I'm relatively new to music production, and I'm in the middle of planning out my first 'serious' (in dollar terms) purchase after getting into the hardware world over the last seven months or so. I started off with a Volca FM, and have since added an Elektron Model Samples and NTS-1 (which I absolutely love!). I have my eye on a Minibrute 2s/Behringer Neutron in the future, but increasingly I've realised that I want to think about a 'brain' for the setup which can serve as a point of cohesion to take things beyond 'making cool sounds and sequences'.
I have Ableton lite which came with my minilab, and I've recently spent a lot more time getting deeper with Ableton through the 90 day trial of 11 Suite - after the frustrating initial process, I can now see how incredibly powerful it is and I'll be buying Standard when the trial expires. Sketching out in session view and bumping to arrangement helped me so much in taking things from cool sounds to actual tracks. Because of this I'm pretty convinced that a dawless setup won't be for me: I need the visual immediacy because otherwise I feel too cluttered.
What I'm looking for is something to act as a hardware 'heart' (rather than full 'brain', whatever we take that to mean) in a hybrid setup, which allows me to develop ideas in a hands-on manner, connected to my hardware, with the ability to then bounce this into Ableton easily. Initially, the Digitakt seemed to be the most logical choice: I love the Electron sequencer on the model samples and the immediate workflow. But recently some of the limitations have become apparent: only 30 second mono sampling, and 4 note polyphony on Midi tracks. This led me to thinking about the MPC One, which is cheaper, and much more feature-rich (greater memory, more track flexibility, CV out for modular gear, multi-sampling etc.). The MPC is of course basically a DAW-in-a-box.
Rather than using the MPC as a dawless setup 'brain', would it function well as a kind of 'heart' of a hybrid setup? That is, as something to sketch out ideas, mess around with sampling and MIDI sequencing to get things rolling, then exporting to Ableton to do more serious composition? I've seen a few videos on exporting Ableton projects from the MPC One, and stem exporting, although I know it's not the smoothest integration. Another option is the Push 2 of course, but I can't bring myself to spend that much on an (admittedly well made) controller.
My other concern is the ability to work generatively with the MPC. This to me is the real downfall compared to the Digitakt and Elektron's amazing sequencing. As far as I can tell it's less easy to use the MPC generatively. The type of music I'm interested in is experimental/ambient/noise, which appears to make the DT a more natural fit than the MPC (which obviously has a massive beat-making lineage).
TL;DR what do people think about the MPC One as the heart of a hybrid setup for jamming/inspiration, integrated with Ableton, for experimental/generative/ ambient etc? Compared to the DT it just seems to have so many useful features, while lacking the flexibility of the DT sequencer.
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