Wow 999US. That’s a good price.
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How are people like the force lately? Came across the sonicstate namm video of it and can’t say I really resonated with what I saw there… felt like he was trying to pivot it as a DJ tool part way through, the live aspect he was pushing didn’t land for me either. Before I judge it too harshly thought I’d check in with people here and see how it has been treating them.
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I enjoy using it. It’s a centerpiece for my production and easy to use live. Sample editing is a breeze. Plug in instruments are fun to use. I love having 64 pads when running midi hardware through it. So much more that the Force does and for under a g it’s a great value.
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That “trick style” quantized drumming at 5:10 was rather cool and impressive.
I’m usually not into the big 64 pad grid, but I can definitely see how this takes full advantage.
C’mon Akai with the disk streaming already tho…
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Akai Force spotted in the wild 
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Im not much of a live finger drummer myself, so this video wasn’t that interesting for me. But i’m looking forward to the drum synth.
I love the Force as a central hub in my studio. It is so fast and easy to get ideas going. It doesn’t have the most complex sequencer, but the speed makes up for it. Sampling sounds and loops from external gear is very fast and smooth. And the autosampler is awesome for getting more out of my monosynths.
Well, I havent really used my force except updating it to the latest OS. Thankfully the annoying bug that messed with my workflow has finally been fixed! So now you can just record a long take unquantized, and set the start and end loop braces to the best bit, and further edits will work normally (this couldnt be done prior to the latest OS due to a bug)
I’d say things are looking very bright for the force and I expect to be using it quite a lot once the arrangement mode and the drumsynth drops.
However, I had to replace my computer with a new one during the holdiays and now that I finally got a new system, I have old projects in the backburner that are keeping me from starting any new stuff. So ableton is “holding me hostage” ATM lol
What do you mean by “it doesnt have the most complex sequencer”? up to 999 bars of unquantized MIDI piano roll with no polyphony restrictions, full automation support… I mean, what are you missing? Its not meant to be used like an elektron, or at least thats how I see it. If you only use the onboard step sequencer, you are missing out big time IMO
I love the sequencer! I have no problems with it. It just doesn’t have some of the fancy new stuff like probability and randomness. But i can get around that with external gear. Another cool thing i do sometimes is using 3-4 midi tracks on the same midi channel to control one synth. Then have a sparse riff going, and using the rest of the tracks with just some notes here and there. And have everyone set to different lengths. Gets pretty interesting and can almost be like probability.
Funny thing is i “hate” Ableton, but love my Force…
I received my Force Thursday and still learning it. Coming from the Live I find it odd how convoluted the process to sample, preview/edit and add to a pad seems to be, makes me miss the simplicity of the Live.
But everything else is great, love the clip based flow and the mixer view.
Bring on the song mode.
I’m trying quite hard to get on the Force beta as I was on the Live one, so far no luck. Apparently the song mode is there already and really good
You can do synced start recording on the Force. Just set up an audio track, and record to that. Then you can edit that sample and convert to keygroup or drumgroup.
But the problem with sampling while the Force is slaved via midi clock is bad. I found a workaround for now, but i hope they fix this soon. I wanted to slave my Force to Cubase so i could record all my external synths while jamming. It works if you slave it via MTC or Ableton Link. Would love for Ableton Link to be a more supported standard for sync.
I’ve never used the Live, but i agree on the sample editing. I got used to it, but i often just do a quick chop’ing in the sample editor. Then just convert to new track with drum group. And edit from the sample menu there. I would love a way to add more samples to a drum group at once. Instead of doing one by one.
This is not same as Synced START recording like on OT where you will define WHEN recording starts.
What you are doing in your example is manually starting a synced recording.
See the difference?
Btw, i checked the manual, you can set length of loop recording but not start/sync.
You have to stop Force to start sync record or manually engage record while playing.
In my workflow that is something i wouldn’t do, so didn’t think about that. I newer did that when i had an OT either. I just started recording on the first step, and chopped it up later.
But if you do record to an audio clip on the Force. And if you would like it to start on step 6. Couldnt you just cut the sample, and insert it on whatever step you want?
It cant be compared to the Octatrack. Workflow is very different, and they both do different things with just some overlap.
Can anyone comment on this blurb from the Force product page?
DJ
Seamlessly assign tracks to Force’s crossfader, load full tracks, stems or loops to Force’s 8x8 matrix - fuse with scene/clip payback for an unrestricted DJ experience.
Specifically the part about loading full tracks. I take it those are single stereo files loaded into the 2GB RAM. And then you offload them out of the RAM after you’ve mixed out to the other track?
Is this the workflow?
Otherwise with that RAM limitation and no disk streaming, it would seem you could only have a crate of about 30-40 full track stereo .wavs in RAM at a time.
I’d love to hear about different DJ workflows from people using the Force.
I DJ’d with OT once for a magazine mix, and I didn’t hate it. I wonder how the Force is different or similar.
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More or less like that yeah. You load a clip, play it, then load the next one, mix into it, transition, delete the previous clip, and on and on. The onboard “garbage collection” feature (coming to the MPC in v 3.0 IIRC) should take care of freeing up RAM after deleting clips.
I’ve never tested this though. One would probably have to pre-warp the audio to the grid before playing, and all that other nonsense I cannot ever be arsed to do when I’m DJing… which is why I prefer the oldschool way of manual beatmatching and using CDJs etc, keeps the prepping to a minimum (you only need to know your records).
Only software that I trust to do the gridding and tempo detection reliably is NI Traktor, and that gets used from time to time. Mixing on it isn’t fun though, the element of risk is eliminated too much, it might be more fun to the audience but much less fun to me.
But, if you’re seriously considering using force as a viable DJing platform, I guess I could give it a shot and report back. Let’s see 
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funny, i remember, he was so mad at mpc live being unable to warp properly, so i’m curious why he decided to take akai on the road again
This seems like something marketing came up with without talking to the people in engineering, or actual product managers. And has given them alot of whining.
The main “problem” is that the 2gb memory is shared with the OS, so you only have about 700 mb for actual samples. And all samples are upscaled to 32 bit. But you still have about 50 minutes of sample time. Good enough for clips and samples, but not enough for big multisampled keygroups or lots of stems.
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Hi Guys, getting my Akai force next week, after selling my MPC Live. One of the worst things of the mpc for me was the warping which was pretty much useless, specially if you were trying to use full tracks or drums loops, due to creating strange artefacts and messing up the transients.
So I know that they have another warping algorithm on the force, but how good is it?
How much can you actually change the tempo (+/- bpm), and still having decent results?
Also according to the manual:
“Note: The Warp algorithms are very CPU-intensive and can result in audio drop-outs during playback if used too freely. Be mindful of how (and how often) you use the warp function. You can reduce the CPU resources required by using the Basic warp algorithm, which is less CPU-intensive.”
How hard is the best warp algorithm on the cpu? Do you notice it “eating” the CPU on, say, one of your normal projects where you use time stretching a bit?
I understand that the warping is not has good as the ones on Ableton, etc, and I am fine with it. I just hope for something that is usable, which unfortunately does not happen with the MPC Live.
Thank in advance