MPC One : Hard to work with, but extremely useful

First off: I'm not yet that experienced with the MPC One, as find little free time to actually sit down and work with it. That being said, I have spent some weekends completely enveloped in it.

It's a great drum machine. Playing a set of drums or samples is as easy and intuitive as it can get. I don't have any previous experience with velocity and aftertouch sensitive pads, so I needed some time to "get" them, but once you're over that phase, it feels just like tapping on your table with your finger (which I like to do, play drums sometimes also).

If melodic instruments are more your thing, you probably don't want to use just the pads, even though the MPC has quite a few different note/cord/etc. presets for many many different genres of music, so sometimes you can get a great idea by just slamming random pads. Pair up a MIDI keyboard and you're done. If the "sample your own instruments" vibe doesn't suit you, that's not a problem. You can sample them, but when you're recording your finished project, you can just *boop* change the track from sample-based to MIDI and record the live instrument (if it connects to MIDI anyway). It has millions of features, truly making it a hardware DAW.

There are a lot more good things to say, but you've probably noticed I gave handling a 3/5. The entire workflow is pretty damn weird and unintuitive. Most functions cannot be found where you would expect them to be. Some functions you would expect would be accessible on buttons are hidden in menus. Speaking of menus, every menu where you have to choose between a lot of options opens on only a third of the screen. This makes working with a lot of samples almost impossible, as you can only see the first like 10 characters of the filename (this can be worked around by using certain filenaming conventions). They could just extend the menu to the entire screen, the extra space helps no one (they even blur it out). Akai is pumping out features lately, so maybe they could polish the existing features sometime, which they probably will.

Tl;dr: Feature packed, can do absolutely anything you want it to, but can be finnicky and unintuitive.