If you often spend your time crafting the perfect beat in the Step Sequencer, you’ll love how quickly you can experiment and play around.

The Akai Fire is a great piece of hardware for creating beats and drum loops. If you combine this with User modes to custom route filters and effects, you can have complete control over your sound as it happens. You play a song live, using the stamp keys to enable different instruments, melodies, and loops. This mode turns the keypad into triggers for samples and loops. There’s also a cool visualizer mode if you’d like a light show to accompany your music. The Step Sequencer can feel robotic and constrained, but the FPC lets me add a certain imprecise human element to my music that I’m often looking for. This is a great way to trigger drums or samples. Tracing the foodchain involved here is kind of meta: (1) Someone samples a breakbeat, (2) that sample is loaded onto an Akai MPC, (3) ImageLine writes the FPC software to emulate an MPC, (4) Akai creates a piece of hardware to mimic the FPC, (5) you press a small key to play that same breakbeat. These correspond to two banks of the FPC plugin – which is a software mimic of Akai’s MPC drum/sampler machine. “Drum Mode” on the Akai Fire lights up two 4×4 grids of the small stamp buttons. So, while you’re playing in C, your notes are being translated up or down to any key you want. One cool feture here is the ability to transpose the keyboard – you can shift the root note up or down.

It takes some getting used to, but you can play notes straight into the Piano Roll this way. If you have a channel selected, you can play that virtual instrument by pressing those small keys.

If you kick the Akai Fire into “Note” mode, those small buttons light up in a rough approximation of a piano keyboard. Keyboard Mode – If you squint, you can make out a piano keyboard formed by the white and orange keys.

Akai fire