I read an extremely interesting article on the 5 Magazine site earlier this week. They’re one of very few dance music outlets that I have any time for. The article goes into detail about how 2020 was the best year in decades for selling hardware and other gear to musicians.

It reminded me of a post that I wrote a few weeks back, but decided not to publish. Yes, believe it or not, but that does occasionally happen. This one was pushed out of the schedule by other stories on a particularly busy Friday.

It was about the launch of the Akai MPC One Retro. Now, those people who were around in the early years of dance music will often tell you that the technology they had to work with for their formative records was, in no unceremoniuous terms, crap.

Many a producer from that era will have plenty of stories about spending hours trying to work out which MIDI cable went where, all the way to hunting around for an obscure floppy disk with that little sample you liked.

They made good tracks with what they had, but frankly, it was because they had no choice. Technology has advanced and opened the horizons – and yet, there’s no end of clamour for things that sound like the past. What better example of that than my post about Traxsource earlier today?

What else explains Akai’s decision to release the MPC One Retro? It looks like several of their old samplers from the 90s, but is essentially a new product.

I just don’t understand this at all. The people who first made house music in the 1980s wanted to make tunes that sounded like they were from the future. Now, everyone wants to make tunes that sound like they were made in the 80s and 90s.

File this one under “more money than sense”. With a price tag of £640, I daren’t think how much you’d need to sell on Traxsource to break even.

Thank god it’s a Bank Holiday weekend…