The most recent model is the MPC 5000, though many performers still use older ones. “You’ve just got to memorize what pad has what on it.” “I can switch to different programs and different pad banks in the middle of a set,” said the Los Angeles hip-hop producer Exile. Typically each machine can hold four different sets of sounds. These can be drums, of course, but also samples from records, vocal snippets, sounds drawn from other instruments, or anything else.

Since then it’s been produced in various iterations by Akai (now owned by Numark), most featuring 16 finger pads, arranged four by four, each set to trigger a different sound. The MPC 60, the first model, rose from the ashes of the Linn 9000, created by the engineer Roger Linn, who refined that failed model for Akai in the late 1980s. But in the last few years, thanks to musicians like Araabmuzik, Divinci, Exile and others, it has become a stand-alone object of fascination. It’s been used, less prominently, as a live tool too.

And then, as if giving out at the end of a long sprint, he stopped, stepping away from the machines as the room caught its breath, and grabbed a Red Bull for fortification.Ī hip-hop producer who’s worked with Busta Rhymes, 50 Cent and others, Araabmuzik is also one of the most visible practitioners of live MPC playing.Īn endlessly variable drum machine, it’s been an essential tool for producers, integral to hip-hop’s sonic development. He played them like a piano, with dignity. Araabmuzik took familiar beats including his own for “Salute” by the Diplomats and dismantled them, then improvised off the themes, playing furious fusillades of sharp drums, shrieks and all sorts of sounds programmed into the machines.

Instead people were clustered around the stage, watching dumbfounded as Araabmuzik pounded out live drumbeats with his fingertips on a pair of Akai MPC 2500s. FOR about 12 minutes at a recent installment of One Step Beyond, a monthly party at the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, no one danced.

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