Testing Akai Professional MPC Key 37 - The keys to groovebox success

A year and a half ago, we tested, the Akai Professional MPC Key 61, a rather interesting product in line with the company’s new “groovebox / beatmaking” releases. For some years now, the brand has been very active in this segment as well as in that of controllers, as you may have seen at AudioFanzine, notably with tests of the MPC Studio mk2, the latest APC 64, mini or Key 25. In terms of grooveboxes, the range at the moment consists of the One+ released last year, the Live 2 released in 2020, and the MPC X SE also in 2023, which are respectively more powerful versions with minor design differences compared to the MPC One, the MPC Live, and the MPC X.

Each of these grooveboxes is broadly the same. They run on the same MPC OS whose updates benefit all products, are compatible with the desktop version of that same MPC OS, and differ in the number of controls, connectivity, battery life, presence of WiFi or Ethernet, and on-board power, mainly. There’s always a well-appointed touchscreen to make these genuine hardware DAWs a pleasure to use, as well as different shades of the 4 × 4 pads emblematic of MPC-branded products.

The MPC Key 61 has been designed to meet the needs of the most demanding users. It’s more or less the same concept as the other MPC products, except with the addition of a 61-key keyboard, of course. It’s also got the Touch Strip of the MPC Studio mk2 controller that’s not seen on the other products. Its colors and the organization of its controls fall between the MPC X SE and the MPC Live 2. It’s a product that can speak as much to beatmakers as to keyboardists tired of traditional workstations who appreciate the MPC workflow. It’s a workflow we’ve regularly complained about because of a number of quirks imposed that go against the grain of what’s typical in traditional DAWs (cuckoo programs) or grooveboxes designed for live use. But thanks to Akai’s efforts in regularly updating the OS and by getting a little used to it, the MPC workflow doesn’t diminish our enthusiasm about the power available on these machines. They allow you to sample, record external audio, sequence, loop, and interact with external instruments, and even use a proprietary but growing range of virtual instrument plug-ins and effects for inserts and sends. It’s now possible to do pretty much the same thing as on a computer with a relatively similar workflow.

And then, in the middle of it all, there’s the MPC Force. It made headlines on its release because of a total change of workflow and OS, a 64-step grid reminiscent of Akai products other than MPCs, and above all, the release of the half-finished product. However, it has since benefited from a substantial number of updates, despite the OS not being the same as the grooveboxes mentioned above, including a recent one that makes it compatible with the latest proprietary plug-ins available to all MPC users.

If you’ve managed to follow me this far, well done! I’m telling you all this to provide context for this test of the MPC Key 37. It’s a hardware groovebox/DAW with keyboard — which can already be defined as an alternative with fewer keys and fewer controls than the MPC Key 61 —  that’s the result of several years of thinking, feedback, design and releases of grooveboxes and controllers by Akai. And some of the product’s evolutions since its initial release at the end of last year mean that this test will say some new things to what we’ve already published previously, so let’s take a look at this new toy without further ado!

Akai Piranha

The Akai MPC Key 37 is, therefore, a groovebox, in the tradition of the brand’s latest MPCs, currently priced at around €850 EUR (approximately $940 USD) and resembling a smaller red version of the MPC Key 61, currently priced at €1300 (approximately $1435 USD). We’re looking at a One+ to which we’ve added a very well-built 37-key semi-ballasted keyboard, with its 15 × 9.5 cm (6 × 3.5 inch) color touchscreen, two pitch and modulation wheels, master volume, emblematic 4 × 4 One+ pads a little smaller than on more conventional MPCs, four Q-Link encoders, a large push encoder with its two plus and minus buttons, two buttons for octave selection, LEDs here and there, and 34 navigation buttons including five for transport (Rec / Overdub / Play / Play Start / Stop). From the outset, we note the absence of the Key 61's Touch Strip, the deletion of one of the transport control lines, and yet another change in the location and nature of the buttons on a new Akai product (please, don’t do that again, a little consistency wouldn’t hurt). Nevertheless, it’s easy to find what you’re looking for if you’re familiar with the workflow of these machines, especially as you’ll find the famous MPC OS operating system in version 2.15 at the time of testing (more on this later).

The machine is rather light, weighing less than 4 kg (8.8 lbs.) and measuring 582 × 314 × 104 mm (22.9 × 12.3 × 4.1 inches). Connectivity is pretty much the same as on the MPC Key 61: power button, mini power socket, two USB-A and B sockets, SD card reader, two left/right audio jack inputs and outputs, headphone jack output, gain pot for inputs, MIDI input and output in DIN format, four CV/gate outputs labeled in a way that implies they are TRS and we actually have eight, and three expression/FS2/sustain inputs. Suffice it to say, there’s plenty to do here, and we’re even pleasantly surprised by the presence of the CV/gate for interacting with modular synthesizers. What’s more, the USB ports offer multiple functions, including powering hardware, upgrading or controlling various things on the computer, and plugging in external controllers and even audio interfaces that will be recognized in the MPC!

