No problem! I’ve honestly been thinking of picking one up just to use as an arranger

Roland Verselab MV1 is oriented towards song writers I believe. Affordable too. Could be your central work station

oh yea they are dead simple. I had a little experience making beats before using older lofi equipment, but every time I’ve tried, I ultimately bounced off. I would make 2-3 bad beats and lose interest. This time it seems to have stuck though as I am working nearly daily on music which is very unlike me. I think the 303 is just such a sublime machine to work on once you get flowing and it just sounds SO good.

I thought about a 404mk2 but it honestly seemed TOO complicated for me. The 303 is the same skeleton but missing the expansive features that make it scary to learn.

You will have ZERO issue learning to use the 202. It doesn’t even have a sequencer. All you can really do on it is record samples and add FX to them. It is basically one button per function. It doesn’t have resampling so you have to bounce it to your 404 and back if you want to stack up its FX, but for the most part its Pitch function is most of the reason to own it. I am not sure why but the 202 stretches and pitches things SO smoothly, so much better than any SP to come after it.

I got an sp303 a few weeks back and havebeen making beats frequently with it. Also got am sp202 for use a sample mangler/flavor adder.

Its totally valid to basically build all thr building blocks on the MPC, export stems and finish up in a DAW.

How’s it going so far? It definitely takes some time to get the ground under your feet when you are new but I’m sure you are getting the hang of it.

I feel like I came off scary when I talked about song mode stuff, obviously there is nothing wrong with banging out a bunch of loops while you get the workflow figured out.

I haven’t used an MPC in a few years but I’m sure I can answer some questions if you have any

don’t get too caught up adding FX and polish until you have a pretty sufficient song written. It is easy to write a dope 4 bar loop and start messing with FX and whatnot, lose track of what you were doing and ultimately lose interest. The plague of this machine is how easy it is to churn out 4 bar loops and how hard it is to finish a track. Sketch the ENTIRE track first, THEN polish and you will be a lot better off. Look into song mode tutorials.