akai

The original prototype for push was built in Lego and Akai did a great job turning it into real hardware.

I remember my dad's Akai player from the 50s even supported quadraphonic.

The Push really is a nice piece of hardware - probably because Akai was behind the engineering.

Due to circumstances regarding my damaged Lenovo laptop, I prefer to travel and work out new tunes on an iPad 2 using an Akai LPK25.

Personally, I use a laptop and Akai MPK49 controller keyboard live.

I'd start off simple by getting a midi controller like a Novation Launchpad (or Ableton Push if you can afford it) or a midi keyboard like the Akai MPK Mini.

Beastie Boys licensed to ill is a great example of an album made mostly with an 808(but synced up with a sequential circuits drumtraks and possibly a linndrum on one or 2 tracks) By the late 80s, most rap was made on sp-12/1200s and akai MPCs.

:-D It was recorded on analogue synths (£1500 + £200), a HardSID slaved to an old P300 running Windows 98, an old Akai sampler (which cost £100), and 2 crappy mixing desks (£75 and £100) over the past month...

Recently I bought an Akai S950, a popular sampler used by Moby (and others), and it is amazing how much better it sounds than a software sampler - especially if you route the 8 outputs through an old mixing desk and adjust EQ/level (and put a compressor on a drum through the Insert channel).

Off the top of my head, the expected order is "big red plane", "iso punainen lentokone" and "ookina akai hikouki" in English, Finnish and Japanese...

Also, Japanese has a special place in my heart for conjugating adjectives like verbs, including tenses: - Akai.