Hey guys, in this video we’re going to talk about the Akai MPD218.
This is a low budget MIDI controller that acts as a finger drumming pad.
We’ll go through how to use it, and my overall impressions of the features and how it is
to work with.
First let’s go over some of the controls we have on the drum pad.
The left side has 6 continuous controller knobs that we can twist.
This sends a MIDI signal to our digital audio workstation that can be used to change different
controls, such as plugins, depending on how our software is configured to receive the
signal.
When I was using Cakewalk by BandLab as a digital audio workstation, I was able to program
the MPD218 to control a bunch of plugin knobs, and it would which what the knobs did based
on whichever plugin was actively selected at the time.
Below that we have 6 buttons.
If we press the control bank button, we can cycle through 3 different control banks, labeled
A, B, and C.
This just expands how many things we can do with the 6 knobs, and it will depend on how
your software deals with it.
The next option is the program select.
The MPD218 can have different programs, which is just a mapping that tells us MIDI events
each of the pads is mapped to.
When we press the program select button, we can then press a pad to change the program.
All these programs can be changed from the MPD218 editor software that we’ll look at
later.
We may want to have different pads configured if we want certain parts of the drum kit to
be on a certain pad, but the instrument plugin we’re using responds to different MIDI events
The next button is for the pad bank.
This is similar to our control bank button we looked at earlier, and we have A, B, and
C pad banks.
When we switch pad banks, it basically just increases of decreases the range of MIDI events
that this group of pads controls, so we can access more MIDI notes with only 16 pads.
This is useful if we need more notes for a different recording, but we can’t expect
to switch pad banks quickly during a performance.
The full level button is pretty simple.
With this enabled, any drum pad we hit will read as full velocity, instead of the lower
velocity that we hit it at.
The NR config button determines the note repeat.
We can set it to 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, or 1/32 notes, or these same timings with triplets instead.
Up above, we can also choose the swing.
We select these settings by pressing NR config and the pad associated with that option.
In the top right, we can set it to respond to an external clock from our audio software,
or TAP TEMPO.
The last button is for actually using note repeat.
To enter note repeat mode, we need to hold down the note repeat button, then press a
pad.
The pad will repeat based on the note repeat settings.
If you increase or decrease the pressure while note repeat is active, it will increase or
decrease the velocity for the next notes.
To work with an external clock, we first need to set our software to send the clock signal
to our MIDI controller.
The way this is done will depend on the software, but in Reaper we can go to MIDI devices in
the preferences, and send the clock under the output.
For this to work, the MPD218 also needs to have NRConfig set to external clock.
Now note repeat will respond to Reaper’s clock signal, but it will only work during
playback or recording.
There will be no clock to sync if it is not playing or recording, so the MPD218 won’t
send a MIDI signal when in note repeat mode otherwise.
On the right of the MPD218, we have all our velocity sensitive pads.
This is the main feature of this MIDI controller that we use to control our virtual instruments.
These are fairly responsive rubber pads that we can hit with our fingers.
When the pad is hit, the light underneath will light up red.
If we set the MIDI output from our digital audio workstation to the Akai MPD218 and play
MIDI clip back, the pads will light up without up pressing anything.
It’s not too difficult to maintain timing with the pads as long as the latency in our
software is minimal.
For that to be the case, you’ll need to make sure your software is set to ASIO mode
with a proper audio interface that can support this.
The pads also respond to fairly light touch, but I have had problems sometimes where they
have missed a note because they we not quite as responsive as I would have liked them to
be.
So I would consider them to be responsive to light touch, but not as reliable as when
you hit them harder.
One of the other things the MPD218 can do is respond to pressure after the initial note
press.
When we hit a note, it can send the initial velocity for that MIDI event, but it can also
vary the pressure while it’s held down if we have aftertouch enabled.
This shows up under channel pressure in programs like Reaper.
Once again, this is another MIDI signal that is transmitted by the MPD218, but it depends
on our program what it will do from here.
An example of how this can be used is with the ReaSynth plugin.
We can set a MIDI linked parameter, such as the tuning of our plugin, to link to the channel
pressure.
That way whenever we press a note and vary the pressure it changes the pitch.
Obviously we wouldn’t normally want to do this because it would sound awful, but I’m
using it as an example, and you can link these two controls together.
So that’s basically it for the MPD218.
From here you can just configure it as an input for your digital audio workstation and
use it as a MIDI input device.
