Hey folks. Matt here.
It’s been a while.
Actually, let’s be honest. It’s been more than a year.
If you subscribed to Retrothusiast and then watched nothing show up in your inbox or your YouTube feed, I owe you an explanation.
The short version is that I’m a software developer by day, and over the last year and a half, AI ate my entire professional life.
I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s been the most interesting stretch of my career.
But when a whole industry rebuilds itself under you, you don’t get to sit it out. So I went deep, and I stayed there.
The music room got dark. The camera stayed in the bag.
Things have finally settled down, and I have my evenings back. So here I am.
The video is below. This post is the companion piece, with the details, the links, and a few things I didn’t have room for on camera.
One promise, and only one: I’m aiming for one solid video a month. If I get organized enough to do one every two weeks, great. But I’d rather give you twelve things I actually care about than commit to fifty-two and disappear again.
The fifteen-minute problem
In my last video, I admitted that I only made music when I felt inspired, and that I almost never felt inspired because I was worn out.
I’d squeeze in ten or fifteen minutes here and there.
Then I made a joke that my fellow Prophet owners would understand: ten or fifteen minutes is barely enough time for a Prophet-10 to warm up and get in tune.
That joke was funnier before I realized it was the actual reason I stopped.
The gear I love has a startup cost.
The Prophet needs to warm up. The Tascam 388 needs a tape and a mood. The MPC X SE is a full studio, which means sitting down at it feels like starting a project.
When all you have is a stolen fifteen minutes, a startup cost is the whole fifteen minutes.
So when I went looking for a way back in, I wasn’t shopping for the best-sounding machine. I was shopping for the one with no startup cost at all.
An MPC60 that got hit by a shrink ray
This is the Akai MPC Sample.
Akai released it on March 24, 2026 for $399, and it sold out the same day. Stock stayed thin for months.
It’s now October, so yes, I’m extremely late to this one. Getting there eventually is sort of my brand at this point.
And look at it. It’s an MPC60 that got hit by the shrink ray from Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
The light gray, the angled front, the padded wrist rest, that old school Akai logo. It’s a very deliberate love letter to the machines that started the whole MPC line.
If you’re newer to this world, here’s the short history.
In 1988, Roger Linn, the designer behind the LM-1 and the LinnDrum, designed the MPC60 for Akai, with his signature right there on the front panel. He followed it with the MPC3000 in 1994.
Akai says the MPC Sample takes its inspiration from both of them.
If you read my DSI Tempest pieces, you already know I have a soft spot for anything Roger Linn had a hand in. So Akai had me before I read a single spec.
One thing worth being clear about: Roger Linn had nothing to do with the MPC Sample itself. This is Akai paying tribute to his design, not a Linn product.
What’s actually inside
Under that retro shell, it’s a 2026 machine.
You get sixteen RGB pads, velocity sensitive, with polyphonic aftertouch. They’re real MPC pads, not clicky buttons, and that matters the moment you start finger drumming.
There are thirty-two stereo voices, two gigs of RAM, and eight gigs of internal storage. About two of those eight gigs are factory content, so plan on roughly six for your own sounds, plus a microSD slot when that isn’t enough.
The 2.4-inch color screen does waveform editing, and next to it are three real-time knobs and that classic parameter fader. The fader is assignable, so you decide what it controls on each pad.
It ships with over a hundred factory kits, four effects engines, and sixty effect types.
But here’s the part that matters most to me.
It has a rechargeable battery good for about five hours, a built-in 3-watt speaker, and an internal microphone.
No computer. No interface. No excuses.
And one detail that I think gets overlooked: projects you start on the MPC Sample can be opened in Akai’s MPC3 software. For me, that means a sketch made on the couch can move to the MPC X SE in the studio later. A sketchpad that hands off to the big studio is exactly what my fifteen-minute problem needed.
First session: the reface CS meets the tiny MPC
The internal mic is fun, but sampling my coffee cup only gets you so far.
So for the first session, I plugged my Yamaha reface CS into the Sample’s stereo input.
The reface is the perfect partner for this thing, and for the same reason. It’s small, it’s instant, and it runs on batteries too. The two of them together fit on a TV tray, which is the entire point.
I’ll be honest about how it went. It wasn’t a tidy demo.
Most of the session was a loop. Pick a sound on the reface. Noodle around until a melody shows up. Figure out how to make the MPC Sample actually record it. Lay down the sequence. Then start over with a new sound and stack the next layer on top.
The edited video shows the highlights and the finished track. If you want every sound I tried and every mistake along the way, that’s what the uncut session is for. More on that below.
The honest bit
It’s not perfect, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. A few things to know before you buy one.
The knobs are pots, not endless encoders. At launch, they only worked in pickup mode, so a knob did nothing until you turned it past its stored value, and that was the most common early complaint. Akai’s 1.3 firmware update added more knob takeover modes, but it’s worth knowing going in.
It’s deliberately stripped down. No plugins, no clip launching, none of the deep workflow you get on the bigger MPCs. That sounds like a feature to me. It might be a dealbreaker for you.
MIDI is on 3.5mm jacks. You’ll need a 3.5mm-to-MIDI DIN adapter for older gear, and the spec listing says it isn’t in the box.
Sync is out only. The spec listing shows a sync output, but no sync input. It can drive your other gear, but it isn’t built to follow it.
None of those are dealbreakers for what I bought it for. But I’d rather you hear them from me than find them out after the box is open.
What’s next
The full uncut session premieres on YouTube on Wednesday, October 28 at 10 AM Central.
I cut a lot of the real workflow out of the main video to keep it moving, including how I actually record sequences on the MPC Sample. If you’re thinking about buying one, the uncut session is the one to watch. You can hit “Notify me” here: [UNCUT LINK]
After that, I’ve got two more machines on the bench.
The Korg multi/poly is Korg’s modern take on the old Mono/Poly. The Sequential Fourm is four voices of Prophet-5 architecture with a polyphonic aftertouch keyboard. Both are getting their own deep dives, and I’m not going to rush them.
And I still owe you a proper look at my vintage computers, which several of you asked for last time and I absolutely did not deliver.
Tell me in the comments what you want first.
And if you’ve got an MPC Sample, tell me what you’re sampling with it. I need ideas that aren’t my coffee cup.
Thanks for sticking around while I was gone.
Take care, and I’ll see you in the next one.
Matt