Exploring the MPC Live II, making live beats, and recording to cassette tape

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A collection of live beat sketches, performed on the Akai MPC Live II and recorded to cassette tape on the Marantz PMD430. Fair warning, they lean shamelessly on the factory soundbank, but they're meant to be more of a "you can learn to finger drum too" than they are as any sort of bold artistic statement.

I work long days. At the end of those days, it's nice to just tinker on music. Through a combination of its speaker (surprisingly good), battery (long-lived), immediacy (play it anywhere), and sense of fun (it's nice to learn finger drumming, a new skill), I've been reaching for the MPC Live II more than any of my hardware synths. It's the device that makes me feel excited to explore with no concrete goals in mind, with only the fun of exploring the factory content and my own expanding abilities. And while I'm still terrible at finger drumming, it's been a blast to see some incremental improvement. I'm looking forward to making some more textured and nuanced music with it in the future.

When I had decided that I was going to try to capture some of these sitting-on-the-couch performances, I knew I wanted to put them on cassette. The Marantz really added some nice character to the sound, that saturation and wobble that defines my earliest memories of music.

Sketched over the last two months, recorded live to stereo output on cassette and then to DAW, and uploaded as is, with only a little EQ, compression, limiting on the master.

https://jayhosking.bandcamp.com/

Видео Exploring the MPC Live II, making live beats, and recording to cassette tape канала Jay Hosking