Akai Professional MPC XL: a pro-grade music studio in a box

This hefty beast is a counterpoint to the continuing shrinkage of high-end music gear. The Akai Professional MPC XL is, as its name suggests, the new flagship in its long, long line of standalone, all-singing, all-dancing MPCs (Music Production Centre).

(Image credit: Akai Professional)

The first MPC emerged at the tail-end of the 1980s, engineered and overseen by legendary music engineer Roger Linn, creator of one of the earliest programmable drum machines, the 1982 LinnDrum. For Akai, Linn bundled everything he knew about music production into one compact box, including the latest sampling technology and full MIDI compatibility.

Swiftly finding favour among emerging genres, most notably hip-hop and dance music, the MPC was effectively another instrument, with a large grid of performance pads enabling musicians to trigger beats, notes and samples in real time. Over the decades, the MPC range has continued to evolve, always retaining its focus on being a standalone tool for either studio or stage.

The new MPC XL ramps up the capabilities of the series, particularly in terms of storage and processing, while also presenting even more ways of physically engaging with the sound, via tweaking, editing and multiple parameters.

The trade-off is portability – this isn’t something you can sling in a bag anymore – but instead it has become more of a studio centrepiece. Although the large 10.1-inch touch screen is the focal point for editing, the XL supplements the familiar grid of pads with dedicated buttons for practically every function, avoiding the need to dive into menus and sub-menus and streamlining the workflow process as much as possible.

The 16 touch-sensitive ‘Q-link’ knobs can be assigned to multiple functions for performance and there’s also a step sequencer, among other features.

A new processor offers four times the processing power of the last generation of MPCs, while the 16GB RAM and (expandable) 256GB of storage provide ample space for samples and projects. Inputs and outputs have also been overhauled, enabling the MPC to be integrated into any kind of studio set-up or external gear via digital and analogue connections.

Akai’s intention was to create an instrument capable of recording a full album without the need for a computer or any external gear. That’s not how musicians tend to work, of course, but straight out of the box, the MPC XL presents a world of possibilities.