On the Key 61, there is also MIDI Thru, eight mono CV/gate outputs, an additional USB port, an Ethernet input, and a large power input, as well as two more outputs, a different format for the two inputs with dedicated gain pots, a line/instrument switch and even a phantom power switch, but — unlike the Key 37 — no SD card reader. We can also guess that the two machines have slightly different power capabilities and that it will be possible to run more tracks and plug-ins on the Key 61.

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The MPC Key 37 comes with power cables, a USB cable, start-up documentation, and a rather nice bundle of plug-ins available in the machine and on the desktop/DAW version of the MPC OS. The fact that projects can be played back on both platforms is quite an useful feature, allowing you to mix your groovebox creations cleanly into the DAW. That’s even better than a simple multitrack export of a project, especially as the DAW also lets you load desktop plug-ins in addition to those built into the machine. This is definitely one of the good points of the ecosystem, which tells us “DO IT!” instead of OK when we have to validate an order.

The Key Features

On starting up the machine, after a short loading time, after seeing all the pads and buttons light up with a thousand lights and colors, you’ll be able to open one of the demo projects, create a new project, load the last project you worked on (if you configure that option), open a template, etc. Then you’ll find yourself in the main OS view. By the way, the demo projects are quite well done, as is the factory content.

Démo Dance Hall

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• Démo Dance Hall01:34
• Démo Deep House00:52
• Démo Drum and Bass00:54
• Démo Future Bass00:41
• Démo Hip Hop00:46
• Démo Tech House01:09
• Démo Techno01:00

The groovebox thus functions like a portable DAW, with tracks of various types: plug-ins, clips à la Ableton Live, MIDI, CV, audio, and a bank of drums sounds assigned to pads or keygroup. The available drum sound content is quite interesting, drawing on content that has been available for years in the ecosystem and the CV output enables interaction with the modular world. In addition, you can load effects plug-ins on each track, on the master bus and in the returns. A number of Akai plug-ins are available as a bundle with the machine, including the following: Bassline (dedicated to monophonic bass sounds), Drumsynth, Electric (electric piano/FM sounds and physical modeling), Hype (polyphonic synthesizers with several engines, including VA or Wavetable), Mellotron, Odyssey, Solina and Tubesynth (another interesting polyphonic synthesizer). Not only do they sound pretty good, but all their parameters are accessible via the touchscreen in the Edit tab, and you can assign certain controls to the Q-Link potentiometers. They even have the luxury of a rather pretty graphical interface, which is quite a change from grooveboxes with parameters buried in submenus and presented exclusively with text… For me, this is really one of the big strengths of the MPC solution, as the sound engines present on other machines at the same prices are more often than not very rudimentary!

Effects-wise, the AIR bundle offered with the machine covers a fairly wide range of needs. These include reverb (more options would have been nice), compressors, delays, distortions, filters, modulations, amplifier simulations, pitch, autotune and so on, including most of the latest ones. In terms of instruments, however, you’ll have to spend upwards of a few hundred euros/dollars extra to use the latest piano and electric piano sound models, the Minimoog, Juno-60 synthesizer or the OPx-6 dedicated to FM synthesis. Fortunately, the bundle also includes a voucher for one of these plug-ins free of charge, and there are also extension packs with presets and samples. Note that all these plug-ins can be downloaded/activated in a 10-day trial version via WiFi by connecting the machine to your Akai account, which is a pretty interesting workflow! We also note the possibility of synchronizing the machine with a Splice account to access all its recorded sounds.

Please note that we’re not going to go into detail here on the OS workflow or on the sound of the machine’s on-board plug-ins because we’ve already covered all that extensively in our test of the MPC Key 61, which we invite you to reread. Written by newjazz, it includes excellent demos of the various virtual instruments, which hold their own in this context. Basically, the interface is built around several tabs, accessible directly via the associated buttons or touchscreen, with the various tracks, piano roll, choice of plug-in or preset, program editing, preferences, mixing, mutes per track assignable to pads, song mode for arranging the execution order of sequences, the sample editing interface, a looper that works with the audio input, and so on. We also appreciate that we don’t need to press the Shift button to access certain secondary commands — instead, we use two quick presses on the specific button. The so-called menu tab enables all the rest, also offering access to a tuner, an XY pad for effects, or the memory + CPU load used in the current project.

