REVIEW
AKAI APC40
If you’re into Ableton Live and you’re looking for a controller, surely this is it. Text: Anthony Touma
There’s rarely a time I use an audio application without wishing there were a dedicated controller specifically for it. Among the gamut of controllers on the market, almost all are customisable to achieve the desired effect but seldom do I come across a piece of gear that has essentially been plucked out of my imagination… The Akai APC40 for Ableton Live is just that, a controller that’s been plucked from my (and I’d wager most other Live users’) mind. The collaborative offspring of Akai and Ableton is a USB-based controller that basically mirrors the GUI of Ableton Live. In true Akai form, the unit sports an 8 x 5 grid of backlit rubber pads for clip launching, an extra row of horizontal pads for stopping clips and a row of vertical pads for launching scenes. There are eight channel faders, one for each vertical row, as well as solo, cue, mute and record buttons. To the right of the unit, there are a total of 16 ‘endless’ encoders (‘endless’ meaning that they can rotate through 360 degrees), each of them surrounded by the now familiar circular LED indicators and all assignable across four banks. The top eight rotary faders are used to control track parameters such as pans or sends, while the bottom eight rotary faders are used to control instrument and effects parameters. There are bank select, nudge and tap tempo buttons as well as global stop, play, record buttons, a master fader level, a cross fader, the option for two assignable foot switches and a cue level knob… pretty much everything a Live user could ask for; all laid out in a well spaced manner all coming together in a nicely-sized 42cm x 36cm form factor. THE JOY OF INSTALLATION Installing the APC40 is an absolute joy. Simply plugging the unit in, loading Live 8, selecting ‘APC40’ from the MIDI/Sync menu and activating the MIDI parameters has everything working immediately. Live 8 provides a visual indication within the GUI of what the APC will trigger by loading red borders around groups of clips and scenes currently mapped to the controller. This ensures you never get lost while switching through banks, and I’d have to say this single feature got me used to working with the controller faster than any other unit I’ve ever played with.
The controller itself is bi-directional, meaning that any channel/ parameter selected within Live is relayed back to APC40 and vice-versa. If, for example, you were to start tweaking FX on the second channel’s delay in Live, the APC40’s Device Controls would then be mapped to those parameters automatically. This makes it a lot harder to touch the wrong encoder or fader, given that both the controller and application stay in sync as you move back and forth between them. Within 10 minutes of jamming with an existing project, I stopped using the mouse and keyboard almost completely. Looking at the screen kept me constantly in touch with which channels the APC was mapped to, the instrument I was currently able to tweak and which sends were adjustable at that point in time. When I needed to select a channel via the mouse and get into some deeper tuning on an instrument, the APC changed to the selected channel I was working on in Live and sat there patiently waiting for me to get back to it… extremely cool. BUILT LIKE A BANK The build quality of the APC40 is excellent. The pads and buttons are very responsive and have that classic Akai MPC feel to them. The knobs feel solid and smooth to the tweak, and the LED indicators that surround them are clear and precise. The faders have just the right amount of resistance to them and their sensitivity is spot on. The bank select and global play/stop/ record buttons, on the other hand, are of the hard plastic variety, which is a bit disappointing from my perspective. Having said that, these are identical to the buttons used on the MPC series of Akai samplers, which have certainly been put through their paces over the years without too much complaint from the user base. The power supply is external to the unit and is of the classier rectangular brick variety, not the cheap and nasty wall wart. The case is sturdy, feeling very much like a ‘pro DJ’ mixer in its construction and the side panels are made of thick rubber for a good non-slip grip when handling and seating. CONTROL The 8 x 5 grid on the APC40 has three backlit colours that indicate where and what is going on in Live. The colour orange indicates that the respective clip slot in Live is loaded with