I assume a cheesy cha-cha pattern on my Yamaha QY22 might need tweaks but will basically play on my Roland MC-909. I assume that kind of capability is built into any midi device made in the last twenty years. But only if it is thoughtfully organized.īeing able to easily move musical and sonic ideas around from one kind of a machine to another is an absolute deal-breaker of a necessity. So why does midi matter to me? Same reason automation matters to me it saves hella time. The MPC is just the biggest, mightiest, Death Star of a tape recorder. I learned to love overdubbing and splicing long before I dared be interested in music. If you have some ancient piece of gear from before the mid 1980s maybe not.īut if the MPC is the center of your universe and every sequence has a kit of samples that is a special snowflake with its own inner truth, who cares about note mapping? You want an outside sound you sample it, you don’t play it live.
With few exceptions modern drum machines have some predictable midi note maps. To me as a noob the answer is because I want my tracks to be portable across machines and I want to just take that portability for granted.
To a long-term MPC user, I guess your pads are the center of the universe, and your midi tracks are internal to your machine, and making external devices work with your internal tracks is… Why?
