MPC Key 61 Stage Piano Plugin 1 | Sessions w/ Mike Patrick 

The last keyboard that I was this excited about was the 🎹Korg Kronos LS (2017).....as of right now I would choose THIS over EVERYTHING(Korg/Yamaha/Roland/Nord/Etc....)!!!! 🥰

Fantastic playing as always!

It's been since the YAMAHA S90 that I've been impressed by the piano sounds in an electronic keyboard.

@0:33 was beautiful and gave me goosebumps!

Incredible Skillz on Keys! Wowza!

This is pure love❤️

Le Workstaion is dead, vive le MPC Keys 61 👑

Akai just killing it at the moment ! #fanforlife

I really hope they come out with an 88 key version. I’m a piano guy and need the weighted keys, but if they don’t… I have to get this!!

Glorious.

Nicely Played Sir‼️

😥😢😭😭😭That's so beauuuutiful..👏👏

I'm going to buy one.

Classic!

Sounds very convincing

Just the 20 years practice 😂.. sounds lovely considering it does so much else too. ❤

Mike Patrick, brilliant! But who swapped the stereo field? If you didn't notice first time reverse your head phones at this point. 1:40

I need 88 keys for the piano patches. Hitting shift to get the lower ranges takes away from being a “piano” player. You have to adjust your fingers on semi weighted and when using an external control you have to adjust the velocity to get that feel to get the desired feel. I love all the plug-ins I just would love to see this in 88.

Considering the main focus of the MPC range and the hardware limitations these sounds certainly are nice. I have heard new keyboards which sound far worse and I have had quite a few. The synth and drum sounds of my MPC Key 61 sound mostly fine, but most of the factory content which is built around samples has a clearly audible noise floor, most notably on notes with a high velocity. I have three suggestions/questions for Akai: - The rather hard panning can become annoying while playing. Say I want to enjoy a little vanilla bass piano without any effects: my left ear is happy with what it hears but my right ear hears little to nothing. It would be great if there was a way to reduce either the panning or the stereo width altogether. I would not mind playing with a mono sample either, which should supposedly be lighter on the CPU too. - Just as important and the main reason why I am not using the pianos because I notice it every time I try them: the noise floor. Try to strike a few notes with a high velocity level and keep them sustained: the noise floor is audible throughout the whole time and sadly hugely annoying to me. This goes both for the base sounds without any EQ and effects but especially as soon as either an EQ or effects are used. I doubt this is a hardware limitation because I have sampled a Prophet 10 with 4 velocity layers and a stride of 1 (i.e. one keygroup per note) and it sounded perfectly fine. So I suspect it is down to the samples themselves. If it were the latter one a fix could be to introduce new samples with a reduced noise floor, which would be lovely. It is especially noticeable in the higher octaves, unfortunately even with medium velocities. It just happens to kill my playing mood. If that's just me so be it, but it does seem odd to think that these noisy sounds are sold separately for quite a high price. Thankfully the synth sounds usually do not have that noise floor. The Solina however has it too and badly so. Every sound from C3 upwards has an audible crackling sound to it, again without any effects, eq etc. I would love to use the Solina more, I really like its sound otherwise. Hopefully there is a way to improve all of this. - And the last thing which has likely been requested before: please add a "select all" button in the grid editing view. That would speed up my workflow a lot. Once its bugs have been fixed and its sounds improved it will be a true "workstation killer" for me. But as of right now the fun is limited. Akai has a record of listening to their users and updating their products. I hope they can and will do so here too. Thank you for listening Akai!

Can u compare stage pianos on mpc and Nord pls.?

What is this.. it’s beautiful melody 🥹

Soundin right

Nice playing... this keyboard is a machine better then the Yamaha genos which cost way more this is what I've been searching for all my life

Great playing, thank you. Did you tweak the sound in any way to make it sound as good as in the video? I have used the same preset 'Jazzy C (Yamaha C7, Ballad, Stretched, Max) in FabricXL and on my MPC Key 61 it sounds muddy. There is no brilliance in it and it has an undesired hall effect. This sound is simply not comparable in any respect with the sound of the Shigeru Grand on my Kawai MP11SE. So far I have not found a Piano sound in these MPC plugins that resembles a real piano over the whole range, and all presets have a reverberation that persists even when I switch it off. The muddy sound is predominant in the middle of the range, and when someone presses G4 I sadly would not even recognize it as a piano sound. I have the impression that this instrument is designed for people who produce endless ambient, chilly sounds. Undoubtly the plugins offer a variety of interesting layered sounds which are useful when producing music for film and theatre. But just to play an plain instrument without any artificial enhancements seems to be almost impossible on this instrument with these plugins.

Liked the concept went to PMT to check it out but in my humble opinion the sounds are a a bit mediocre and when you compare the sound to a almost 13 Korg Kronos it fall a part big time I own MPC X, Live II and a Force and love them but this one could've been a game changer if the wasn't this limited For starter if Akai can implement disk streaming it would unlock lot of potentials And one BIG question. Why a quadcore with 4 GIG of RAM?? This was a big mistake !!! I am sure people would've pay happily for more RAM and CPU power, 16 GB of RAM is nothing these days

To be fair the Korg wipes the floor with this in terms of keyboard sounds like piano and electric piano sorry. As does Native Instruments 🤷‍♀️