AKAI FORCE
Hardware that tackles DAWs head-on…
“What’s relevant here is that it has a fully-fledged arrangement view”
Akai’s Force is many things in one: a sequencer, a sampler and a software instrument host. What’s most relevant for us today is that it includes a fully-fledged arrangement view, where compositions can be created, edited, mixed, then exported as Ableton Live projects, or as ready-to-share stereo files.
The package includes the Force itself, a mains power supply, three 3.5mm MIDI adaptors, and a USB cable. It’s somewhat chunky, weighing 3.87kg, and measuring 350 x 389 x 72.5mm, but maybe that’s an acceptable trade-off given the expansive control surface that’s available as a result – the top panel includes the 6.9” multitouch display, many buttons, a large data dial, a crossfader, eight touch sensitive assignable knobs, each with its own little display, and 64 illuminated, velocity, and pressure sensitive pads. Because of the sheer number of options, you’ll often find that there’s more than one way to perform any given task.
The front edge of the Force is home to an SD card slot, 1/4” headphones jack with volume knob, and a cue-level knob. The rear panel hosts four CV/ gate outputs, MIDI in/out/ thru, 4 1/4” audio outputs, two XLR/jack input audio jacks, with switches for line/ instrument and phantom power, as well as a Gain knob for each of the two inputs. Two USB-A connectors have been provided for external storage, or connecting MIDI controllers, a B connector for the computer, an ethernet port, and a power switch.
Underneath, there’s a bay for you to add a hard drive, which is more or less essential if you want to keep your entire sample library within reach at all times – we’d recommend an SSD drive, because they’ll be more resistant to vibrations that can often occur during loud performances – prices on these are ridiculously low right now. We installed a 240GB one on our example model.
The Force comes preloaded with demo projects, which will help you to get to grips with the workflow – they’re all in dance music styles, which tells you how Akai view the market for this. Press the Matrix button to trigger clips containing loops or one-shot samples by tapping the display, or use the launch button to allow triggering them from the physical pads. Tapping any of the vertical row of pads at the right will launch a scene – a horizontal row of clips. Press the Note button, and the pads function as a grid-based MIDI keyboard, so if the selected track hosts a drum kit or a software instrument, you can play those sounds in real time. Keep pressing to cycle note layouts, based around different scales and chords, a basic ‘piano’ type layout, or press Launch/Note together for our favourite, a split mode where the top four rows handle launch functions, while the lower four rows can be used to play notes at the same time. If any of this is giving you deja vu, it’s because using the Force is very Ableton-like at times. There are big differences, but anybody who’s used Ableton Live with Push before will quickly grasp the basic concepts of the Force.
Continuing in DAWstyle, the Force has different track types, with up to eight audio tracks available, eight for plugin instruments, and the rest assignable to drums, key groups, or external MIDI sequencing – up to a total of 128 tracks per project. There are four software instruments available – Hype (EDM-type synth), Bassline (monophonic synth), Electric (piano), and TubeSynth (analogue). Although these include a number of presets, we preferred to load the vanilla settings and build our own patches as we went along.
A set of drum synths have been added in a recent firmware update; each one – kick, snare, etc – can be loaded to a track as a separate instrument, or they can be loaded collectively as
“Force makes a good go of interacting with a computer when the time comes”
the Drum Synth kit. These work very well, and are an invaluable addition to the factory sample-based kits, and to any samples of your own that you might load.
As we mentioned earlier, the Force’s pads are velocity sensitive, and those responses are captured during recording, and can be manually edited after the event if needed. Audio effects can be applied to each kit, or to individual drum sounds, enabling complex effect processing. The included audio effects are wide-ranging, including compression, delays, distortions, EQ, filters, and more, from AIR Instruments, and from Akai themselves, with effects including autopan, chorus, various compressors, reverb, sidechaining, and much more. Up to four effect slots are available per track (per pad in kits), and there are also slots and presets available to load and save favourite combinations as effect racks.
