Computer Music gets hands-on with Akai’s APC40 Ableton controller

Akai Professional’s new APC40 controller for Ableton Live looks great on paper, but what’s it like in the flesh? Computer Music laid hands on it at the NAMM show, so read on for those all-important first impressions…

What’s the first thing you do with any piece of new gear? Why, twiddle its knobs and push its buttons, of course! The APC40 passes this test with flying colours (pun intended), with smooth (but not slack) fader travel and a satisfying knob action. It feels solid all round, and the LED-ring encoders and backlit buttons look great too. All of which is no great surprise given Akai’s experience in the field of making quality hardware devices.

What is surprising, though, is just how intuitive the APC40 is – we had the basics sussed in no time, with no manual and no outside help. We might have missed a trick or two, but here goes with our totally off-the-cuff – and possibly totally inaccurate – crash course in APC40 wizardry…

A red border in the Live Session view lets you know which clips the upper-left 8×5 button matrix is controlling – hit these backlit buttons to trigger the corresponding clips and they change colour to reflect the clip’s status.

The Bank Select cursor buttons to the right move the red border around, so that you needn’t be limited to one area of your set. Because the cells light up in the pattern of the on-screen clips, it’s pretty easy to get a handle on where you are in the Session view. Squint hard enough at our pic below and you can just about make this out.

Scenes are launched with the column of 5 buttons to the right of the main matrix, and Clips are stopped with the lower row – this corresponds to the layout of the Session view, so Live users should find it immediately intuitive.

Each of the eight channels (as highlighted by the red box on screen) has a level fader and its own monitor, solo and record buttons. The top-right eight-knobbed section is labelled Track Control, and offers pan or one of three send levels per track.

For controlling devices, the other eight-knobbed panel, Device Control, comes into play. There seems to be more to this section than we were able to fathom during our brief encounter, but we were able to use it to wrench filter cutoffs (and other parameters, natch), move back and forth through effects chains, and bypass devices at will.

Other controls include the lower-right crossfader (this controls the Live crossfader, unsurprisingly), master level and cue level, transport buttons, quantisation buttons and metronome toggle.

So, first impressions are favourable – the APC40 offers a lot of functionality without overwhelming the user with layers of options or multipurpose controls. You’ll have to wait for the full-on CM review, however, to discover if it can live up to the hype once the novelty has worn off, and if there are any show-stopping rough edges or deal-breaking deficiencies.

One last thing to get excited about: due to the inclusion of Max For Live in Ableton Live 8, brainiac users will be able to work some Max magic to extend or alter the way in which the APC40 works – there’s already a working example of a patch to turn the matrix grid into a step sequencer, reminiscent of those seen for the monome controller device.

Tags: Ableton, Akai, Computer Music, Hi-tech, Live, max for live

This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 10:25 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.