You are soooooo wrong. You can make music just using mouse and keyboard, but hands-on access to your instruments surely yields better music due to better workflow. I have a Korg NanoPad and it was cheap and consequently the pads are crap and started to die one by one. Some of the pads were unreliable resulting in skipped beats. Sure it was cheaper than say an MPC or KontrolPad, like you said, but it didn't help me make music. Quality costs money. While I like to have as little gear as possible and do as much as I can in the box (as I pointed out earlier in this thread), I think a good set of monitors, a good keyboard and a good reliable pad controller can significantly improve both workflow and productions.

I doubt many mixers work in Ableton ^^

maschine.

everything about it will speed your workflow like crazy

Ambience wasn't the one who necroposted though. just sayin

I know this thread is old but I'd like to add to it:

There are three different methods I feel are very productive for hip-hop production (with a computer and MIDI only... excluding MPCs)

1. Maschine standalone- Sampling/chopping is a joy and breeze to do. Sure, the "scenes" are kinda clunky, but in general, it's very easy to produce a song with Maschine. Cost $600. Check out this guy's series on YouTube (probably the best of the best):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XV8hkX64zSA (this is part 1, but you can easily find the other parts)

2. Maschine as a VST inside your favorite DAW

You get the benefits of Maschine (easy sampling/chopping, etc)... with your DAWs looping capability, and easy audio tracks for vocals, vocal processing, etc. Cost $600.

3. This is my personal favorite:

Any MIDI pad controller, Reaper, plus the Poise VST

If you invest in an Akai MPD18, and upgrade the pad sensitivity (using the tape method, or the MPCstuff thick fat pads method), that's a $100 investment (or less, if you look around). Reaper is free (though it's good to buy a license... it will work indefinitely, fully, nagging you to buy it)... Poise VST is $50. That's a $150 investment.

If you insert Poise as a VST in Reaper (or whatever DAW)... you can use 4 instances as 4 "banks"... Track 1, instance 1... track 2, etc. Select the track/automatically arm when selected... and every time you change tracks, you're on a different Poise instance/"bank"... 1 could be your drum one-shots, 2 could be your chops, etc. You get a very fast workflow, which works great for hip-hop.

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My problems with Ableton: the Drum Rack, while powerful, is tiny and annoying to look at. The Arrangement view is annoying and clunky to me... punching in audio isn't possible (must be on a new track)... which makes it annoying for tracking vocals after producing your beat.

Advantages-- Session view. It's great trying out different combinations of clips with other clips, and launching scenes on the fly, recording your session view performance. You'll need an APC or a Launchpad, which is an investment of $120 or more...

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There are a lot of ways to get the job done. Personally, I've found #3 to be the most cost-effective, and fast. Though I do own Maschine and love it... its sampling is really powerful and building a song "groovebox-style" is definitely speedy. But you'll need to "track out" your stuff to do vocals in a proper DAW.

Good luck!

I always hear about mpd pad sensitivity being bad, but my mpd26 had soft responsive triggering right out the box brand new.
Has Akai upgraded the mpd pads recently?

But have you compared them to the pads on Maschine or padkontrol?

No, but having owned a mpc2000/mpc500/trigger finger, the mpd's pads are by far the softest, and I never get missed triggers like with the 500.
I'll admit it's been years since I had my a 2000, but I remember the pads being fairly firm, and tougher to depress than the mpd26 that I have.
So no comparison to the pk, or maschine, but is my comparison 2k, and 500 pretty consistant with what others have experienced, or has Akai done like they have in the past with the 1000, and updated their pads?

It depends what you are looking to do with your devices. The Maschine is designed to be used to its full extent, which is really running it through the Maschine software which can be stand-alone, or even better as a VST plugin to a daw such as Ableton (what i'll be doing once i get this thing), and using it as a sampler / drum machine.. and is really designed to improve workflow. If you're looking for a midi controller with pads and a few knobs to maybe trigger a few samples on Ableton, go with something else like the AKAI MPD and don't buy the Maschine if you're not planning on using it for what it was originally designed for.

I tried a friends akai MPD 32 and its amazing. that thing is good enough to use it as a master controller if your going with a really simple setup. my friend has a setup where he's got the pads assigned to clips of his tracks (each with different clip launches so he can repeat things), and then he has beat repeats and some effects on his device control for each track that he can control.

that's a really simple way to do a show, he also has a roland sp 404 he uses to overlay some sounds because you can get some really interesting samples with that thing and its completely seperate to ableton.. so its a bit frustrating to sync in time if you don't have it midi clocked with your daw, but for pads and noise its great

I just made a thread about the Vestax Pad-One....

If you are just looking for a controller to trigger samples/plugins and finger drum...it's a beast IMO. The best pads...the BEST, by far. And the unit is an all metal.chassis.

Drawbacks I guess would be the 12 pads vs 16...but to me its not that big of a deal. It has 4 banks. I set Battery4 up to have a 12x4 matrix. And set up kits on each row of twelve. So I can toggle between 4 kits just like the MPD.

The XY pad is dope. And with the roll and chromatic feature you can do.snare rolls or pitched rolls with the XY pad...not much unlike the PK.

Mapping the pads from the controller is madddd convenient too....tap the pad and turn the dial to whatever note you want on the LED display...done.....way faster than on the MPD and way WAYYY fast than on the PK

The pads are soft and chunky and responsive.