Akai Professional MPK Mini Play - Sand, software and sound

Compared to the Yamaha MODX, the Akai Professional MPK Mini Play is a piece of Halloween candy.

The MPK Mini Play is a tiny 2-octave keyboard with eight MPC drum pads, four knobs and a joystick. It’s battery powered (3 AA batteries). And get this, it has an internal sound engine (128 voices and 10 drum kits) and speaker. That smells like General MIDI and without further information, we’ll have to wait to hear what it’s got.

Digital connectivity is over USB and only audio headphone out (3.5mm jack) is provided. There is a 1/4″ sustain pedal jack, too.

$129 USD street (MAP).

This one is in “impulse buy” territory. Christmas stocking stuffer?

Kind of a shame that it doesn’t have an auxiliary audio input, too. It would make a nice companion for the Akai MPX8 Mobile SD Sample Player. Hmmm, I wonder how to MIDI this up?

Early information alleges Reason Lite in the bundle. Nothing official yet.

First demo video by GAK

Dream SAM2635 inside?

[Update] Two more unofficial videos popped up on Youtube. One video scrolls through the first several patches. Yep, the MPK Mini Play is the 128 sound General MIDI (GM) set.

The GM standard has only one drum set. The MPK Mini Play has ten sets. What’s up?

Well, the instrument abbreviations are the same as the Dream GMBK9764 sound set and drum kits. Many of you may not be familiar with Dream S.A.S France, but they are one of the few vendors (aside from Yamaha, Roland, Korg, etc.) who design and sell sample playback silicon. The GMBK9764 sound set has 128 GM sounds (plus variations), nine drum sets and one SFX set for a total of ten drum sets.

If we were to crack open the Akai MPK Mini Play, I expect we will find a Dream SAM2635 synthesizer (PDF) with the GMBK9764 CleanWave64® sound set (PDF) stored in a separate 8MByte ROM. If this is true, that’s good news for Akai MPK Mini Play users. They should be able to access the GM variation voices, alternative chorus/reverb effect types, and synthesis parameter control functions via MIDI (assuming that the Akai software isn’t stupidly filtering out certain MIDI messages).

The MIDIPLUS miniEngine is also Dream-based. If you own a miniEngine, you already know how the MPK Mini Play sounds.