Akai MPC
electronic musical instrument
The Akai MPC (originally MIDI Production Center, now Music Production Center) is a series of music workstations produced by Akai from 1988 onwards. MPCs combine sampling and sequencing functions, allowing users to record portions of sound, modify them and play them back as sequences.
The MPC was created by the American engineer Roger Linn, who had designed the successful LM-1 and LinnDrum drum machines in the 1980s. Linn aimed to create an intuitive instrument, with a grid of pads that can be played similarly to a traditional instrument such as a keyboard or drum kit.
The MPC had a major influence on the development of electronic and hip-hop music, and led to new sampling techniques as users pushed its technical limits. It had a democratizing effect on music production, allowing artists to create elaborate tracks without traditional instruments or recording studios. Its pad interface was adopted by numerous manufacturers, became standard in DJ technology. Prominent users of the MPC include DJ Shadow, J Dilla and Kanye West.
Development
By the late 1980s, drum machines had become popular for creating beats and loops without instrumentalists, and hip-hop artists were using samplers to take portions of existing recordings and create new compositions. Grooveboxes, machines that combined these functions, such as those by E-mu Systems, required knowledge of music production and cost up to $10,000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Akai MPC” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.