PIANOS, KEYBOARDS & SYNTHESIZERS
1. 2. MAKING WAVES Synth and keyboard manufacturers at NAMM showcased how they’re merging old ideas with new resources to modernize musicians’ workflows. — By Ed Enright
I n the high-tech world of synthesis, Native Instruments (NI) and Akai made waves at The 2025 NAMM Show with news of a recent collaboration that merges NI’s software capabilities with Akai’s hardware innovation. What their creative partnership means for dealers and end-users is that Akai’s keyboard lineup now integrates seamlessly with NI’s creative platform, resulting in a complete synthesis toolkit. “The Akai MPC is known for its legendary workflow as far as sequencing goes, but NI
is known for its amazing sounds and sound design,” said Stuart Murphy, national man- ager of inMusic Brands, Akai’s parent com- pany. “So, we’ve gone ahead and brought in several Native Instruments’ Play Series titles: Analog Dreams, Cloud Supply, Sway, Homage and Nacht. They have been avail- able on desktop only, and we brought them over, modified some of the code and made MPC editions of NI Play Series plugins. You can’t do this on the desktop, but since we have a 7-inch touchscreen on all our MPC
models, we added a four-quadrant morphing system, and in each one of these quadrants you can adjust specific parameters like the filter, the envelope time, the motion and the meta. That’s just on the surface level to get instant gratification of the sound design, but you can go into each layer and do complex sound design if you want to go super deep. A lot of things where you used to have to menu-dive, you can now just swipe down and have access to all these quick menus.” Making it easier for keyboard players
62 I MUSIC INC. I APRIL 2025
Powered by FlippingBook