For the rest, the workflow is definitely Akai MPC OS with its share of quirks, which you can get used to with a little practice, but which often tend to waste time unnecessarily. These can include organization of track content into programs, preset choices that disappear when changing tracks, Q-links that associate with the wrong parameters, a rather peculiar pad-based chord progression feature, inability to assign a fixed parameter to an encoder, RAM memory size limitations for loading long audio files, tedious note-editing in the piano roll or step sequencer, with rather rudimentary functionalities for a groovebox (no note generator or randomization, for example), sound navigation and project sound inclusions from another era, official documentation rather succinct, even sometimes unreadable, when trying to mix info on all MPCs at once, and practically necessity to acquire some paid documentation maintained by MPC Tutor which frankly helps to better comprehend the machine and its workflow…

However, once you’ve got the hang of it, it’s easy to overlook (a little) these issues because of all the possibilities offered by the groovebox. Personally, having not had the MPC Key 61 at hand, I’m discovering the alchemy between the OS, the pads and the presence of the keyboard, which makes absolute sense (with aftertouch, by the way) and allows you not only to make your own musical productions, but also to play the various instruments on offer, which is a truly pleasant experience. I was also able to realize that the groovebox works very well with my modular setup, and that the Hype plug-in comes with quite a few riser presets :)

Modular X MPC

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MPC OS 3

Since the release of MPC Key 61, it’s interesting to note that the OS has had several updates, affecting both the desktop version and all machines running MPC OS, with bug fixes, workflow improvements, new features that have their button assigned on MPC Key 37 but are accessible on other machines too, and new plug-ins. For example, since 2.13, we’ve been treated to AIR Chorus, AIR Multitap Delay, AIR Expander, AIR Vintage Filter, the Vocal Tuner, the famous AIR Soft Clipper, etc., the ability to load a specific project at startup, the function available on the MPC Key 37 Latch + Chord interface (which lets you play a chord, then trigger it with a key across the entire keyboard register).

And best of all, we got some excellent modeling of the Minimoog and Juno-60 (heard below with the Stage EP Piano), which sound really good and are great to handle on the machine.

Rhodes adventures

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We could also talk about the Sub Factory, which was released on 08/08 while the test was being written and which looks like one hell of a bass-sound machine. But of course the big new feature already present on the machines is Stems, which enables track separation from a stereo file containing the mix of several tracks. The function is very simple to use, via the appropriate menu, and enables the contents of a single clip (bass, drums, vocals, others) to be exported in 4 clips. As is often the case with this type of algorithm, the efficiency and cleanliness of the rendering of each track will be highly dependent on the source material, and not always easy to use in isolation. But having this kind of tool is more than enough to extend the possibilities of classic sampling, give the feel of source material to original material, and even give relatively clean results by choosing sources and timelines that aren’t too busy.

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It should be noted, however, that the rendering of Stems is noticeably different between the version embedded on the hardware, and that accessible in the DAW MPC 2. On the loop used for testing, you can hear a clear difference with the desktop version, which seems to succeed a little better in separating the tracks, with fewer “bizarro phase”-type artifacts, and with the bass part seeming a little more aggressive, perhaps. We don’t know if it’s just a matter of available power in one case or the other. Still, it would be desirable to be able to obtain the same results in both cases, or even to have access to some parameters of the algorithm to be able to customize the rendering according to the sound material to be processed.

MPC Stems Standalone Demo

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• MPC Stems Standalone Demo01:03
• MPC Stems Desktop Demo01:04

Finally, it’s impossible not to tell you about the latest addition to the ecosystem, namely version 3 of the MPC OS, available to a lucky few in beta! We haven’t had a chance to test it yet, but a number of features caught our eye enough to tell you a few words about it.

The big news in this version 3 is obviously all the rather radical workflow improvements, with the removal of programs, simplified access to certain functions, and the various and sundry sequencer improvements we’ve seen in the official videos. A number of new color codes improve the visibility of elements track by track, both in the sequencer and in mixing views. We also noted the presence of streaming directly to the internal hard disk (roughly 25 GB by the way) or to external disks (SD and USB), which will make it possible to increase the size of clips quite a bit and get closer to the workflow of a multitrack recorder, which is very much appreciated. Other features that seem like nothing, but which we’re eagerly awaiting, include randomization in the sequencer and the ability to assign fixed parameters to encoders, whatever the context. We’ll tell you more about all this when the OS is officially released, of course. Still, it already greatly enhances Akai’s proposition with this MPC Key 37 and all its other products, workflow quirks being one of the problematic elements on MPCs.