#12

I picked up a maschine mk1 when they were released and have preferred those pads to many others, both in their software and in midi mode

I’ve always felt kind of meh about my qunexus. Was never very satisfied w/ the feel/sensitivity of it for melodic stuff and I’m with Galapagoose on leaning towards akai-sized pads for drum stuff. Haven’t tried it w/ CV though, that would likely be fun …

#13

I have a quneo and a second-hand mpd32 - both are pretty good but the mpd32 was all but useless before fitting rubber ‘corks’ and upgrade pads. Quneo maybe doesn’t feel as ‘bouncy’ as the mpd with aftermarket pads.

Have been runnning a quneo on linux driving an mfb drum machine with my own midi looping software and find those pads totally fun to play on once quneo is set up right - may end up selling the mpd as it’s rather big and clunky.

Quneo can slip around on the wrong table and make some noise by hitting the pads - mine now sits on a piece of unfinished plywood sitting on a keyboard stand, which works well.

#14

Oh yes - the mpd32 (and 26) had terribly unresponsive pads relative to traditional MPC and the later mpd18 & 24.

#15

oh dear, now I’m thinking I should definitely sell the mpd32 & maybe try out an 18 or 218. Do the later mpd designs also benefit from aftermarket pad upgrade kits?

#16

@rick_monster
I put the cork and the extra thick pads on my old one from mpcstuff. Worked brilliantly. Only got rid to buy a 128!!

#17

hey thanks so much, everyone, for sharing your experiences. it looks like the new mpd218 has been getting good reviews on pad sensitivity. nice and compact, too.

i may go for that, though i like the idea of getting something with 5-pin midi… so perhaps ye olde mpd18/24 will be the way to go.

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#18

Wow. That’s a nice little controller. I have a padKONTROL myself. Have had it for quite a few years. It’s always been good to me but as mentioned it does require a lot of power, takes up a lot of space on my desk. Right now I’m using it mostly as a controller for an MS-20m. Definitely oing to check out one of thes 218’s now.

#19

Never used one, but trigger finger pro has dropped to under £100. Seems a decent price. Nice to have the step sequencer built in.

#20

So did you get an mpd in the end? If so which one? I’m pretty deep into a rig-tinkering stage and thinking about swapping out that ugly quneo for blank pads & a 128 while everything has its guts hanging out…

#21

@rick_monster i’ve held off… but going to get one soon. the mpd24 is looking appealing. i’d go for a newer 218, but i’d like to have the midi din ports.

@Galapagoose can you tell me more about that max patch that read aftertouch data? sounds cool.

#22

It had 16 identical samplers (one per pad), plus a button (on the grid) as a ‘clear’ shift.

  • pressing any pad lightly would playback whatever is in the buffer (max 16seconds i think).
  • audio would be overdubbed into the buffer whenever the pressure on that pad was above a threshold (half way?)
  • hold ‘clear’ and press any pad to clear it
  • triple press ‘clear’ to clear all the buffers (for changing songs).

Thus you could get interesting overdubs as well as ‘cut’ effects by press&holding a pad, then applying heavy/light pressure to cut the overdubbing in and out rhythmically. There was an additional 4x4 grid on screen where you could arm/disarm the overdubbing per pad. I used this simultaneously to playing back samples in ableton – I would layer vocals over some long melodic samples, or other times deliberately use feedback on certain drum samples (eg. whenever i hit the snare, it samples the acoustic feedback on the mic and adds it to the snare).

2 Likes
#23

any videos of this functionality in action? sounds so cool

#24

the JamKAT looks awesome. love the pad layout. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bokToqFV-Fc

i recently acquired a DrumKAT Turbo and it rocks. the pads use FSR tech so they’re super responsive and there’s a ton of really advanced features you normally don’t see in a midi controller. you can special order them on sweetwater but it’s crazy expensive. they go for really cheap used though. (they’ve been around since the 90’s)

#25

posted the wrong link…

#26

Slightly off-topic, but if anyone interested in this sort of drum trigger controller is using a new iPhone with 3D Touch, I’m looking for a some beta testers to test a new midi controller app that I’ll be releasing to the App Store soon.

There’s a small survey to make sure that I get folks with a variety of apps and equipment to test with: https://goo.gl/forms/ZhFK3VOIYOR1E73e2

Of course, the iPhone will never really feel the same as proper pads, but it is compact :wink:

#27

I’ve been curious about this. I don’t have a device with 3D Touch, so I don’t quite know how it works. Is it good for pressure, or velocity or both? What’s the sensitivity like? Is it possible to maintain consistent pressure while also dragging your finger?

#28

Wow, I must get one of these.

#29

the pressure resolution is pretty substantial. roughly 400 unique values exposed to developers (+/- depending on Accessiblity settings), with a lot of headroom in private APIs.

so, mapping that to aftertouch works really nicely, and downsampling to MIDI’s 0-127 range leaves some headroom for reasonable detail with a custom velocity curve

velocity is a little trickier, since the sample rate seems to be about one per 15 milliseconds, and the first touch almost always comes in at a force of 0, so you have to live with 30ms of latency to have real “velocity”… i’m kind of fudging it in my app by only using the first two samples to cut the latency down, but it means i have to do some other tweaks to get the output to behave as expected

even without 3d touch, the app works really nicely with Aalto so far in MPE mode. with it, though, and it’s damn near a linnstrument

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#30

That’s amazing. I wonder when 3D touch will make it to iPads. I’ve been pondering an upgrade from my 4th gen iPad, but I’m tempted to wait until it gets 3D touch (but will I be waiting forever?!)

I’ve been experimenting with XotoPad (Windows app for touch-screen grid layout MIDI control) + my 27" Dell 2017T touch monitor. It’s nice (there’s a Bitwig script that lets it output MPE) but I wouldn’t describe it as Linnstrument-like. No pressure (obviously) and the pitch bending seems bugged. Bend up is fine, but bend down is glitched (bends slightly up first). But it’s close enough to convince me that a touchscreen can be a very expressive instrument. My 4th gen iPad was simply too weak on CPU to let me assess this accurately, and my iPhone 5S is just too small to be enjoyable for input.

#31

Kind of silly, but my favorite pads are from my Akai LPD.

b_1_q_0_p_0.jpg750×750 73 KB

The controller is cheap, but I like it, and the pads are responsive and fun to play with.

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Midi that goes thwack