Now that we’ve gone over how this works, all we have to do is learn the mapping of
our various virtual instrument plugins.
Then we can practice a drum beat and record it in our software.
Compared to some other MIDI controllers, there are a few features we don’t have, especially
since it’s designed for drumming and not synths.
The first, and most obvious, missing feature is any sort of pitch bend control that a lot
of the keyboards have.
We don’t need this for drums, but it’s a cool feature for synths.
There’s also no play, pause, stop, forwards and back buttons that some other MIDI controllers
will include to control the project transport, but those are often found on more expensive
controllers.
In addition to the MIDI controller itself, the Akai MPD218 also comes with a few pieces
of software that we can use with it.
It includes Ableton Live Lite, Akai Pro MPC Essentials, SONiVOX Big Bang Cinematic Percussion
and Big Bang Universal Drums.
Since I use this MIDI controller with different digital audio workstations, I generally don’t
use the included software that comes with it.
The only things I use are the SONiVOX plugins through my other digital audio workstations,
and we’ll cover some of the sounds those can make in another video, but they’re a
pretty decent plugin considering they’re included for free.
The last thing we need to go over is configuring the MPD218 control knobs and pads.
This is done with the Akai MPD218 Editor that can be downloaded from their website.
The MPD218 editor basically allows us to control what the drum pads are mapped to as far as
events.
On the left, we start with the 3 control knob banks.
If we click on these, we can change the channel and event value for how the software will
receive the signal.
We can also change the minimum and maximum values.
The full range is from 0 to 127.
To right, we can adjust the pads, and we can switch the pad banks with the buttons at the
top.
We’ll usually keep these set to NOTE mode to use it as a drum pad.
Then we can change the MIDI channel.
This allows us to virtually separate different drum pads on the MPD218.
Let’s go over an example of how we can use this.
Say we’re creating a drum beat, but we want to use two different instrument plugins at
once.
First, we’ll set up the plugins on two tracks in our digital audio workstation.
Then we can separate the left and right half of the MPD218, or the top and bottom if you
prefer, to different MIDI channels.
I can set one side to channel 1 and the other to channel 2.
Then what I want to do is set the input on my first track to channel 1 and the input
on the second track to channel 2.
Now they will only record the MIDI input on their channel, and we can keep them separate
without having to record them separately.
What this allows us to do is capture the beat with both plugins at once, without capturing
all the MIDI events on both tracks.
If we didn’t set up the channels, we would capture everything and have to separate it
out after, which takes extra time.
Below we can change the MIDI note if we want to rearrange them.
We can also have notes multiple times but on different MIDI channels if we need to.
Then we can set our aftertouch settings.
This is that pressure reading we saw in Reaper.
We can turn that off if we don’t want it, but we can also just leave it on and tell
our software to ignore it.
Otherwise, we can have it on in channel or poly mode.
Not all software is going to be able to use aftertouch when it’s in POLY mode, but the
setup we looked at earlier in Reaper used channel mode to make adjustments on the plugins.
In momentary, it’s just a single note press.
We can have it set to toggle on or off.
That way when we press it, it stays on until we press it again.
On the far right, we have some common controls.
There’s a preset name, tempo, time division and swing which are used for the note repeat
mode we talked about earlier.
We can get more accurate tempo from this software than tap tempo, especially if we need to match
it to a tempo that’s already in another piece of software.
The other thing we need to cover is the autopopulate tool, found under the tools at the top.
From here, we can adjust all those controls we saw earlier, but we can adjust them for
entire banks of pads or knobs at a time.
This makes it quicker than adjusting them individually.
When we’re done, we can save our preset on the computer, that way we can keep more
presets than the MPD218 will store.
To get our changes to work on the MPD218, we need to send the changes to hardware, and
this is done from the file menu at the top.
We can have 16 presets on the device, which are switched based on the program selection
we saw earlier.
We can keep more presets, but not on the device.
They would need to be saved on a computer and swapped out.
The one thing I would like to mention is that you’ll probably have issues sending or receiving
a MIDI preset from the hardware if it’s in use by a digital audio workstation.
If that’s the case, try closing your software and restarting the MPD218 editor.
So that basically covers everything on how to use the MPD218.
It’s overall a fairly simple MIDI controller that makes it a lot quicker than manually
adding MIDI from the piano roll view.
Thanks for checking out this video on the Akai MPD218.
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