as far as production workflow. So between the countless MPC One, X, and Live tutorial videos, you'll be able to find plenty of great teachers free of charge. There's also a reasonably priced MPC bible that is supposedly to be the go to print resource to learn from and reference when needed, though I still haven't purchased this yet.The sound quality is crystal clear. Definitely pro quality. I uploaded tracks I had made with my One to the Free Music Archive and a couple of them ended up being smash hits and even ended up being used as background music in other people's videos and multimedia projects. This box has what it takes to create professional quality music that people will want to listen to and share.There are a couple 'bugs' I ran into while using my One, for instance, my unit happens to have the Q-Panel bug and I had to switch off my q panel monitor... and there was a couple times when things got buggy in the recording process... but that's when you just simply make sure your project is saved and then load the project up again and the bugs are gone. These issues I won't hold against Akai as they'll most likely iron out these issues over time. Any of the bugs I may have come across in the six months using it so far aren't the kind that will screw up any recordings I make with it.Speaking of the six months of owning it so far... this whole time I haven't opened or used my computer DAW for any of my compositions. With the One, I can record all my guitars and vocals right into the unit and then produce from there. I even find the hardware limitations of four effect slots for each channel inspiring. On the PC I'm used to having as many effects slots as my PC can handle, but the One's effect limitations cause me to think about the production more and I ended up learning a thing or two in the process.The effects are top notch as are the synth plug-ins. It comes with plenty of drum kits and instrument samples to use. I enjoy the F9 expansion it comes with. Probably won't invest in more expansions and just make my own, but it's nice that there are plenty of third-party expansions one can buy for their MPC to beef up their sound and instrument palette.The unit is built nicely and pads feel great. I love the expressiveness of the sensitivities of the pads. I'm finding out that I'll never want to program in another bass line when I can simply record it by playing it with way more expression by using the pads. All the ports feel sturdy. I love that it has an SD slot so I can expand the storage. Tracks save at a decent speed when saving to the SD card.Might update this review later, but so far, all in all, I'm madly in love with my MPC One. It's a great little all-in-one machine. I had originally planned to buy it to enhance my studio, but the thing quickly ended up becoming my studio altogether. Love it. Definitely will stick with MPC for now on.

I'm not a "beat maker," but I did want some kind of song creation tool that didn't require me to use my computer and DAW. So, I've tried various options. The MPC One comes about as close as I can imagine for a complete song creation tool that is much more hands one than a computer and mouse. The touch screen is surprisingly great and the workflow, though complex, is actually layed out very well. I was inclined to give it a four star because Akai has terrible Inonexistent?) customer support, but this unit itself deserves a five.Be careful about buying any additional software or sounds from Akai. Their website sells "expansion packs" which seem like they will work on your MPC standalone machine. Many of them do not, at all. They only work with the computer software that comes with the MPC--in other words you have to be connected to your computer and use their dedicated software to use them as expansions. Also, after buying more than $100 of extra sounds from Akai, and purchasing the right to download the sounds for up to a year, the next time I logged in, their website said I'd made no previous purchases (despite what my bank statement says). I contacted Akai about it and.... crickets. That was a good week ago. Very disappointing. Won't get fooled again.Anyway, steer far and wide from buying anything additional from Akai, but the MPC One is really a great investment.

I wanted to buy a mpc one for quite sometime but was always slightly intimidated by it for some reason. As a owner of many other groove boxes, the mpc one definitely has the easiest and most versatile work flow for me. The new pay software is very good and has already had some very reasonable sales. The software synths mix very well with expensive analog equipment and it’s a killer brain sequencer.Very inspirational and intuitive instrument! It’s by far the best way create a non computer workflow.

AMAZING? YES! YES! YES! Easy to use? NOPE. All I can say is watch YouTube tutorials. I am a pretty good musician. But - this thing is difficult to understand at first. There is no instruction manual or tutorials. There's a lot of workflows to take into consideration when making music with this thing. YouTube everything, bro. I LOVE this thing - but in the 3 months I have had it, I doubt if I have achieved more than 1% of this thing's capacity. Good luck.

Sounds great

Great item. I love the Akai products. This particular item just wasn’t for me at the time. Retuned it to Amazon and they took forever, holding my refund money for almost a MONTH! Horrible. I never ever had a refund from them take that long.