AKAI Professional MPD 218 1-star Reviews

Poor quality

You have to hit the pads really hard. People suggest sensitivity can be improved by putting tape on the sensors etc. but the reality is that out of the box this is not a very useful product. I have a Boss drum machine which must be 20+ years old and it's still much easier to play. The only pleasant surprise is that the knobs are endless rotary encoders.

Too much velocity needed to trigger pads, even in "Full Level" mode

Unfortunately pad sensitivity was set up in a way that made the entire thing useless. After reading some reviews it seems to me that the pads on the MPD218 are either to stiff (the one they sent me had almost no sensitivity at all, I could not trigger anything but quarter notes without missing beats) or too sensitive. AKAI seriously need to work on their quality control. I will not order another one of these in hopes of randomly getting a good one, but settle for a different controller instead.

Good looking, poor quality

It looks professional out of the box, but I am totally disappointed with its playability and functioning. I didn't expect it to be this bad, I guess it varies from product to product.

1. The pad sensitivity is different on each pad. Thus, Its likely that you will miss a hit. Velocity is terrible and the pads are too stiff.

2. The pads bounce and over trigger notes. I tried recording a drum beat and later I figured that there are lots of unnecessary notes on the midi line, that I didn't intended to play. Eventually, I figured that, sometimes pads trigger the same note multiple times.

3. Sometimes hitting one pad triggers the others around it. For example, when I hit the kick pad, that also triggers the snare and hi-hat.

I cannot use it properly

It doesn't react the way you would think it would. It is not sensitive. I have a hard time doing anything with it. I guess it's not for me...