AKAI Professional Force 4-stars Reviews

Great gear but mine may be faulty

I love this box and with the Akai Force 3.2 updated it is unbeatable in my opinion. All though they're a few bugs with the update.

The only thing is my unit seems to have an issue with the pads, from day one. They are not really responsive too light taps. Even after messing with the pad sensitivity the velocity jumps from very low to 127 with pretty much the same amount of pressure applied to the pads. It's really hard to play at a decent level. It's either to quite or to loud. No one else seems to have this problem that I can see.

Massive all-in-one device

If you are looking for many features conceived in a no-way compact form factor, the Force might be what you are looking for. The greatest takeaway from me would be the Ableton style manner of clip recording, launching and playback. Akai had treated the MPC/Force series well with periodically useful updates.

Great product with caveats

The workflow is great, samples and loops are poor. Really made for hiphop and house. Not many on board synths. Bluetooth midi is unusable due to big latancy.

Almost perfect - but instable

I love the sound of the Force. It is an awesome sampler, has nice synth engines. It ist extremely extensive. You can record mic and guitar input, loop&overdub it in the looper mode, prepare a huge amount of snippets for live performance, create whole songs etc.

This complexity comes at a cost: It is heavy, I spend a lot of time tweaking sounds and thinking through patterns, micro adjusting notes and playing with plugins and tapping on the touch screen. This hindered me from being productive. I usually prepare projects with versatile drum kits, have user-defined synth sounds prepared and both audio tracks already prepared as a basis for all my new projects.

If you don't really need that many options and you want to be more productive on your couch, I would recommend smaller groove boxes e.g. Elektron Model:Samples over or in addition to the Force.