Grooveboxes

I have a soft spot in my heart for groove machines. I have been on a sort of journey over the years trying to find one that is perfect, but I should have known that nothing of the sort exists. I started out with a Yamaha SU-200 with the floppy drive. I got one loop going with that and messed with the filters and thought wow this is great.

But then I never used it again. I never wanted to load more loops onto a floppy in the format that was required. There are workflow limitations to these boxes.

Another one was the MC303. I got addicted to the arpeggiator. I just would mess with that arp all the time and forget about programming drums or anything else. It turns out that making an entire groove on the machine is a little off putting. I still love these things though and I bought a total of four of them over the years.

Related, is the MC505. If the 303 was limited the 505 must be sublime right? Well, not exactly. It has a lot more controls and faders for each channel, but the sequencer still leaves something to be desired and oh those tactile switches. Why do we always fall for these?

Speaking of tact switches, what about the Akai MPC500? I have two of these. I was on a thing a while back where I did my live sets as “A deck and B deck” so I would get two of the grooveboxes so I could go back and forth with a DJ mixer. This has its own problems, which I will get to in another post maybe.

How about the Boss SP505? I had this one too. The best thing about it was the voice transformer effect. Other than that it was kind of boring.

Korg Electribe sampler? This is one that I will never get rid of. Super limited but very fast to work with. This box set the standard for many step sequencers to come. It would be nice if it was velocity sensitive but the effects are very cool. The delay effect is great.

I recently splurged for an Akai Force. This was touted as Ableton in a box. I’m not sure I guess I didn’t really need ableton in a box. I hoped that I could use it for live looping, and you sort of can but there are always limitations. Live looping is one of those things that everyone has their own idea about what it actually entails and very few loopers (if any) are flexible enough to support everyone’s ideas of how looping should work. This leaves the looper enthusiast in a position of having to try everything out themselves and mostly discover the limitations even after poring over the manual to see if it supported the thing they cared about most. Sigh.

Surely Elektron has it all figured out? Well almost. I must say that I do like the keyswitches they use even though they are not velocity sensitive. The limitations of the sequencer mean that you can work quickly and there are a few features like probabalistic triggers that make it possible to create a whole song out of a 4 bar loop. I own two Octatracks (why?) and a Syntakt (great drum synth). Oh and the Machinedrum (again, why? although it’s a classic now).

What about the Volcas? I’m not sure where to put these in the ecosystem of groove things. They are pretty limited but I really like the touch capacitive sequencer things. It would be cool if they just released a sequencer version of the Volca Bass maybe.

There must be something I am forgetting here. I have an Akai MPC 1000 that I never used really. I don’t know if it is any good or not.