Although it’s fully functioning as a standalone device, the Force does make a good go of interacting with a computer when the time comes – at a simple level it’ll use Ableton
Link for sync, either wirelessly or through the ethernet port for a more reassuring physical connection. When the Force is connected to a computer via USB, we can enter computer mode, where all of the Force’s user installed storage appears on the desktop for drag ‘n’ drop of content, stereo mixes, live projects, and firmware updates. In computer mode, the Force can also act as a USB audio interface for the computer. The USB ‘A’ ports, as mentioned earlier, can be used to connect USB storage, MIDI keyboards or other controllers – we were also able to power USB gooseneck lights from them, which could be useful for live sets and soundchecks. If the Akai Professional Network MIDI app is installed, the Force can wirelessly connect to Ableton Live and operate as a Pushstyle controller; the functionality isn’t as deep as using Ableton’s actual own Push: notably it can’t trigger notes from the pads, but for a lot of situations, the instrument and effect controls will be good enough, and it’s a useful extra even if you don’t use it too often.
The Force’s native sound library can be expanded by purchasing add-on content, or by sampling directly from your own sources, after which they can be edited, and time-stretched, for looping or playback at different tempos. One-shot drum samples can be organised into kits, which can, of course, be saved for future use, but our particular favourite sampling tool is keygroups, where samples can be imported and quickly converted to keyboard instrument patches that can be reused and adapted as part of your signature sound. They can include stacks of samples within one patch, and one of the things we enjoy most about this is that if
“It’s the arrangements and the expansive user interface that set the Force apart”
short samples or even single-cycle waveforms are used, very little disk space or RAM is used.
Whether your MIDI parts are recorded or drawn in, there’s a full range of editing tools available here, including the rather neat ‘generate random events’ function, where a
MIDI clip can be populated with random drum events or melodic events, supplementing or overwriting any notes that are already present. Notes can be constrained to a user-defined scale, so in this case random doesn’t have to mean chaotic – unless you want it to. MIDI editing can be conducted in the typical DAWstyle editing view, or you can go hardcore and use the List View, where MIDI activity is presented in a vertically scrolling format, not unlike what you’d see in tracker software, or indeed on the screen of the Polyend Tracker that we also review in this feature.
It’s very impressive to have all this detailed MIDI editing power in a hardware machine, and if it was all we had to make music, we could live with it, but sooner or later a job comes along where you’ll want to work on a more expansive computer display. It’d be nice if it could share its screen content to another display, like some of the old Roland hardware digital recorders could, but sadly there’s no way of doing that with the Force. What’s most important from our point of view is that the Force can create ‘proper’ arrangements, captured in real time and edited afterwards, automation included, again with common DAW-style edit functions such as punching in new sections, copy, paste, delete, and so on. It’s exciting to have these capabilities, and a lot can be achieved before the display feels cramped. It’s down to what other gear you have, and how averse you are to computer use.
Undoubtedly this could be an excellent way to record a live performance as you’re on-stage, and perhaps that’s where it will be most useful. We’ll contradict the standalone concept for a moment by wishing for the ability to move the full arrangements to computer software for final editing, to an Akai-type DAW without needing Live conversion and export, but that doesn’t seem likely at the moment.
Once an arrangement’s been created, it can be exported as a stereo mix and transferred to a computer. Or it can be saved as an Ableton Live project, converting the Force parts to audio or to MIDI clips – there’s no way to retain the instrument sounds and settings, as they’re unique to Akai hardware, so some rebuilding in Live is required, and there’s a lot to be said for considering a Force arrangement as a done deal. This isn’t a one-way procedure, by the way – Ableton Live projects can also be imported into the Force, as long as they’ve been saved in a recent, compatible version of Live 10 or 11, that is. It’s kind of trippy to take a years-old Live project and open it into 21st century hardware!
If you love to work with arrangements, you probably wouldn’t want to edit them with the Force, day in, day out, but this is great functionality to have on board, and as we said earlier, a useful way to capture your live sets at the very least. It’s the arrangements and the expansive user interface that set the Force apart… oh yes, and the Ableton integration. We’ve used the Force in the studio, and for a handful of live sets, and it has performed solidly in all situations. Live users have long called for a hardware, standalone, version of their favourite software, and right now this is as close as you can get.