Akai MPC Sample

Akai recapture the magic of MPC with a powerful, portable groovebox.

When I first saw the MPC Sample I laughed out loud... in a good way. Rumours of a ‘mini MPC’ were going around, which I’d assumed would be like an MPC One but even smaller. The new MPC has that rare design property of showing you exactly what it is at a glance. My laugh of delight was realising Akai had channelled the spirit of the original MPC60 at an adorable scale, and that it was going to be very much its own thing rather than a new incarnation of the modern MPC OS. The question was: would it be a novelty collectors’ item, or a useful, entry‑level beat machine?

The Sample is much smaller than it looks on YouTube. While it is, in fact, solid and quite hefty, it has an ’80s handheld game vibe, like a massive old MPC shrunk to dimensions somewhere between a Teenage Engineering KO2 and Roland SP‑404 — references we’ll come back to later. The whole pad grid would fit comfortably inside a 3x3 section of a regular MPC’s grid. The deep pads feel and respond much like the previous generation of MPC’s pads before the new MPCe design, which is to say fantastically.

Another clue that the Sample means business is the screen. While only about three fingers wide, it’s high‑res and multicoloured, supporting detailed views with small fonts and waveforms. It’s far superior to what the machines we already mentioned offer, especially the KO2, and it’s even better than the display on Roland’s TR‑1000.

Sample‑centric

The MPC Sample is endearingly small, measuring just 194 x 236 x 50mm, but also reassuringly weighty at just under 1KG.The MPC Sample doesn’t have a track‑based structure like its bigger siblings, and it’s a purely sample‑based instrument. More akin to the SP‑404, you have one sample per pad to work with, which you sequence via multiple patterns. There are eight banks of 16 pads.

In the default Sample mode you can play the pads and record patterns in real time. Settings, controls and waveforms for the most recently tapped pad are displayed on the screen. Three buttons above the screen move through various control sets, such as sample trimming, tuning and filter controls. Editing is done with the three knobs below the screen.

As you move around, the knobs are rarely in sync with the parameters they control. Spec’ing knobs instead of encoders may have been a budgetary consideration, but it also feels like a nod to the 404. In the initial release, constantly having to twist the knobs to pick up the control position was my least favourite thing about the Sample. Thankfully the 1.3 update added other options, with the default being a scaled takeover. I’ve got mine set to instant takeover.

The general layout is really easy to grasp. A mode section jumps you between the regular sample triggering mode, sequence launching and the two different styles of effects. The blue buttons provide pad modes that we’ll dive into. Sample Select opens the sound browser. Then there’s a transport section with separate Record buttons for audio sampling and sequence recording. All other operations and menus are accessed via the pads with Shift.

Getting Stuff In

A new project presents a blank slate of empty pads to populate. A whole set of ‘kits’ come pre‑loaded, which are themselves simply pre‑configured projects, as a project is essentially a single drum program in the MPC way of thinking. To load a sample to a pad, you simply tap the Sample Select button and browse the internal drive or an external SD card (up to 1TB) using the push encoder. There’s a load of good stuff already on board — I didn’t add any of my own drums, just some loops and melodic samples.

On the back panel are 3.5mm jacks for headphones, sync out (TRS CV and gate) and MIDI I/O, quarter‑inch jacks for audio I/O, a record gain knob and a USB‑C port.

However, the Sample really is built to sample. Press Sample...